Cereal Guy

About

Cereal Guy is a stick figure character commonly used on imageboards and discussion forums as a multi-purpose reaction face.

Origin

The original comic was posted by graphic designer Bob Averill (a.k.a Lego_Robot) on the SomethingAwful forums sometime in 2007. Depicting a long-distance couple’s argument over the phone, the comic strip served as a parody of TV commercials for Reese’s Puffs cereal featuring the tagline “Candy?!… For breakfast? It’s Reese’s!” The popularity of the comic prompted Averill to start his own webcomic series Lego Robot Comics, now known as Plastic Brick Automaton.

4chan’s Cereal Guy

In late 2009, Averill’s character resurfaced as a reaction face on 4chan where he received the name “Cereal Guy”. For some time, the images were referred to as “STFU when I’m talking” through a successful 45 GET-- however that name ultimately did not catch on.

Following the generally positive reception of Cereal Guy, a number of derivative instances were introduced by other users on 4chan, such as Cereal Guy 2.0 the polished version of original MS paint image, Bubble Pipe Cereal Guy who appears to be taking a break from eating cereal and Cereal Guy Ninja doing a roundhouse kick.

There is also a single topic blog titled Fuck Yeah, Cereal Guy^[3] which is dedicated to answering various people’s questions with counterpoints in character of Cereal Guy.

Search Interest

The keyword “Cereal Guy” has a visible search trend, while “STFU when I’m talking” (even without quotes) has none. This signifies that the name did not catch on in most people’s minds. Furthermore, a Tineye^[4] reverse image search shows that of the four images indexed, two retain the “cereal guy” name, while the other two are assigned arbitrary numbers.

External References

^[1] Plastic Brick Automaton – #1 reeses crazy

^[2] Plastic Brick Automaton – Comics

^[3] Tumblr – Fuck Yeah, Cereal Guy

^[4] TinEye – “Search Results”:a TinEye image search