Current status / schedule Updated daily | Genre(s) Humor | |
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Website Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Launch date September 5, 2002 (an earlier incarnation debuted January 28, 2002) Similar xkcd, Ctrl+Alt+Del, Questionable Content, Cyanide & Happiness, The Order of the Stick | ||
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) is a webcomic by Zach Weinersmith. It features few recurring characters or storylines, and has no set format; some strips may be a single panel, while others may go on for ten panels or more. Recurring themes in SMBC include atheism, God, superheroes, romance, dating, science, research, parenting and the meaning of life. SMBC is published daily.
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Weinersmith's webcomic was recognized in 2006 and 2007 with the Web Cartoonists' Choice Award for Outstanding Single Panel Comic, and received nominations in 2003 and 2008.
History
The comic was character-based in a previous incarnation, focusing on the romantic and academic endeavors of several college students. That strip (referred to as Classic SMBC on the site's archives) ran from January 28, 2002 to September 3, 2002. The comic went through three other renderings between Classic SMBC and the current version. The current version of the strip began on September 5, 2002 and has updated daily since.
The first 480 comics were originally removed from the main SMBC archives; however, they could still be found on a hidden section of the site that was linked to in the SMBC forums by Weinersmith himself. He made them officially publicly available on September 22, 2008. In most comics the reader can now see a bonus joke called a "votey" by clicking on a red button with the mouse. The earliest votey released is for the comic dated November 27, 2006, however, he has since started drawing new voteys for his earliest comics, as part of a Patreon goal.
SMBC receives a quarter-million visitors a day, and was notably described as one of the most popular webcomics as of 2012.
SMBC Theater
Weinersmith launched a side project linked with SMBC called SMBC Theater featuring skits and short videos put up on YouTube for his fans to enjoy. This is normally updated once a week on Mondays with one or two short sketches and as of February 18, 2014 the channel had 80,721 subscribers. Certain holiday clips are marked "part one," although very few have a second part yet. Despite its one-shot style there are certain characters who have received multiple storylines, such as James Ashby as president, J.P. Nickel's news stories, Jon Brence's dating shorts, and Zach Weinersmith as Jesus/James Ashby as God. All the videos are satirical.
In August 2011, a project was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter called "SMBC Theater Goes TO SPACE!". This became Starpocalypse, a space opera webseries, which was released on 25 December 2013.
Reception
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal was recognized in 2006, and 2007 with the Web Cartoonists' Choice Award for Outstanding Single Panel Comic. It has been twice nominated for the Award, in 2003, and in 2008. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been featured on a variety of websites and blogs, including The Economist, Glamour, Boing Boing, Bad Astronomy, Blastr, Blues News, Joystiq, and Freakonomics.
In a YouTube video on the SMBC website, Zach Weinersmith addressed accusations that the comedian Sarah Silverman stole a joke from one of his strips at a Spike video game awards ceremony, in addition to pleading with Sarah Silverman to go on a date with him. In the satirical video, he claimed that the joke must have been stolen because he was "the only humorist ever to write on the topics of Africa, AIDS, or video games". In response to a criticism of his focus on academia, in July 2010 Weinersmith discussed his ideas concerning webcomics in an open forum with critics.