The Cyanide & Happiness webcomic turns 20 years old this year. I’ve been reading and enjoying it for almost that long. It’s certainly not for everybody. It can be crass, vulgar, gross, shocking, offensive, and often just plain stupid. But it’s also really funny. So needless to say, I was very excited for the opportunity to be able to review this book.

If you’re unfamiliar with Cyanide & Happiness, it’s a daily webcomic written by Rob DenBleyker, Kris Wilson, and Dave McElfatrick, who switch off writing the comic from day to day and who all draw in a distinctively crude style that’s not quite stick figures, but close. This book, originally published in 2018, collects a number of the comics they’ve done involving children and parenting over the years and intersperses it with advice about how to raise your child.

The title, of course, tells you everything you need to know about the quality of this advice. They are, in fact, three guys with no kids—or they were in 2018, at any rate. Dave McElfatrick, the one who actually wrote the advice that accompanies the comics, now has a son of his own. Keep that in mind as you read it. It will add a whole new perspective to the book.

Dave is also responsible for a long-running gag throughout the comic, depicting a father abandoning his son in amusing (often pun-driven) ways. Several of them are in this book, alongside a section of advice on how to abandon your child. A few sections earlier, there’s a section on how to kidnap someone else’s child, if you can’t have your own. And at some point, there’s also a section on farting directly in your child’s face, as often as you can. In case you were at all in doubt about what kind of a book this is.

Each section has one or two comics from one of the guys on the C&H team, with a few paragraphs of corresponding advice and musings from Dave on the opposite page. Some of the sections are fairly straightforward: pregnancy, adoption, raising teenagers, telling your children about the facts of life… Other sections are more niche, like what to do if your child wants to be a dinosaur when they grow up, how playing “the floor is lava” may mean your child is a psychopath, or why you should send your infant child to work to support the family while you stay home in diapers.

The thing to understand about this book is that all the comics were taken, pre-existing, from the website. Sometimes, the advice page uses the comic as a jumping-off point to cover basic, general topics. Other times, it just expands and elaborates on whatever is in the comic. The problem with that is these comics were designed to be standalone. Three or four panels and a quick joke. If you’re not careful, the more you talk about it, the less funny it becomes.

For instance: One of the comics portrays a father showing a T-shirt to his son that says, “Daddy’s Favorite”—then putting it on himself, rather than giving it to his child. On the opposite page is a very long passage about how your wife and child have disappointed you (Everything in the book is addressed to you, the reader.), leaving you a shell of your former self, until you drunkenly stumble across a T-shirt and wear it proudly.

You know where the passage is going from the beginning, because you’ve just read the comic. And the comic has already made the joke and gotten the laugh. It’s done its job. The text is basically just a convoluted origin story, attempting to answer questions we never asked, like “Where did Sheldon get the word ‘Bazinga’ from?” or “How did Han’s last name get to be Solo?”

But perhaps I’m being overly harsh. While it’s true some sections do fall flat, most of the book is pretty funny. The comics are great, of course, and the text has a fair few laugh-out-loud moments, as well. If you’re a fan of Cyanide & Happiness, this is a solid book and worth a read.

Creative Team: Kris Wilson (comics), Rob DenBleyker (comics), and Dave McElfatrick (comics and advice)
Publisher: BOOM! Studios
Click here to purchase.