| Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Zach Weiner |
| Website | Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal |
| Current status / schedule | Updated daily |
| Launch date | September 5, 2002[1] (an earlier incarnation debuted January 28, 2002[2]) |
| Genre(s) | Humor |
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) is a humorous webcomic by Zach Weiner. SMBC is "at heart a geek comic, but it nevertheless addresses a broad range of topics, such as love, relationships, economics, politics, religion, science, and philosophy."[3] It has been featured on a variety of websites and blogs, including The Economist,[4] Glamour,[5] Boing Boing,[6] Bad Astronomy,[7] Blastr,[8] Blues News,[9] Joystiq,[10] and Freakonomics.[11] It is published daily and has few recurring characters.
Contents |
The comic was character-based in a previous incarnation, focusing on the romantic and academic endeavors 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 version of the strip began on September 5, 2002 and has updated daily since.
The first 480 comics were originally removed from the main SMBC archives; however, they could still be found on a hidden section of the site[12] that was linked to in the SMBC forums by Weiner himself. He made them officially publicly available on September 22, 2008.[13]
The comic used to feature a votey, a special punch line only visible if you vote for SMBC as best website. This restriction is no longer used. In most comics you can now see a bonus joke by hovering over a red button with the mouse. The earliest is on the comic dated November 27, 2006.[14]
More recently Weiner has begun a side project linked with SMBC called SMBC-Theater which features skits and short videos put up on YouTube for his fans to enjoy. This is normally updated once a week on Mondays with one or two short sketches and has garnered a popular fanbase. Certain holiday clips are marked "part one," although very few have a second part as of yet. Despite its one-shot style there are certain characters who have received multiple storylines, such as James Ashby as president, J.P. Nickle's news stories, Jon Brence's dating shorts, and Zach Weiner as Jesus/James Ashby as God. All the videos are satirical.
There are several topics which frequently occur in SMBC, including:
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has twice been nominated for Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards and won in 2006 for Outstanding Single Panel Comic[15] (in 2003, it was nominated for Outstanding Short Form Comic).
In a YouTube video on the SMBC website,[16] Zach Weiner addressed accusations that the comedian Sarah Silverman stole a joke from one of his strips at a Spike video game awards ceremony, in addition to pleading with Sarah Silverman to go on a date with him. 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".
In response to a criticism of his focus on academia, in July 2010 Weiner discussed his ideas concerning webcomics in an open forum with critics.[17]