Cyanide & Happiness: Punching Zoo by Kris, Rob, Matt & Dave

When I read the big 20th anniversary Cyanide & Happiness book a couple months back, I noted that I didn't think the strip had ended, but that I hadn't seen it in a long time. Well, the library app I use has a bunch of C&H books, so I figured I'd read at least one more.

I picked Punching Zoo, because it seemed to be the oldest one there - there are some new anniversary editions of older books, too, but this was the actual 2014 collection, still available in the same format, as it was when Boom! Box published it a decade ago. Back in 2014, all four founding cartoonists were still involved: Kris Wilson, Rob DenBlyker, Matt Melvin, and Dave McElfatrick. Sometime between then and now, Melvin dropped out of the mix - I have no idea when or how, if it was big and splashy or quiet and barely noticeable.

Punching Zoo collects 119 Cyanide & Happiness strips as they originally appeared online, each one signed by the creator, so you can tell which of the four did that one. (They also have slightly different art styles, so, if you paid attention, you could probably figure them all out even without the credits.) Also included were thirty then-new exclusive strips - they might have appeared online later; I'm not about to comb through the C&H archives to check - and a "Chew Your Own Adventure" story called The Hot Date that takes up the last forty-one pages of the book.

Cyanide & Happiness has a distinctive tone and style - it's one small step up from stick figures, with often inappropriately smiling characters in a usually blank landscape, and it's nearly always Internet-mediated "sick" humor. Some strips occasionally dip into potentially-offensive material, but C&H stakes out its territory as offensive material, and roams freely through all of the subsectors of that land. Some jokes are about sex, some about death, some about poop or suicide or religion - but every strip is likely to offend someone. That was the original point, and in 2014, they were still solidly in that mode - from the 20th anniversary book, I think they've broadened slightly (only slightly) since then, under the weight of publishing so many different jokes and needing them to be at least slightly different from each other.

I don't want to say all Cyanide & Happiness books are basically the same, except the way any strip collection - Dennis the Menace, Marmaduke, The Born Loser - are basically the same. But if you know the typical jokes and style, you know what you'll get, and you read the book to get it. That's the case here. The additional material means you get a big chunk of material you can't find on the website, but it's all the same kind of thing with the same sensibility. You probably don't need multiple C&H books within a short period, unless you're a huge fan of this style of humor. But one of 'em, once in a while, can be fun and amusing.