A month ago, Jake posted Finding Suitable Reading Material for Your Level. I have an addition: bilingual iPad comic books. I just met up with Yen Yen and Colin from Dim Sum Warriors, which apart from looking awesome and having a lot of cool story material also has a free iPad app that lets you read and listen in Chinese while checking the English with tap-and-hold.
If you’re interested in making a Skritter list for the first issue of Dim Sum Warriors, post in the comments and let’s get one started collaboratively–they provide the vocab from the comic on the site.
Why comic books? John Pasden explains it: you want stuff that’s easy, engaging, and has pictures to help you follow what’s going on even when you don’t get all of the text. Most Chinese comics are not actually easy (Skritterman Doug lent me a Chinese Mickey Mouse comic a couple years ago that almost killed me), and the ones that are supposed to be easy still aren’t easy because of crazy vocabulary. And then the stories often aren’t any good, either. Plus, they’re not digital.
So you should also check out John’s Chinese Picture Book Reader which contains an elementary story involving gorgeous art and steampunk post-apocalyptic dinosaurs.
For some fun ones that have English (but not necessarily audio), there’s the hilarious and often obscene Chinese Superman and everything else at HorseDragonFish. There’s also MandMX, which often riffs on fun cross-cultural differences and can be delivered right to your inbox. If you want to get more into authentic Chinese comics, then there are tons of options discussed at Chinese Forums, and our own Chris posted some indie Chinese comic recommendations on the forum.
Know any other good digital, bilingual comics for Chinese or Japanese? Post them in the comments, yo.