Savage Chickens is a

webcomic Webcomics (also known as online comics or Internet comics) are comics published on a website or mobile app. While many are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers, or comic books. Webcomics can be ...

created by Canadian cartoonist Doug Savage. It is a single panel comic drawn on yellow sticky notes, often featuring alternative humor. Savage Chickens has existed since 31 January 2005 and it contains at least a thousand comics. The page is generally updated daily Monday through Friday. Whereas situations in the

comic a medium used to express ideas with images, often combined with text or other visual information. It typically the form of a sequence of panels of images. Textual devices such as speech balloons, captions, and onomatopoeia can indicate ...

are primarily carried out through cartoon chickens, other characters, such as Timmy the tasteless

tofu Tofu (), also known as bean curd in English, is a food prepared by coagulating soy milk and then pressing the resulting curds into solid white blocks of varying softness; it can be ''silken'', ''soft'', ''firm'', ''extra firm'' or ''super fi ...

, and a

mock-up In manufacturing and design, a mockup, or mock-up, is a scale or full-size model of a design or device, used for teaching, demonstration, design evaluation, promotion, and other purposes. A mockup may be a '' prototype'' if it provides at lea ...

robot boss named PROD3000 are integral characters. Savage supplements his cartooning income with a day job, and has claimed that by day he "edits software manuals in the dark recesses of a giant corporation".

Characters and themes

Almost all characters in the strip are

chicken The chicken (''Gallus gallus domesticus'') is a domestication, domesticated junglefowl species, with attributes of wild species such as the grey junglefowl, grey and the Ceylon junglefowl that are originally from Southeastern Asia. Rooster ...

s, which have no names or genders. Savage states that the characters can be anybody, allowing readers to "map their own lives onto" the strips, making the relationship jokes flexible for everybody. Otherwise, there is a large cast of non-chicken recurring characters, such as Timmy the tasteless tofu, who often engages in lewd thinking or activities, PROD3000, who portrays a

satiric Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or ...

-hyperbolic view of a workplace manager, Worm, an alcoholic bug attorney, and a cast of

mutant In biology, and especially in genetics, a mutant is an organism or a new genetic character arising or resulting from an instance of mutation, which is generally an alteration of the DNA sequence of the genome or chromosome of an organism. It ...

s possessing seemingly useless powers. There are also multiple

popular culture Popular culture (also called mass culture or pop culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as, popular art or mass art) and objects that are dominant or prevalent in ...

references, including

Jason Voorhees Jason Voorhees () is a character from the ''Friday the 13th'' series. He first appeared in ''Friday the 13th'' (1980) as the young son of camp-cook-turned-killer Mrs. Voorhees, in which he was portrayed by Ari Lehman. Created by Victor Mill ...

, ''

Alien Alien primarily refers to: * Alien (law), a person in a country who is not a national of that country ** Enemy alien, the above in times of war * Extraterrestrial life, life which does not originate from Earth ** Specifically, intelligent extrate ...

'', ''

Star Wars ''Star Wars'' is an American epic space opera multimedia franchise created by George Lucas, which began with the eponymous 1977 film and quickly became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon. The franchise has been expanded into various film ...

'',

Mr. T Mr. T (born Laurence Tureaud, May 21, 1952), is an American actor. He is known for his roles as B. A. Baracus in the 1980s television series ''The A-Team'' and as boxer Clubber Lang in the 1982 film ''Rocky III''. He is also known for his d ...

, U2's

The Edge David Howell Evans (born 8 August 1961), better known as the Edge or simply Edge,McCormick (2006), pp. 21, 23–24 is an English-born Irish musician, singer, and songwriter. He is best known as the lead guitarist, keyboardist, and backing voca ...

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies explained as originatin ...

, and

Chuck Norris Carlos Ray "Chuck" Norris (born March 10, 1940) is an American martial artist and actor. He is a black belt in Tang Soo Do, Brazilian jiu jitsu and judo. After serving in the United States Air Force, Norris won many martial arts championsh ...

, along with other popular movies and actors. Mocking the corporate world is a regular theme of Savage Chickens. Savage states that he finds corporations interesting, "because they're perceived as these monolithic impersonal structures, but they are created by and composed of individual people. People with dreams and hopes and aspirations." The boss character, PROD3000, "is a robot that they themselves created. The corporation is a monster, but it's a monster of our own creation."

Acclaim

Savage Chickens has garnered some critical acclaim. The strip was nominated for Best Comic Strip at the 2006 Weblog Awards, and nominated for “Outstanding Single Panel Comic” for the 2006 Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards. A comic review site, The Webcomic Overlook, gave it five stars out of five. A 2009 article reported that the site received about 10,000 views each day. Savage produced a stop-animation style music video in the artistic style of Savage Chickens for a contest to make a music video for singer-songwriter Laura Veirs. Savage's video, which took two weeks to make, won the contest, and the video contest also attracted readers to the comic.

Books

In 2011 a selection of the cartoons were published in a book titled ''Savage Chickens: A Survival Kit for Life in the Coop''. Savage also created a children's graphic novel, ''Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy'', based on the Laser Moose character from Savage Chickens, which has had two sequels.

References

External links

*{{official website, http://www.savagechickens.com 2005 webcomic debuts 2000s webcomics 2010s webcomics Comedy webcomics Comics about chickens Canadian webcomics Gag-a-day comics Webcomics in print Canadian comedy webcomics