Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Author(s) | Zach Weiner |
| Website | http://www.smbc-comics.com/ |
| Current status / schedule | Updates every day |
| Launch date | September 5, 2002 [1] (an earlier incarnation debuted January 28, 2002[2]) |
| Genre(s) | Bizarre humor |
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is a single-panel webcomic by Zach Weiner. Like many single panel comics, there are few recurring characters. The humor often comes from leading the reader to think they understand the situation when they look at the picture, but then throwing them off with a punchline-esque caption underneath.
SMBC is amateurish in style. Paneling and links are made up of wavy lines of inconsistent width, and coloring is kept purposefully simplistic.
Contents |
[edit] History of comic and author's works
The comic was multi-panel and character-based in a previous incarnation, focusing on the romantic and academic endeavours of several college students. That strip (referred to as "Classic SMBC" on the site's archives) ran from January 28, 2002 to September 3, 2002. The comic went through three other renderings between Classic SMBC and the current version. The current, single-panel version of the strip began on September 5, 2002 and has updated daily since.
While the mainstay of the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic is the archive of over 1000 strips, Weiner has also branched into numerous side projects, often related to the comic. Some of these are available on the SMBC website's bonus section and movies section. The first 480 comics have been removed from the main SMBC archives; however, they can still be found on a hidden section of the site [3] that was linked to in the SMBC forums by Zach himself.
- Vince Invincible [4] is a multi-panel adventure, which ran from September 26, 2003 to November 13, 2003, with three later installments in April 2005. It was a departure from Weiner's previous work, both in that it was entirely hand-drawn on lined, yellow paper, and in that the storytelling techniques for each strip didn't always conclude with humor. The comic was about a boy named Vince, who as seen in the title, is impervious to any form of harm. He is shown doing dangerous things, such as smoking, getting an axe thrown at his head, and having a ruler cracked over his head. The comic is shown as a few panels with subtitles for some of the panels. The story remains, presently, unfinished at 25 strips.
- Baby Moloch [5] is a six-part mini-series. The work is an origins story for the character Moloch, who featured in several of the earlier SMBC single-panel strips. Five of the six strips have currently been completed.
- Chason, a character from the multi-panel days of SMBC, has been expanded into an independent comic called Chason! [6], also written by Zach Weiner, but illustrated by a new artist since the 20th episode.
- Captain Excelsior [7] is the latest comic project written by Weiner. The comic is about a superhero (Captain Excelsior) who was recently divorced from his superhero wife, Mrs. Mind. Thus far, he has tried going on a blind date, but failed after listening to his friend's advice. His ex-wife is getting remarried to a regular non-hero guy, causing strife with her mother. The last comic shows the Captain acting grumpy and aloof towards his kids, showing the irony in Mrs. Mind's mother's statement that the captain was good with the kids. It launched to the public on 19 January, 2007, and features Chris Jones (who also runs his own webcomic Grumps) as the illustrator. Now it has its own website.
- The Jerry Simpiro Project is a four part mockumentary of a fictional webcomic creator. The eponymous main character of the series is the subject of unspoken derision for his lack of commitment to updating, and lack of originality. The series provides commentary on common complaints with modern webcomics. It can be found in the movie section of SMBC, along with another movie titled, "Brushing Teeth".
[edit] Awards and controversies
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has twice been nominated for Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards and won in 2006 for Outstanding Single Panel comic [8] (in 2003, it was nominated for Outstanding Short Form Comic).
In a YouTube video on the SMBC website, Zach Weiner addressed accusations [9] that the comedian Sarah Silverman stole a joke from one of his strips at a Spike video game awards ceremony. In the satirical video, he claimed that the joke must have been stolen because he was "the only humorist ever to write on the topics of Africa, AIDS, or video games." Despite the ridiculous claim, many responders to the video did not realize that he was being sarcastic.
