Breaking Bad Comics

About

Breaking Bad Comics was a single topic blog featuring crudely drawn MS Paint comics inspired by the AMC television series Breaking Bad. The blog was removed from the microblogging site Tumblr in May of 2012.

Origin

The original comic was posted to the webcomic blog SB Board^[9] by user Henry Lawson on October 16th, 2011. It featured a conversation between the Breaking Bad characters Walt and Jesse about cooking meth to provide for Walt’s family.

On October 25th, then newly-created “Chili P, Yo” Tumblr^[12] began featuring similar comics that used the original SB board submission as an exploitable template. Three days later, the “Breaking Bad Comics” Tumblr^[1] was created and hit the 1,000 followers mark by November 6th.^[13] Within the first two months, the Tumblr accumulated over 200 posts.

Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad is a TV drama series created by American writer, director and producer Vince Gilligan that premiered on January 20th, 2008. The show centers around the life of Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston), a high school chemistry teacher who begins cooking and dealing methamphetamine to make money for his family after finding out he has lung cancer. He is accompanied by Jesse Pinkman, a wannabe thug and former student (played by Aaron Paul), who assists him in cooking and dealing the meth. The series has received “universal acclaim” status on Metacritic^[2] and was declared one of the top ten television series of 2011 by the American Film Institute.^[6]

Spread

On November 3rd, 2011, the AOL Comics Alliance^[8] blog posted an article titled “Memetic ‘Breaking Bad’ Comics Define Paradoxical Locus of Elation and Dread”, which featured several notable examples from the Tumblr blog. In between late November and early December 2011, the bloggers behind the Breaking Bad Comics site went onto launch spin-off comic blogs for other AMC drama series like the Walking Dead Comics^[3] and Mad Men Comics,^[4] though both sites have been discontinued since then. On May 19th, 2012, a “Breaking Bad Comics” entry was created on the Internet culture wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica.^[14] The comics have continued to spread on the /r/breakingbad^[5] subreddit and Tumblr under the tag “#breaking bad comics.”^[18]

Tumblr Suspension

On May 15th, 2012, the Breaking Bad Comics Twitter announced that the blog had been suspended by Tumblr and urged followers to contact the microblogging site to reinstate the blog.

Tumblr have suspended the breaking bad comics account :-( Help me convince them to put it back online support@tumblr.com
— Breaking Bad Comics (@break_bad_comic) May 15, 2012

On May 15th, Redditor Stick submitted a post to the /r/breakingbad^[19] subreddit titled “The Breaking Bad Comics Tumblr has been taken down”, which revealed that the blog was suspended for breaking Tumblr’s terms of service in regards to affiliate linking. On May 24th, Redditor 9h057 submitted a post titled “Breaking Bad comics tumblr suspended, help it get back online now!”, to which Redditor sbboard replied that the owner of the blog was “extremely shady.” On June 11th, Redditor tonermcfly submitted a post^[17] asking what had happened to the original Tumblr, to which Redditor mattisnice replied with a Mediafire^[15] archive link containing all 300 comics.