Reddit AMA Recap: Rob DenBleyker and the producers of Cyanide & Happiness

 

The producers of Cyanide & Happiness( Kris Wilson, Rob DenBleyker, and Dave McElfatrick) dropped by Reddit and did a HUGE AMA. So huge, we just had to stop because there was just so much. Plus, Dave and Kris were literally posting still into the wee hours of the morning, but we got some interesting bits.

The most rewarding part of Cyanide & Happiness

Rob

The most rewarding thing in the last couple years has been forming a team that consistently amazes me. Every one of our animators, artists, production assistants and managers has added so much comedy and nuance to every project they touch. When C&H first started I was working by myself in an apartment. Now I’m working in a studio full of talented and funny people and our animations keep getting better and better thanks to that ever evolving team. It’s an adventure!

Evidently, funding shit via Kickstarter is a fucking nightmare.

Rob

After our experience with Season 1, I would not want to do another Kickstarter to support an animation project of that magnitude. $770,000 seems like a lot of money at first, but here’s what happens with it:

10% of that vanishes right away due to Kickstarter/Amazon fees, and declined credit cards (our $10,000 backer actually had a declined card. Ouch!)

Then another 50-60% of that is merchandise. Our merch and shipping costs spiraled out of control, mostly due to outside factors (for example, USPS hiked their prices in 2013. Bam, more budget lost!)

In the end, we had to forgo paychecks and funnel YouTube ad revenue toward the project just to get the show released a year late.

Part of that was our own planning failures, for sure, and we’ve learned a lot from it, but I would not rely on anything as unstable as Patreon to finance a project that involves so many people.

By partnering with a network (in this case Seeso, who have been amazing to us and left all our writing uncensored) we’ve been able to make Season 2 in a third the time at a quality that puts Season 1 to shame.

The obvious downside is we’re asking a lot out of our fans: to sign up for another subscription service. But I know Seeso has some amazing comedy shows besides ours lined up (stuff from Dan Harmon, Scott Aukerman, Paul F Tompkins) and will show how valuable a service it is in the coming months.

On how Cyanide & Happiness came to be

Rob

Kris began the strip in 2004 and posted them on the forums of a website I ran with Dave and Matt. I really liked them and in January 2005 joined forces with Kris to make them daily. Dave and Matt joined in a couple months later, and Cyanide & Happiness became a thing.

How Kris tries to work/watch comedy

I fight every day to not get sick of comedy or hate it like many of my heroes have. That tends to happen when you truly care about something like comedy. Also, a sense of humor differs like a sense of taste, and sometimes you have to make a choice whether you’re going to choose to make a joke to make only make yourself laugh, or act more selfless with your humor.

 
How long it takes to finish a strip.

Rob

Sometimes a simple idea will pop into my head, and not require any weird artwork. Those ones I can knock out in thirty minutes. Other times I’ll have an idea that sits in my idea list for years and years until I rediscover it and decide how to finish it.
In fact, this one was almost completely created in 2009 and I talked myself out of it. Then last week I found the art file and said “Nah, that’s actually funny to me” and finished it.
So to answer your question, anywhere from 30 minutes to 7 years.

Why Matt Melvin left Cyanide & Happiness (Here’s Matt’s answer)

Kris

There’s many reasons why we parted ways with Matt, and the professional/creative conflicts only grew over the years. After a while, Matt’s attention just ended up shifting completely which put Cyanide & Happiness into bad positions. When Explosm first started, Matt wanted to maintain and develop the website, deciding later that he wanted to make one comic a week. After the Kickstarter, Matt stopped working to fix the website entirely, and stuck to only releasing one comic a week. He was often difficult for us to work with, and would strongarm decisions with the website simply by refusing to do what we all agreed on. Matt also very rarely wrote or worked on animations with us, coupled with side projects he was starting up, it was apparent that Matt wanted to pursue other projects. He’ll more than likely remain bitter since we let him go, which is just another slice of an already shitty pie we were served, yet we did what we had to and wish him the best. We have no intention of flinging shit at him because he is and always will be a part of Cyanide & Happiness, and we want the readers of C&H to check out his new project http://www.lastnerdsonearth.com and his Twitch stream twitch.tv/MattMelvin

Rob

We removed him from the team after many, many years of frustration and problems, spanning everything from writing input, to tech stuff, to running the business itself. I don’t want to use an AMA to mudsling, and I want him to do well on his own, but he wasn’t a good business and creative partner to us, and it was only getting worse and worse as we tried to get Season 1 written and produced.

There’s actually a whole bunch more. I mean, there’s three fucking people in this AMA. Read some more here and be sure to catch Cyanide & Happiness streaming new Thursdays on SeeSo.