How did "Hunzile" come into being?

Customs clearance of "learning scum"

Chen Lei was a "school scum" in middle school.

In that year's history class, now in Chen Lei's impression, only the male teacher on the podium is dancing and spitting. He didn't listen and drew a cartoon at the bottom.

With a pencil in one hand and a head in the other, people in comic books such as Dragon Ball and Slam Dunk Master come to mind. Often after a class, several pages in the book are cartoons.

When it comes to checking class notes, Chen Lei is a little embarrassed even if the teacher doesn't say anything.

Drawing cartoons is also good.

After class, there is always a group of students chasing Chen Lei to paint, mostly female students, even girls in the next class and junior girls.

Draw a cartoon of a character and give it to the little beauty in the next class, and then there will be a topic. Occasionally, I write letters and make pen friends after a few letters.

Although Chen Lei is a student, he is not interested in knowledge. On the contrary, he is curious about a lot of knowledge.

But young people are always rebellious. "More than 50 people in the class are listening to this thing, and I don't want to be like them." Chen Lei, who is stubborn, wants to understand knowledge by himself. He kept flipping through books and calculating along a curious point.

Sometimes he will succeed.

For example, the acceleration formula in the physics textbook was introduced by Chen Lei himself, and the physics score in that chapter was excellent.

But most of the time, only thinking about yourself is a failure.

Repeated failures have tempered Chen Lei's strong logical thinking, and he can quickly sort out the ins and outs of things more and more.

During college, Chen Lei occasionally played games in his spare time.

Once, I heard that a game called Allied Death Squad was very difficult to play. Out of curiosity, he downloaded the game, clicked it, and found that the name and location inside were cool. He was fascinated by it.

However, with the increasing difficulty of customs clearance, Chen Lei found that more and more background knowledge was completely unknown, only remembering that World War II was the background in the introduction.

Trying to remember the history class in high school, I don't remember anything about World War II.

"I think we must understand!" Chen Lei typed "World War II" in the search box, and the more information he read, the more confused he became.

He went to buy books about World War II, such as Hitler's biography.

I discovered World War II. "What about World War I?" He then pushed forward and gradually learned about the history of World War I.

"Although I am not dead, there are problems I don't understand. I always have tea and rice." Chen Lei is becoming more and more interested in history.

"I didn't think it would develop into my career."

While I am interested in history, I continue to draw cartoons.

20 1 1 became popular in Weibo.

Chen Lei bought the first scanner, scanned the hand-drawn cartoons on paper, and then uploaded them to Weibo.

He made a series of "guessing people by looking at pictures", drawing a cartoon image of a public figure for fans to guess, mainly to train himself to capture the characteristics of the characters.

In the same year, 65438+February 3 1 day, Chen Lei released the first episode of the four-grid comic "Generally Don't Talk"-"Going to work on Saturday will not have a good result", and the second-rate comic stone made its debut.

The Second Married Son is a tour, based on the novel I Love My Family, which I liked to read when I was a child. What he wants to do is to make everyone happy like an idiot.

Mr. Stone has a pouting face, funny words and pictures released from time to time. Chen Lei persisted in doing it for three years, published nearly 400 episodes and accumulated about 40,000 fans.

However, in Weibo with hundreds of thousands of fans, tens of thousands of fans are nothing.

Chen Lei thought: It takes several days to make up a joke. After watching it for five seconds, the fans will be gone, and they won't click again.

"You can't watch a joke twice." Suddenly he was confused.

One night in 20 14, before going to bed, Chen Lei leafed through the Outline of China People's History and read the chapters of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, and found that there were many countries in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, and each country and its monarch had distinct characteristics.

While reading a book, Chen Lei flashed one character after another in his mind: King Zhou was the son of heaven and King Zhou was a fat man ... Just like this, many rulers had a vague image in his mind.

Why not make a series of cartoons to write history? An idea suddenly occurred to me.

Chen Lei recalled many chats with his colleagues in the company. Everyone likes to quote classics and say some historical allusions. "A blockbuster, won the Central Plains ..." In Kan Kan, it seems that everyone can talk about it.

But when asked about the specific content, even the relationship between these two historical periods, everyone is puzzled.

It seems unrealistic for everyone to read a history book, so try to explain history in a relaxed form of comics.

As soon as I have an idea, I will do it. Who does each country correspond to and what is the relationship between people?

After a series of elaborate designs, Chen Lei imagined the Eastern Zhou Dynasty as a class group, with Zhou Wang as the head teacher and governors of various countries as students, and other people who had made important contributions in history also had new roles.

Winning the Central Plains is Achu flirting with Teacher Zhou; Chu Jin's hegemony is the covenant between Achu and Laojin; Shang Yang's political reform was that Xiao Qin found a mentor ... The idea was put into practice, and it became a four-part "If all the countries in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty were in the same category, it would be easy to understand".

Create "mixed words"

From then on, Chen Lei stopped talking about "generally not talking" and stuffed "hard knowledge" into cartoons full of jokes.

Weibo pushed a few articles, and Chen Lei found that this cartoon with dry goods was effective, and the reading volume increased obviously. After reading it today, the audience will watch it tomorrow, not just laughing it off.

20 1 165438+20041October 9, catching up with the bonus period of WeChat official account, Chen Lei picked up two paragraphs that he had neglected for a year and an official WeChat account, and launched these dry comics on it.

It is not easy to make meaningful cartoons. Besides designing funny content, it takes time to digest "hard knowledge".

The thinking of science and engineering men has played an important role.

Chen Lei summed up the connection of most knowledge points in four words-because.

The reason for this is because of that.

Touch it up level by level, and then come down, and the context of knowledge will be clear.

"I'm not studying knowledge, I'm just a porter of knowledge." He looked through many other people's research results and sorted out the context himself.

"You have to learn 80 points to write an article with 60 points." In order to determine the historical period, Chen Lei first collected information online, then read different versions of books, selected major events in chronological order, sorted out their relationships, digested 80 points of knowledge, removed details, and wrote an article with 60 points of knowledge.

I posted five Weibo posts, and I read a lot, but only 1000 fans transferred from Weibo.

He occasionally envies "Li Bingbing posted a Weibo for 8 minutes and had 180 comments".

Christmas is coming, and Chen Lei finds that people around him like to celebrate Christmas. What is Christmas? He decided to popularize the knowledge of Christmas, so he made the first hot explanation.

Chen Lei searched the Internet for information about Christmas, and millions of messages popped up.

"In fact, it is not difficult to acquire a lot of knowledge." Staring at the computer screen all morning, Chen Lei sorted out a clue to introduce Christmas, simply listed the needed information, added some jokes, or decorated it with relaxed language.

Finally, design cartoons and characters according to the characteristics of Santa Claus.

I wrote it in one day.

It was mailed the day before Christmas. Every few minutes, Chen Lei will click on the background to refresh the data. The reading volume has increased by thousands, and the number of fans has soared.

Not surprisingly, this article "Do you know what Christmas is? ! "I am angry on WeChat.

"There are more than 9,000 fans in one day." This state lasted for three or four days, which exceeded Chen Lei's expectation.

The first wave of rapid powder rise hit.

Later, in addition to history, Chen Lei also chose some hot spots to write.

He often watches the news on his mobile phone, and it becomes his topic to meet hot spots that he can't understand.

They all say artemisinin, so what is artemisinin? They all say Sade, so what is Sade? Chen Lei explained to the readers one by one.

Popular science is professional and follows the idea of "because of this". Why there is artemisinin, because there is plasmodium, why we should prevent plasmodium, because there is malaria. All the knowledge points are interlocking and finally written as artemisinin.

After writing it, Chen Lei was not at ease, so he asked his relatives, a medical professor, to help him review it.

Send it out after reading it.

2065438+At the beginning of 2005, the editor of a portal website paid attention to the official account of WeChat, which was a "bastard", and approached Chen Lei to discuss writing cars in comic style and tried to advertise cars.

I made several intellectual cartoons about cars, which were very popular. A car company invested 40,000 yuan to advertise on the platform of "Marriage and Joy".

"It turns out that this platform can really make money!" The first advertisement made Chen Lei a little excited.

He had the idea of jumping out to start a business, but now he has a salary and a stable job that allows him to buy a car and a house in Shanghai. Entrepreneurship is risky, and the reality is that he has to eat. He is in a dilemma.

More importantly, behind closed doors, all the good things are our own. Is it really good? Chen Lei is not sure.

At this time, an opportunity came again.

"Come over for dinner tonight. I have called Sister Quan Ling. " One day in June, 20 15, Chen Lei clicked on such a message and shook his mobile phone in shock.

That night, he came to the hotel with great expectation.

At the dinner table, my friend and Zhang Quanling are talking about investment projects. "I didn't say I would vote for me." Chen Lei was a little embarrassed and had to bury himself in seafood.

After dinner, the matter gradually subsided.

Unexpectedly, a month later, Chen Lei received Zhang Quanling's WeChat, "Can you commercialize this matter?" Chen Lei shook the phone again.

In fact, in Zhang Quanling's view, these knowledge-based cartoons of Soul Moon are typical projects with IP potential.

"Suddenly someone took out more than one million to prove that * * * is good." This investment of 1.47 million gave Chen Lei a shot in the arm, and combined with the previous combination boxing, Chen Lei resigned.

He calculated that the money was enough for three years. "There are many variables in three years."

Sure enough, within three years, drawing cartoons became a full-time job, Chen Lei became a boss, and he became a mixed brother with 6.5438+0.9 million fans.

"Fans are food and clothing parents"

As a self-media, the relationship between Chen Lei and his fans is subtle.

For fans, "Hunziyue" is not a cold official WeChat account. Brother Hunzi is a man of flesh and blood.

"Wrong, admit your mistake immediately!" Although tweets are "rescued" one second before being sent, there are times when they are not "rescued".

"Qi, director of the dying, if you don't concentrate, it will be late! There has been a dislocation of leadership position, which has also been pointed out by fans.

Chen Lei immediately replied to the fans to apologize.

Sometimes he also acts as a peacemaker.

When some articles came out, fans argued fiercely and saw that something was wrong. Chen Lei seems to persuade him to "stop arguing, everyone is right." As soon as Brother Hunzi spoke, the fans stopped making trouble.

Chen Lei only explains the hot issues of current affairs, and does not comment. "We can't do this with comments."

For Chen Lei, fans are his parents, but he will not fully respond to them.

Some fans praised him for "seeing the author's deep historical background, so he can write so easily", but he always thought he was a layman.

Some readers also think that the content of the comic book Hunziyue is too simple.

Chen Lei's explanation is that it is better to try a little than to back down.

He thinks that he is doing addition instead of subtraction, and hopes that readers will be interested in some knowledge through interesting cartoons, and then learn in depth.

It's hard for people to get in, and sometimes fans don't buy it if the joke is not enough. "But my article is not mainly to make him laugh."

Besides having fun on the platform, there are some fans walking backstage.

In 20 16, Chen Lei's content team recruited 16 people, all of whom were fans of Hunziyue.

"Fans know exactly what I'm doing, so they went through a round of screening."

During the interview, Chen Lei threw the candidate a topic unrelated to his major, and asked him to explain it to Chen Lei, a "school scum", in any form within one week.

His standard is that if the "scum" can be made clear, the public will understand.

A team of more than a dozen fans, * * * run Hunziyue together, and have a topic selection meeting every week.

In front of the conference table is a small whiteboard.

Every week, two people (one is responsible for drawing and the other is responsible for writing) choose a topic to explain.

Everyone makes suggestions below, and Chen Lei knocks on the blackboard. The standard is the same: make "scum" interested and make it clear.

"I just like his grounding gas." A fan who has been following Hunziyue for two years said.

He thinks that the cartoon of Hunziyue has no difficult words and literary talent, and the focus is exactly what the public wants to know, just like someone really tells you a story with a cartoon.