Was Slug given the characters in question to draw, or did he actually research himself to find out which characters we were talking about? I was somewhat shocked to see the right characters there and not generic faux-Chinese.
In 2000 the use of encoding schemes which had all the Chinese characters probably was limited so they couldn’t use them in the text easily like I did in the thread title. Of course, the other problem is that it’s almost impossible to recognize characters when they’re shrunk down to the same height as English text which doesn’t have as many complicated elements.