Cyanide and Happiness' hilarious and dark comics have formulated the humor of a generation and has grown from one of the best comic strips in the past decade to some of the best books and cartoons, as well. Over the year, the creators have created multiple series within the Cyanide and Happiness name that has created its own cult following.
Teaming up with Octopie, Explosm Entertainment has created a new series called, The Stockholms, telling the story of a bank robber who ends up in a hostage situation where he and his hostages become something of a family. At the same time, the negotiator enables the situation. Working with voice actors like Nolan North and Chris Sabat, this short series has been a hit upon release.
Recently, we were able to catch up with creators Mike Salcedo and Rob DenBleyker to discuss the new show and their journey from comic to full show! Make sure to see what they had to say below!
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! Otherwise, we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments 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.