Cyanide & Happiness

Cyanide & Happiness is a webcomic written and illustrated by Rob DenBleyker, Kris Wilson, Dave McElfatrick and formerly Matt Melvin.^[1][2][3] It is published on their website explosm.net. It was created on December 9, 2004, and started running daily on January 26, 2005. It has appeared on social networking sites such as Myspace, Quora, LiveJournal, and Facebook, where, in April 2006, it had generated more than a million visits per week.^[4] The comic's authors attribute its success to its often controversial nature,^[4][5] and the series is noted for its dark humor and sometimes surrealistic approach. Cyanide & Happiness characters were used in the television advertisements for Orange Mobile's Orange Wednesdays.^[6]

Conception

Cyanide & Happiness began as a small series of comics drawn by Kris Wilson at the age of sixteen. Wilson was at home with strep throat and had doodled some stick figure comics.^[7] On his DeviantArt profile page, he notes that he "created Cyanide & Happiness in 2004 because I can't help but draw stupid looking characters to spew out my stupid ideas."^[8] He showcased his comics on his Comicaze website, and then on Sticksuicide.com, "a website devoted to animations and games graphically depicting the violent deaths of stick figures", which was founded by Rob DenBleyker in 2004.^[9]

Meanwhile, DenBleyker and Matt Melvin had been working on projects where they "made bad stick figure death movies together after posting their stuff at Newgrounds.com back in around 1999 and 2000." The forum's webmasters, including DenBleyker, Melvin, and Dave McElfatrick (who joined Sticksuicide) liked the format of Wilson's comics. Melvin said, "When we decided to branch off from just stick figure death movies and do something more with the site, we started Explosm and brought Kris on board."^[10] Wilson and the webmasters then collaborated on the comics, where each person would contribute content. One of the earliest Cyanide & Happiness comics, #15, was posted by Wilson on Explosm.net on January 26, 2005.^{[7][lower-alpha 1]} A variant of the comic's title is first mentioned in #121, in which one character sells cotton candy, and explains that it is made of "Cyanide & Happyness" [sic], after which the other character replies: "Happyness!?!? Hot damn! I'll take 4".^{[lower-alpha 2]}

Production

Development

The cartoonists started out in different locations: In 2006, DenBleyker was a college student at University of Texas at Dallas.^[4] Wilson lived in Fort Bridger, Wyoming,^{[note 1]} Melvin in San Diego, California, and McElfatrick in Belfast, Northern Ireland.^[5][11] They would also use Skype for occasional collaboration.^[7] Melvin said, "We collaborate here and there on them, but the comics are most often individual efforts. The animated shorts, however, are big collaborative projects, often bringing in people from outside our little, core group."^[12] Although they started working on the project in 2004, the authors did not meet each other face-to-face until the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con.^[9]

Format

The format of Cyanide & Happiness is typically a single page where the cartoonist would post his comic. The page can vary in length and number of panels. The drawings are done in Macromedia Flash.^[4] Although generally static, some of the comics have animated panels.^[13] Others break the fourth wall; for instance, in #375, one of the characters looks at the reader, and the other asks what he is looking at. He then looks out and says "Holy shit! It's a person!"^{[lower-alpha 3]} In #445, the panel catches on fire and the characters inside panic.^{[lower-alpha 4]} In #680, a character has fallen through a broken bottom border of the panel.^{[lower-alpha 5]}

Influences

Wilson and DenBleyker have mentioned the traditional comic The Far Side by Gary Larson and the webcomic The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch as influences for the comic.^[7] Wilson mentioned Don Hertzfeldt, Bill Hicks, White Ninja Comics, Monty Python, and David Wong as influences.^[5] At a Davenport College panel, DenBleyker commented that he writes for up to ten hours a day and collaborates with friends,^[9] however, in April 2013, he tweeted to replace "reading classic philosophy texts" with "sitting in my car crying".^[14] McElfatrick was inspired by old English children's comics such as The Beano and The Dandy.^[5] Melvin did not read comics as a kid, but enjoyed Larson's The Far Side and Matt Groening's Life in Hell; he preferred live-action sketch comedy shows such as The Kids in the Hall, Monty Python, Upright Citizens Brigade, and Mr. Show.^[5]

Setting and characters

The cartoonists regularly make jokes on controversial topics including abortion, suicide, and AIDS.^[9] Their characters rarely have names and are usually only distinguishable by the colors of their shirts.^{[note 2][lower-alpha 6][lower-alpha 7]} The male characters almost always have no hair, which became a joke in itself in #642.^{[lower-alpha 8]} Female characters are distinguishable by their long hair and chest size, often used to comedic effect. Jesus makes appearances, accompanied with religious puns.^{[lower-alpha 9]} Some recurring characters have names; they include: Charles & his girlfriend, the Purple-Shirted Eye Stabber, Dr. Baby, Trelaf the Wise, Sad Larry, Obese Maurice, The Personal Space Invader, superheroes like Seizure Man and Super Jerk, Dan the Downer, and Tall Justin. DenBleyker added that the stick figure style "makes the characters seem very transient, as if they only exist for a given comic. 'Cyanide and Happiness' prides itself on having no characters or themes. If we ever bring up a character, we usually retire it after its share of original jokes has run out."^[4]

Publication

One of the cartoonists' strips would be featured on a single page for the day. Melvin says that they "keep a schedule of sorts, but it's nothing completely set in stone."^[10] Wilson credits the comic's success to consistent output: "There are plenty of funny people creating content, but they're not consistent or reliable. The Internet has ADD, and if you're not constantly giving them something new, you're going to lose them."^[7]

Events

On occasion, the Cyanide & Happiness cartoonists have featured Depressing Comic Weeks, where they wrote depressing and/or upsetting comics. In an interview, Melvin said, "we'd made comics that were funny because of how dark they were. But now DCW is just about making really sad comics with no punchline whatsoever."^[12] The December 30th episode of the Cyanide and Happiness Show featured the "depressing episode" - coinciding with the 8th depressing comic week at explosm.net.

Cyanide & Happiness has featured Guest Weeks, where readers submit entries, and some would be featured as daily comics over the course of the week.

On October 14, 2007, Wilson announced a desire for every comic in their archive to be translated into other languages. In a subsequent post, he reported a "phenomenal" 1300 replies with offers to translate into over 20 different languages.

In 2010, author Dave McElfatrick, a Northern Ireland native, started a petition for a visa into the United States, in order to be with the other writers to produce more animated shorts. The petition garnered over 132,000 signatures in less than three weeks.^[15] On September 1, 2010, it was officially announced that Dave qualified for the visa that would allow him to enter the United States to work on more comics and animated shorts with Wilson, DenBleyker, and Melvin. As of August 31, 2014, Matt Melvin announced that he is no longer part of Cyanide and Happiness.^[16]

Reception

Rob DenBleyker and background artist Shawn Coss, Toronto, 2012

John Hargrave of zug.com said that "Despite all this solo effort, the end product is coherent and strangely logical, as if the four creators were each viewing the peculiar world of C&H from a slightly different angle -- a world in which disembodied heads turn into seagulls, and Jesus is a designated driver."^[7]

DenBleyker has mentioned that the comic's popularity grew from their sharing policy, "which encourages readers to repost and re-blog comics, effectively allowing anyone to spread Cyanide and Happiness' content."^[9] In January 2006, the comic was getting about 20,000 unique visitors a day, but "we added a little box under each comic which allows people to post an Explosm-linked version of the comic, which brings a lot of traffic back to us. After we put that box up, the traffic started exploding." After a few days, the comic received about 300,000 unique visitors a day, which consisted of mostly traffic from MySpace and LiveJournal blog links.^[4]

In response to the question regarding controversial topics, DenBleyker said that the authors have not received a huge amount of serious negative feedback and do not intend to tone down the edginess of their comics.^[9] Melvin notes that some of the respondents have criticized them on one topic, but at the same time praised them for a different one.^[12]

Explosm projects

Explosm has worked on other webcomics, animation shorts and projects. McElfatrick wrote Die Romantic - A Look At Aiden, which scathingly critiques goth punk band Aiden.

Animation

In addition to animating Cyanide & Happiness, the cartoonists have done animations drawn in a similar stick figure style. They are doing eleven full-length episodes of The Cyanide and Happiness Show as well as shorter cartoons once a week all year. The animations are in Adobe Flash format and are typically voiced by the cartoonists.^[17] Chase Suddarth contributes occasionally to the shorts. DenBleyker made a series called Joe Zombie, which lasted six episodes, and left fans to anticipate a seventh, where he stated "will come out eventually".^[18]

Interactive story

In 2007, Explosm featured an Interactive Story on their web forum, where they would start with a series of illustrations for the main character, and then have forum members suggest what happens next, and they would draw the corresponding picture. Their first story was "My Magical Skiing Adventure," about a man who finds two warring societies inside Mt. Everest.^{[note 3]} Later that year, DenBleyker worked on illustrating "Working on the Space Station: Day 1".^[19]

Media

Books

Four books have been released by Explosm through It Books, a division of HarperCollins. The first two volumes each feature 120 of their favorite Cyanide & Happiness comics, and 30 previously unpublished comics. The third volume featured many Cyanide & Happiness comics from their Depressing Comic Weeks with 40 previously unpublished comics.^[20] While the fourth is another compilation of the artists favorites

Other media

Explosm released a Cyanide & Happiness app for mobile devices.^[28] The free "Lite" version allows the user to access the last 30 days of the archive.^[29]

Merchandise is available including T-shirts, toys and gifts, novelties, housewares and school supplies.^[30] The Explosm website also sells signed prints.^[13]

Comedy Central announced an "Untitled Cyanide and Happiness Project" in 2011.^[31] However, on January 15, 2013, Wilson posted that they had walked away from a third television deal, and are planning instead to produce a web series, exclusively on the Internet.^[32]

On February 9, 2016, Explosm released a Kickstarter project for a Cyanide & Happiness card game titled "Joking Hazard",^[33] in which cards represent panels of a 3-panel comic and the players must attempt to form a humorous combination. The project's funding will be finished on March 10, 2016.

See also

• Shock art

Notes

References

Comics references

General references

External links

• Official website
• Cyanide & Happiness Archive(Russian)
• Cyanide & Happiness Archive(Portuguese)
• Cyanide & Happiness Archive(simplified Chinese)
• Kris Wilson at DeviantArt
• Dave McElfatrick on Tumblr
  • Dave McElfatrick on Twitter
  • Dave McElfatrick's blog