Cyanide & Happiness (C&H) is a webcomic created by Rob DenBleyker, Kris Wilson, Dave McElfatrick and Matt Melvin. The comic has been running since 2005 and is published on the website explosm.net along with animated shorts in the same style. Matt Melvin left C&H in 2014, and several other people have contributed to the comic and to the animated shorts.
The comic and animations use stick figure art to present graphic, dark, and often surreal humor which has been described as "seem[ing] to have no taste boundaries whatsoever", covering topics such as abortion, suicide, violence, and necrophilia. The comic was called one of the ten best webcomics by a columnist for The Telegraph in 2009, and by 2012 the website was receiving over a million views each day. C&H has won a Streamy Award and has been nominated for an Eisner Award.
C&H has had multiple spinoffs: there have been four seasons of an animated television show called The Cyanide & Happiness Show; three tabletop games have been produced; and two video games are in production.
Conception
Cyanide & Happiness first appeared on explosm.net on January 26, 2005, but initial development of the comic started in 2004.
According to Matt Melvin, he and Rob DenBleyker had been making stick figure death movies together around 1999 and 2000, and they knew Dave McElfatrick from the stick figure community. In around 2001, DenBleyker created the website StickSuicide, which hosted animations and games depicting the violent deaths of stick figures. According to Melvin, McElfatrick later joined StickSuicide, and Wilson was an active member of its forums.
Wilson has described himself as the creator of Cyanide & Happiness; Melvin said that Wilson started the style of C&H. Wilson started drawing stick figures while he was home sick from high school with strep throat, and was posting comics on the StickSuicide forums. According to Melvin, "when we decided to branch off from just stick figure death movies and do something more with the site, we [Melvin, DenBleyker and McElfatrick] started Explosm and brought Kris [Wilson] on board."
The website name "Explosm" came from a domain name DenBleyker was squatting on. Another potential name for the project was "BestWhileHigh.com", an idea Wilson disliked, as he thought it sounded too much like teen zine or 9gag. Wilson said that when he heard the name "Explosm", he thought, "I don't know what you just said, but I love it!"
The first animation appeared on explosm.net in 2006.
Creators
Cyanide & Happiness was started by four cartoonists who were at the time in different locations: in 2006, Rob DenBleyker was a college student at University of Texas at Dallas; Kris Wilson lived in Fort Bridger, Wyoming; Matt Melvin lived in San Diego, California; and Dave McElfatrick lived in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The creators did not meet each other face-to-face until the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con. In 2010, McElfatrick 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 146,000 signatures and in September 2010 it was announced that Dave qualified for the visa that would allow him to work in the United States.
On August 31, 2014, Matt Melvin announced that he was no longer part of Cyanide and Happiness. Melvin said in a personal post that he was "pretty depressed over the turn of events. Making comics on the internet for a living was an absolute dream come true. To find myself no longer in that position is awful on multiple levels." Melvin later said in an AMA that the other creators forced him to leave through "a clause in our contract that, in the opinion of myself and all the lawyers I spoke to, was grossly misused" and that he was now forbidden to draw C&H characters. According to explosm.net, Melvin preferred "to focus his talents in web design and project management [and] very rarely worked on the animations. His comic production also scaled down, releasing only three to four per month, and his attention shifted to focus on more personal projects. Eventually Matt stepped down from project management, and in February 2014, left the C&H team entirely. The transition went smoothly, and the Cyanide & Happiness team was able to maintain momentum despite losing a member of the team."
Other creators have contributed to the comic and to the animated shorts, such as Chase Suddarth, Joel Watson, Connor Murphy, Zach Prescott, Bill Jones, Mike Salcedo and Shawn Coss.
According to their Twitter profiles as of 2021, DenBleyker still lives in Dallas, Texas, and McElfatrick now lives there too, while Wilson lives in Colorado.