Cyanide and Happiness

2005

Date: 25 January 2005 · Place: explosm.net, Dallas, Texas · Figures: Kris Wilson, co-founder · Rob DenBleyker, co-founder · Matt Melvin, co-founder · Dave McElfatrick, later co-founder · Tags: Webcomic, Stick 01. Three Teenagers Build a Stick Empire Kris Wilson, Rob DenBleyker, and Matt Melvin meet on a small webcomic forum and merge their efforts at explosm.net. The first Cyanide and Happiness strip posts on 25 January 2005. The art is deliberately crude: four panels, stick limbs, dot eyes. The jokes are deliberately bleak: cancer, suicide, paedophilia treated as four-panel punchlines. By 2007 they are posting daily. By 2010 they have a Comedy Central pilot. By 2015 their YouTube animations are clearing nine figures of views per video. 02. The Stick Comic Becomes a Business Cyanide and Happiness is the first webcomic to industrialise the SomethingAwful-tone shock-joke into a brand a chain bookstore can sell. They publish books, run a Kickstarter, ship a card game, build a YouTube channel. The strip's success proves that the stick-figure aesthetic is not a budget constraint but a style. The flatness lets the joke land first. The drawing never gets in the way. Sources • explosm.net archive, first strip (25 January 2005) • Wired, 'How three teenagers built Cyanide and Happiness' (2010) • KnowYourMeme, Cyanide and Happiness