It plays out like a sad commercial for dogs in shelters. This skit presents all of the different parody villains. The villain we see is a parody villain to that of the Joker taking government officials hostage. That was “five or six” years ago, “and we haven’t missed a single one since.We first see John Battman villains in the John Battman skit. “We hit a tier where we’ll do a short every week without thinking about what that entailed,” Nusrallah remembers.
#Battman cyanide and happiness series
When a big opportunity in Hollywood came around in 2013, Explosm turned it down, and chose to go to Kickstarter to fund what would become the mega popular Cyanide & Happiness animated series on the 8.5 million subscriber-strong Explosm Entertainment channel on YouTube. Despite that, Cyanide & Happiness has thrived, its creators adapting and expanding to new mediums at a careful pace. Webcomics aren’t dead, but the culture is past its prime. “Even if they want to, everybody goes through getting over that hurdle of sharing it.” “There’s a vulnerability to being an artist,” Nusrallah says. It’s different than a piece of art people are freebooting.” “I can understand why people would ,” he says. In broad strokes, the majority of other creators were carefully building original IP while “we were doing gags.” Wilson also believes the identity of C&H was different than most webcomics. That is the nature of things now but it wasn’t back then. The fact that we allowed hyperlinking helped us.”Įxplosm’s embrace of hyperlinking was timely, as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr surfaced to allow for funny doodles to get retweeted and reblogged alongside something called “memes.” “If you had an image on your website and it got shared, the bandwidth would exceed. Because even if credited them, you weren’t giving them the traffic they needed.
Thus, it became “offensive” to a creator to share their work. Web hosting was expensive, and hyperlinking put a strain on a creators’ limited website bandwidth. “One big reason was the cost of server space and bandwidth,” says Wilson.
There were also technical and financial reasons why other webcomic artists didn’t like hyperlinking. He now plays a critical role in C&H’s expansion into other realms, such as book publishing and video games.īut no one would be playing Joking Hazard, or the upcoming video game Rapture Rejects if the founders made the comic like every other webcomic of its time.īetween an accessible premise (again - stick figures!) and letting fans share their content on social media rather than force traffic to the actual Explosm website, the creators ensured Cyanide & Happiness would evolve while still retaining a deceptively simplistic, almost childish visual aesthetic. You just need to know what it’s like to have had a bad day.Ī more recent Kris Wilson 'Cyanide & Happiness' comic, from August 1, 2018.Īdam Nusrallah, a UT Dallas grad who produced the animated short Sticky with 32 of his classmates, joined Explosm much later in 2015 as a production assistant before rising the ranks to become producer on all C&H multimedia. Its signature black humor is broad, too you don’t need to be gamer to grasp the bleak nuances of the human experience. It was and still is nameless stick figures who murder or cuss out at each other, coming and going in three to six panels. There were also a lot of video game-centric comics, like PvP, Penny Arcade, Ctrl+Alt+Del, Megatokyo, and the pixelated Diesel Sweeties, all of which cultivated fandoms with defined characters and in-jokes. “We just wanted people to see it, enjoy it, and show it to people who would enjoy it.”Ĭyanide & Happiness emerged in 2004, when most (but not all) webcomics were dominated by serialized stories with complex continuities. “When we were starting, we had the virtue of, ‘Share it, link it, just keep our signatures,’” recalls Wilson. Those decisions, co-founder Kris Wilson and producer Adam Nusrallah tell Inverse at RTX 2018, comes from the fact that the creators at Explosm Entertainment were mostly just really chill. Emerging in the mid-aughts heyday of webcomics, C&H survived and outlasted the majority of its contemporaries because of a few strategic and unexpectedly prescient decisions made behind the scenes. But its enduring success well into 2018, with expansion into an array of multimedia like YouTube, tabletop, and online video games, is an anomaly. The appeal of Cyanide & Happiness isn’t hard to fathom violent, foul-mouthed stick figures are funny.
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