Cereal Guy

2007Reaction image / stick figure comicclassic

Published March 10, 2026 · Updated March 23, 2026

Also known as: Cereal Dude · Cereal Spitting Guy

Cereal Guy is a stick figure character depicted casually eating cereal, originally drawn by graphic designer Bob Averill for Something Awful's forums in 20072. The character became a staple reaction face on imageboards and forums, typically used to convey indifference, nonchalant observation, or the act of watching drama unfold without getting involved2.

reaction memesexploitable templatessomething awful memesstick figure memeslate 2000s memes

Overview

Cereal Guy, a simply drawn stick figure sitting at a table eating a bowl of cereal. The character's defining trait is his unbothered demeanor. In most uses, he's either calmly spooning cereal into his mouth while chaos happens around him, or doing a dramatic spit-take when confronted with something shocking. The clean, minimal art style made him easy to redraw and drop into comic strips, which helped him spread rapidly across early meme communities1.

The character exists in two primary modes: the calm version (eating cereal while ignoring something) and the spit-take version (spitting cereal in shock). Both versions became widely used reaction faces in forum posts and imageboard threads throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s1.

Origin & Background

Platform
Something Awful (original comic), imageboards (viral spread)
Key People
Bob Averill, a.k.a. Lego_Robot
Date
2007

Graphic designer Bob Averill, posting under the handle Lego_Robot, created the original Cereal Guy comic on the Something Awful forums sometime in 20071. The comic depicted a long-distance couple arguing over the phone and was a direct parody of television commercials for Reese's Puffs cereal. Those ads used the tagline "Candy?!... For breakfast? It's Reese's!"1.

The comic struck a nerve with Something Awful's community. Its popularity encouraged Averill to launch his own webcomic series called Lego Robot Comics, which later rebranded as Plastic Brick Automaton1.

How It Spread

After its debut on Something Awful, the Cereal Guy character quickly migrated to imageboards and discussion forums as a standalone reaction image1. Users extracted the stick figure from Averill's original comic strip and began inserting him into new contexts, particularly multi-panel comics where the punchline involved either calm indifference or an exaggerated spit-take.

Search interest data for "Cereal Guy" shows a visible trend, though the phrase "STFU when I'm talking" (a caption sometimes paired with the character) never gained comparable traction as a search term1. A TinEye reverse image search found that of indexed versions, most retained the "Cereal Guy" name, confirming the character's identity stuck with the community1.

The character became closely associated with the rage comic format that dominated sites like Reddit, 4chan, and 9GAG between roughly 2008 and 2012. Cereal Guy was one of several recurring stick figure characters (alongside Trollface, Forever Alone, and others) that formed the core cast of rage comics during this period.

Platforms

4chanReddit9GAGTumblr
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Frequently Asked Questions