About

The Perry Bible Fellowship is a newspaper comic strip and webcomic series created by American cartoonist Nicholas Gurewitch. The comic is best known for its use of innocent imagery in combination with dark and surreal humor on a wide range of subject topics, from religion, family and geek culture to war, violence and death.

History

Gurewitch originally began working on the comic for the Syracuse University school newspaper The Daily Orange in 2001. The comic got its title from the name of a church located in Maine. The comic appeared in print on Sundays, playing off its religious title. The comic first appeared online in October 2004, on a website managed by artist Cheston Gasik. The web comic launched on its official site, pbfcomics^[3] on August 1st, 2006, with a comic titled "Stiff Breeze."

The comic updated weekly until 2007^[6], when it began updating on an irregular basis. On February 18th, 2008, Gurewitch announced an indefinite hiatus of the series^[11], saying:

"It’s really not as big a deal as it might seem. I’ll simply be producing comics at a pace I’m more comfortable with.”

Print Publication

On March 14th, 2007, Dark Horse comics published The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack^[9], the first published collection of the Perry Bible Fellowship comics.

In September 2007, Dark Horse Comics published the second collection of the Perry Bible Fellowship comics The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories (The Perry Bible Fellowship)^[7]. The book did extremely well in pre-sales, becoming part of the top 500 sellers on Amazon and made over $300,000 before it was released.^[8]

Accolades

The comic earned Gurewitch multiple Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards, an Eisner award, and a Harvey.^[4] The comic won the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Online Comic^[10] in 2005 and 2006.

Social Media Presence

As of May 2014, the official The Perry Bible Fellowship Facebook page^[1] has over 45,000 likes and its Twitter account^[2] has over 5,000 followers.

Related Memes

Weeaboo

Weeaboo is an English slang used to describe a person (typically of non-Asian descent) who prefers Japan and all things in Japanese over one's indigenous culture. The term is a successive mutation of "Wapanese," a derogatory slur referring to western Japanophiles with a strong bias towards Japanese cultural and tech imports. From late 2003 and onwards, usage of Wapanese became alarmingly visible on 4chan, often leading to unpleasant exchanges between anime/manga fans and those who were far less interested in their subcultures.

At the peak of its abuse in mid-2005, 4chan moderators devised a creative intervention using the word-filter, replacing every instance of Wapanese with "Weeaboo," which was a fictitious term originally coined by Nicholas Gurewitch in his Perry Bible Fellowship comic strip (date unknown, comic #62):

Box of Hate

Box of Hate is a photoshop meme based on a Perry Bible Fellowship comic titled "Box of Hate," which features a boy putting a note reading "spankings" into a box mark "things I hate," which is followed by a frame of him being spanked. The comic was first uploaded to the Perry Bible Fellowship site^[3] on July 4th, 2007.

Spanking can be replaced with any word or image for examples of the meme, but the rest of the comic remains the same.

Skub

Skub is a fictional substance based on a Perry Bible Fellowship comic strip portraying two individuals at odds with each other due to their opposing stances on the aforementioned material. The insignificance of skub is the basis of the comics joke, which arises from the fact that people would not normally have an allegiance to a product this insignificant.

Search Interest

External References