A webcomic that has run for over a decade and a half, Cyanide & Happiness has existed since 2005. Over the years, Rob DenBleyker and animator Mike Salcedo have been hard at work to up the quality of their product, ultimately turning the comic into a series of animated shorts.
All of the success that Cyanide & Happiness has garnered has helped pave the way for the newest series from Explosm and Octopie, The Stockholms. A show with a unique plot, this animated mock sitcom follows hostages in a bank as if they are a happy family, leading to outrageous storylines.
The series has attracted voice talents such as Chris Sabat (My Hero Academia, Dragon Ball Super) and Nolan North (Deadpool) and has already launched the first three episodes, with more episodes coming each week. We spoke exclusively with the creators to discuss their trajectory from comics to cartoons and how Cyanide & Happiness helped to set the stage for The Stockholms.
If you're interested in hearing the audio component of our exclusive chat with Mike Salcedo and Rob DenBleyker, you can do so via the podcast player below!
Literary Joe: When did you guys first start working together?
Rob DenBleyker: I started Cyanide & Happiness with some friends back in 2005, and it kind of became a business. And then, when we first started getting back into animation, it was 2013. So we began kind of scaling up for the first time with the intention of taking our comics and making them into cartoons.
And Mike here was one of the first people we brought on board as an animatic artist. And since then he's become a writer and director. And now a show creator in the case of The Stockholms.
Literary Joe: How do you guys feel like your work on Cyanide & Happiness helped prepare you for The Stockholms?
Rob DenBleyker: Yeah, it definitely helped. In some ways, this is all brand new. This is our first character-driven series that we've done.
But we've also built this traditional writing room over the years where there's five of us in a room. And anything goes, the goal is to just try and make each other laugh. So I think it's a lot more insane because of where we came from, with our shorts.
A lot of the writing is just completely bonkers and unrestricted. It was also a lot of problem-solving, and Mike can probably attest to that more than me, but trying to fit in the character arcs and trying to give every character a beat in an episode that's like 4 minutes long.
Mike Salcedo: Yeah, that was definitely a new challenge. I think the show originally had a lot more characters that we kind of whittled down due to the limitations of how short the episodes were. So some characters used to be two different characters that we just kind of co-opted into one, which was kind of a fun challenge compared to short writing when we introduce someone and then say goodbye forever.
As far as problem-solving in the production scheme of things, we kind of took what we learned from previous seasons of the Cyanide & Happiness show and productions of the shorts. I was really happy that we were able to optimize a lot of that stuff.
I think the production went a lot smoother. We had character designs and backgrounds done before animatics. Really, everybody really just rocketed through these episodes, I think, because we're constantly getting more efficient.
*This interview has been edited for clarity.*
Yong Sun misses his family as his first Christmas in the bank approaches. Even so, the Stockholms are gonna be okay.
New episodes of The Stockholms release once a week. Catch up here.