Cyanide & Happiness

The webcomic is published daily.[18] Wilson credited the comic's success to consistent output, saying, "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."[1]

Each cartoonist creates their own strips; they have used Skype for occasional collaboration.[1] McElfatrick said in 2010, "We all help each other with writing sometimes, but generally each of us take turns in both writing and creating the comic on a given day."[10] In 2010, DenBleyker was using Macromedia Flash to draw the comic.[9]

In 2006, the first animated version of C&H appeared on the website.[8] According to Explosm, it currently releases a short each week.[18] Many more people are involved in producing the animated shorts than in the comic; as an example one short released in 2017 had twenty-one people credited to its production.[21]

Each Cyanide & Happiness comic strip varies in length, but are typically three to six panels.[25] The comics are usually static, but some of the comics have animated panels.[lower-alpha 2]

The comic regularly makes jokes on controversial topics including abortion, mental illness, suicide, AIDS, disabilities, and necrophilia.[1][2] One review noted the characters in the comic regularly explode "along with being beaten, shot, and occasionally torn asunder by projectile food",[1] another noted, "its subjects include correcting the spelling in a suicide note, a doctor feeling up a dead patient, and a character giving the Lincoln Memorial a lapdance",[25] and another highlighted a strip in which a boy cries for four panels over the corpse of his father who was hit by a car.[2]

Characters rarely have names and are usually only distinguishable by the colors of their shirts. The male characters almost always have no hair, which became a joke in itself in #642.[lower-alpha 3] Female characters are distinguishable by their long hair and chest size, often used to comedic effect. Some recurring characters have names, such as "Obese Maurice", the epileptic superhero "Seizure Man",[25] and Jesus.[lower-alpha 4] DenBleyker said that the stick figure style "makes the characters seem very transient, as if they only exist for a given comic", and said that, "'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."[9]

Some comics 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 5] In #445, the panel catches on fire and the characters inside panic.[lower-alpha 6] In #680, a character has fallen through a broken bottom border of the panel.[lower-alpha 7]

Wilson and DenBleyker have mentioned the newspaper comic The Far Side by Gary Larson and the webcomic The Perry Bible Fellowship by Nicholas Gurewitch as influences for the comic.[1] Wilson mentioned Don Hertzfeldt, Bill Hicks, White Ninja Comics, Monty Python, and David Wong as influences.[10] At a 2012 panel, DenBleyker stated that he writes for up to ten hours a day and collaborates with friends.[2] McElfatrick said he was inspired by old British children's comics such as The Beano and The Dandy.[10] 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.[10]

On occasion, Cyanide & Happiness has featured Depressing Comic Weeks, where for the week all the comics are depressing or upsetting. The December 30 episode of the Cyanide and Happiness Show featured the "depressing episode", coinciding with the 8th depressing comic week at explosm.net.[26]

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

By April 2006, the website was receiving more than a million visits per week.[9] By 2012, it received more than a million visitors each day.[2]

DenBleyker has said 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."[2] 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.[9]

In a 2010 interview, the creators reported that based on surveys and conventions their audience was split equally between men and women.[10]

Tom Chivers, a columnist for The Telegraph, wrote in 2009 that Cyanide & Happiness was one of the ten best webcomics, saying, "The darkest, bitterest, rudest comic of the lot, Cyanide and Happiness is also one of the funniest... [the comic] seems to have no taste boundaries whatsoever... [this is] not one for the faint-hearted... approach with caution."[25]

Writing for CBR in 2010, reviewer Brigid Alverson said, "The Cyanide & Happiness formula is pretty simple: Stick men (and women) do shocking things to one another. There are four different artists, but the style and humor are fairly uniform; a situation is set up in the first panel and resolved, by stabbing, boob-grabbing, or shouting "You have cancer! LOL!" in the last....Fortunately, the creators pace themselves, mixing different types of humor (including some clever wordplay and visual puns that aren't at all bloody) so that when someone gets stabbed in the forehead, it actually does come as a surprise. Also, there's more to Cyanide & Happiness than blood and gore. The gags really are funny, in a laugh-out-loud sort of way, and the pacing is usually spot-on. Occasionally someone is left hanging for an extra panel, but usually it works."[27]

John Hargrave of the website Zug 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."[1] A writer for student newspaper Yale Daily News said in 2012 that the comic was "known for its unusual, graphic and insensitive jokes".[2] Writing for Comixtalk in 2007, reviewer Xavier Xerexes said that the art was "pretty minimal, but my impression is it's gotten better over the archives of the strip and really for awhile now has been pretty good. It's still stickmen, but it's a slicker stickman style".[3]

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.[2]

The newspaper strip Pearls Before Swine parodied Cyanide & Happiness in a strip in June 2013. The strip claimed to be a rerun of a C&H strip, showing one panel in its art style with almost all of the dialogue censored by black bars.[28]

The book collection Cyanide & Happiness: Stab Factory was nominated for an Eisner Award in the Best Humor Publication category in 2016.[29]

Cyanide & Happiness won a Streamy Award in 2015 in the Animated Category, and was nominated again in 2016.[30][31]

In February 2016, Explosm started a Kickstarter project for a Cyanide & Happiness card game titled Joking Hazard, in which each card is a possible panel of a comic and the players must attempt to produce a humorous combination. The project's funding finished with over $3.2 million USD in backings, and at the time was the second most funded card game in Kickstarter history after Exploding Kittens.[40] Joking Hazard was released in 2016;[41] reviews have compared the game to Cards Against Humanity,[42][43][44] and as of 2021 the game has an average user rating of 6.4 out of 10 on BoardGameGeek.[41]

In June 2019, another Kickstarter campaign for a card game project was launched, developed in collaboration with Skybound Entertainment, titled Trial by Trolley. The game is an adaptation of the trolley problem in philosophy where a player must choose a track to send an out of control trolley down. The campaign raised over US$3.5 million.[45] Trial by Trolley was released in 2020 and it also has a 6.4 out of 10 rating on BoardGameGeek.[46]

In November 2018, Explosm Games, along with developer studio Galvanic Games and publisher tinyBuild, released Rapture Rejects to Steam as an early access game. Rapture Rejects is a battle royale style game. The developers stated that they planned to release the game in early 2020, but the game remained in early access, and is no longer available for sale.[47]

In September 2017, Explosm began another Kickstarter for a Cyanide & Happiness video game with a goal of $300,000, earning over $575,000. The game is described to borrow elements from games such as South Park: The Stick of Truth. The game was slated to be released near the end of 2018 but was later pushed to 2019, then delayed again to 2020 and then again until "early 2021".[48][49][50][51][52] The game's title was announced in March 2020 to be Cyanide & Happiness: Freakpocalypse Part 1 – Hall Pass to Hell.[50][51] The first part of the game was released on March 11, 2021.[53]

In March 2022, Explosm began Gamefound for a new Cyanide & Happiness card game titled Master Dater.[54] It was released on February 14, 2023.