About
Stop Bullying Comics is an online comic series that began as a collaborative project between Cartoon Network and Bitstrips for School in October 2011. Part of the social media campaign against bullying in school, the comics share some similarities with the Law For Kids PSA parodies, both being humorous spoofs of educational webcomics.
Origin
On October 3rd, 2011, Cartoon Network teamed up with the online comic software company Bitstrips for Schools[1] to launch its anti-bullying campaign “Stop Bullying: Speak Up!” This social media campaign was meant to raise awareness about the dangers of bullying by encouraging visitors to illustrate their own scenarios using Bitstrips’ comic generator. Once submitted to the site, each user contribution was showcased in the official gallery page[3] where members could vote for their favorite instances.
Spread
The Huffington Post[4] covered the campaign on October 4th, 2011. On October 6th, a link to the comic creator was posted to the forums on the YouTube poop related website YouChew.[6] A thread titled “Cartoon Network lets you make comics to stop bullying…this is what my friend did”[7] was posted to the r/funny subreddit by Redditor dantecd on October 8th, 2011. The post eventually managed to reach the front page with more than 1,300 up votes. On October 10th, the unofficial single topic blog for curating the best parodies was launched on Tumblr, although the site hasn’t been updated since March 2011. In the following months, people began sharing their own parody comics through Reddit’s /r/bitstrips[8] and the Tumblr tag[5]“#stop bullying.” The Facebook[3] page, which was created months prior to the campaign’s launch in August 2011, has received more than one million likes as of June 2012. The first volume of the Stop Bullying: Speak Up Comic Anthology[9] was eventually made available as a downloadable PDF document in May 2012.
Notable Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1]Bit Strips – Bit Strips for Schools
[2]Cartoon Network – Stop Bullying: Speak Up!
[3]Facebook – Stop Bullying Speak Up
[4]The Huffington Post – Stop Bullying and Speak Up
[5]Tumblr – #stop bullying
[6]You Chew – Stop bullying speak up comic creator
[7]Reddit – Cartoon Network lets you make comics to stop bullying…this is what my friend did.
[9]Bit Strips – Stop Bullying, Speak Up Comic Anthology