Over the past two years, an anthropomorphic onion with a big head and a body that looks like a huggable cross between the Pillsbury Doughboy and a Care Bear has taken over Asia. Abo, who is more commonly referred to in English as Onion Tou (洋蔥頭, also known as Onion Head or Onion-Kun), is the star of a blog, Onion Club (blog.roodo.com/onion_club), that publishes several new comic panels per week, fan clubs all over the world and an all-encompassing array of merchandise that ranges from English textbooks to condoms.
Onion Tou is the creation of Ethan Liu (劉順龍), one of several Taiwanese artists, including Wan Wan (彎彎) and tutugo, who over the past two years have made the leap from creating online emoticons and publishing their art on blogs to garnering mainstream fame. Soft-spoken and modest, Liu hardly fits the stock image of a media mogul in the making. But with the marketing acumen of his agent, Amy Chang (詹嘉慧), the founder of Full Tone Image (豐朵圖像), Onion Tou might just very well become Taiwan’s own Hello Kitty.
For a character that has become so ubiquitous over the past two years, Onion Tou’s beginnings were modest. Three years ago, Liu, who studied interior design at an art vocational high school in Tainan, decided on a lark to try his hand at creating an online avatar with MSN Shell, a program that allows users to customize MSN Live Messenger.
Onion Tou wasn’t even meant to be an onion. At first Liu drew several little cartoon people. One had two tufts of hair sticking out from the top of his big, round head. “A friend of mine saw him and said he looked just like an onion, so I decided to call him that, too,” says Liu.
The emoticons were meant for Liu’s own use. “There were things he did that represented how I was feeling inside. For example, in one drawing, Onion Tou was pointing to the sky and yelling angrily. I used him to express my own emotions at the time,” he says. Between the end of 2005 and 2006, however, Onion Tou started garnering a loyal following, starting with Liu’s own friends, and then spread with the speed that only an Internet trend can. At the end of 2006, Yahoo! Taiwan featured Onion Tou in television commercials for the Web mega brand. The exposure gave the little cartoon fellow a jumpstart into offline fame.
The exposure came as a surprise, says Liu. “I didn’t draw Onion Tou to attract people’s attention, but then they started noticing him on their own.”
“In the beginning, Ethan felt that Onion Tou was just accidentally famous,” says Chang, who with her confident manner and forthright way of talking is Liu’s polar opposite in personality. “I told him, of course, trends often start like that, but you have to take advantage of it.” To Chang, Onion Tou is more than a passing fad.
“Amy told me that she feels that he can have international appeal, and that people in other countries can take to him, like they took to Hello Kitty or Mickey Mouse,” says Liu.
In the late 1990s, Chang worked for two years at Yuk Long Publishing (玉郎圖), the publishing house of artist Tony Wong (黃玉郎), who is often referred to as “Hong Kong’s King of Comics.” Yuk Long Publishing’s multi-layered corporate structure, which Chang compares to that of The Walt Disney Company, continues to influence her management style.
Liu was Chang’s first client after she founded Full Tone in 2006. The two met when Chang, who worked at a toy company after moving back to Taiwan, was hired to produce a line of Onion Tou figures for 7-Eleven.
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