Honk Honk / Chen Edits

About

"Honk Honk" is a nickname given to a 4koma (4-pane) vertical comic strip featuring the Touhou Project character Chen riding a bike, which refers to a sound effect a bike horn made in the strip. The comic has inspired a series of edits and parodies after being shared to 4chan during 2008.

Origin

The comic strip is part of a series of Touhou doujin 4-panel named Charm, which is written by doujin artist bkub. This particular comic strip was submitted to his pixiv account^[1] on April 3rd, 2008. The comic (shown below, right) featured Chen riding a bicycle before stopping in front of Suika Ibuki laying intoxicated in the middle of the road, at which point Chen begins to honk her bike horn.

Spread

The earliest archived posting of the strip on 4chan was two weeks later, on April 17th, in a thread on the /jp/^[2] (Otaku Culture) board, but it didn't gain much attention. Another thread would be posted ten days later, on April 27th, on the /jp/^[3] board, in which users began replying in the thread with "Honk Honk", then eventually posting edited versions of the comic, as well as others from bkub. On July 14th, 2008, Youtuber bebopblue uploaded a video titled "HONK HONK" featuring modified gameplay footage of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, showing a character resembling Chen preforming stunts on a Motorcycle. Two years later, another 4chan thread featuring bkub's comics would appear on the /a/^[4] (Anime&Manga) board on May 8th, 2010, which was then derailed when users began posting the word "Cheeeeen" in over-sized and colorized font.

Chen edits can also be found on Youtube. On November 1st, 2011, the Youtube account Roo uploaded an animated version of bkub's comic (shown below, left). A month later, on December 13th, the Youtube account Commander Douche uploaded a video titled "HONK HONK.mp4".^[6] On February 3rd, 2013, the Youtube account Steel Balloon uploaded a horn remix of Chen's Touhou theme, Diao Ye Zong (Withered Leaf) which was inspired by bkub's comics (shown below, right). As of April 2015, the videos have gained respectively over 38,000; 43,000; and 27,000 views.

The top definition on Urban Dictionary with 80 votes for the keywords "Honk Honk" was created on June 15th, 2012, and describes it as "the sound a bicycle horn makes when squeezed by a small magical cat girl named Chen."^[7] The Youtube account Primantiss also created a series of videos featuring a 3D-model of Chen,^[5] styled after bkub's comics, which counts 37 videos as of April 5th, 2015, since its start on December 20th, 2014.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References