You’ll Appreciate This: Breakfast of the Gods

As Conor answered the listener, there are only so many hours in a day. With so much competing for everyone’s attention, something has to go unread, and as a result some people just can’t keep up with webcomics.

While that is certainly true, I must confess in my case the avoidance of webcomics is more willful. The fact that they’re webcomics is irrelevant, actually. It’s not their webness that gets to me, but their comicness. I mean, I buy my share of comics on paper; that doesn’t mean I keep up with Marmaduke.

So many webcomics, despite the fact that they can have any size, shape, length, or content they want (having been freed from the constraints and editorial controls of conventional publishing) still cling to that lame, hacky three-panel “Statement! Question? Punchline! Zing!” format. The webcomic’s joke probably has some profanity, or a niche pop culture reference in its gooey center that’s too geeky to land it space next to The Family Circus in the Post-Dispatch, but at the genetic level the webcomic and Ziggy are the same somnambulant thing. Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, the they’ll give you the Doonesbury/Family Guy third panel that takes place somewhere else and illustrates what the two guys in the previous panels were talking abouZzzzzzzz.

How do I describe Breakfast of the Gods? At the most basic level, it is a three-volume epic depicting the battle to save the soul of a once-proud kingdom from the forces of darkness.

“Like The Lord of the Rings?” you ask.

“Yes,” I answer. “Exactly like The Lord of the Rings, if The Lord of the Rings had not been about elves and dragons and other things that make me wish I drank coffee and/or liquid cannabis, but instead had been about Frankenberry and Frosted Flakes’ Tony the Tiger.”

For you see, gentle reader, the kingdom being battled for in Breakfast of the Gods (or BOTG, as I call it) is the land of Cerealia, and all of the characters featured in it are the advertising mascots that adorned your favorite breakfast cereal boxes and commercials growing up. Within its pages, the noble Cap’n Crunch and his heroic compatriot Tony the Tiger face the unholy hordes of Castle Chocula and its Lucky Charms. Everyone fears the Fruit Brute. The Trix Rabbit is your man on the inside when you need a master of disguise. And Dig ‘Em is for some reason a gangsta.

To the average person with a few years behind him and a TV set, BOTG is probably pretty funny on its face. Just about anyone could enjoy it. Seeing these simple, one-note characters bestowed the level of gravitas and sincerity that they attain is worth a chuckle just for the incongruity and defiance of expectations. Take something innocent, treat it like it’s Goodfellas, and you got yourself some yuks.

(Suddenly, I feel like I’m on Star Trek trying to explain humor to Data. Forgive me.)

Breakfast of the Gods, though, offers something special for people like you and me. It’s funny to us in a way it wouldn’t be to average people, and I think that’s intentional.

You see, built into the bones of BOTG is the idea of silly licensed characters being written with the seriousness of a parent’s stroke. Characters cry, argue, get beaten, get tortured, and (in one case that hilariously pays tribute to Ultimate Hulk vs. Wolverine) get ripped in half. If you have read any interview Alan Moore has given in the last five years, you have seen him lament the fact that all most people took away from Watchmen and Killing Joke were the idea of the grim ‘n’ gritty superhero comic, the darkest possible take on the stories that had so enraptured him growing up. Well, although I have no idea whether this is what the author Brendan Douglas Jones intended, BOTG carries this line of thought to its conclusion. The first chapter begins with the brutal slaying of the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee. Who could find that as funny as those of us who’ve seen what happened to Speedball?

Moreover, BOTG hilariously relies on an encyclopedic knowledge of breakfast cereal continuity. I’m not going to call any writers out by name, but I will say that anyone who has failed to get a lot out of books with the word “Rebirth” in their title will love the fact that BOTG relies heavily on mastery of Silver Age breakfast characters. The climax of volume three absolutely depends on you being familiar with Quisp and Quake, two cereals which I’m pretty sure were outlasted by the Nixon administration. Which reader can remember Yummy Mummy’s story? Who alive can recall Chief Yumma Yumma? I trust you see where I’m going with this. If you can remember these things, and treat them like the Pentagon Papers, then BOTG is for you. If you read this comic and laugh at it, you’re laughing at yourself a little bit, too. And that’s okay.

Whatever your geek bias, I urge you to check this comic out. You will find yourself laughing, and then surprisingly touched, and then laughing again at yourself for being so touched. I admit that the layout of the web site itself makes the reading interface a little clunky– I’m not sure the author intended it to be experienced just like this– but it can be gotten around.

Look at these pages. Above all things, I love that the creator did this work, literally over the course of twenty years, purely for the love of it. No one has ever paid him for it, and if one of you were a lawyer for General Mills (and also a dick)* it could all disappear in a wink.

*(I would rather you not be a dick.)

I would have shared this with you much sooner– three years sooner, in fact– but I know how you are about “lateness.” You think Old Man Logan was bad? This guy released his book onnne paaage at a tiiime over the course of the last threeee yeeears, and it still isn’t done. If it were a major company release, a third of the readership would have been lost to apoplexy by now. I opted to hold off on recommending it, having been sitting on it in my RSS feed since before I was a member of this site. But it is absolutely worth it to someone like you or me.

Here is where you can enjoy it:

Book 1: The Last Good Morning

Book 2: O Cap’n My Cap’n

Book 3: Apocalypse Yum

You can thank me later.