Cyanide and Happiness
| Cyanide & Happiness | |
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One of the fictional characters in the webcomics
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| Author(s) | Kris Wilson Rob DenBleyker Matt Melvin (former) Dave McElfatrick |
| Website | www |
| Current status / schedule | Daily |
| Launch date | January 26, 2005 |
| Publisher(s) | Explosm |
| Genre(s) | Black comedy, satire, surreal humor, word humor, sketch comedy |
Cyanide & Happiness (C&H), also known as Cyanide and Happiness, is a webcomic written and illustrated by Rob DenBleyker, Kris Wilson, Dave McElfatrick and formerly Matt Melvin, 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. The comic's authors attribute its success to its often controversial nature, 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.
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. 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." 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.
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." 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. 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".
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