CH Gift Guide: Valentine’s Day 2014

From the provocative to the romantic, an array of goods sure to warm the heart

It may take a muscle to fall in love, but bestowing someone you care about with a token of your affection on Valentine’s Day is sure to help keep romance in the air. It’s one of the more difficult holidays to shop for, but we’ve pulled together a handful of creative items which serve as a physical reminder of your perpetual admiration. Below are a …

Snowpiercer: The Escape

The French sci-fi graphic novel, whose film adaption will soon release in the US, finally gets its English translation 30 years later

The 1982 French sci-fi comic “Le Transperceneige” would have remained in obscurity had film director Bong Joon-Ho not walked into a comic book shop in Seoul and devoured all three volumes in the store. Nobody could blame him. Within the black-and-white illustrations, a post-apocalyptic world, frozen over by ice and snow, is revealed. The only human survivors are aboard a train—the Snowpiercer—that perpetually circles the …

Chineasy

A delightfully illustrated guide to learning Chinese characters

Beginning with key Chinese characters—which the book refers to as building blocks—author ShaoLan Hsueh and artist Noma Bar have made a memorable guide, as helpful as it is pretty, to one of the most difficult and oldest languages in the world. “Chineasy” translates the Chinese language into a pictorial code, by building out imagery around the linguistic characters. The symbol for fire morphs into a …