Stop Bullying Comics

2011Exploitable comic creator / parody webcomicdead

Published March 31, 2026

Also known as: Stop Bullying: Speak Up Comics · Bitstrips Bullying Comics

Stop Bullying Comics is an online comic series born from a 2011 anti-bullying campaign between Cartoon Network and Bitstrips for Schools that was quickly hijacked by internet users to create absurd, off-topic parody strips. What started as a well-meaning educational tool for students to illustrate bullying scenarios became a goldmine for joke comics, with users exploiting the drag-and-drop comic creator to produce intentionally ridiculous content that spread across Reddit, Tumblr, and YouTube Poop forums.

exploitable templatesanti bullying memesearly 2010s memescartoon network memesbitstrips memes

Overview

Stop Bullying Comics grew out of the "Stop Bullying: Speak Up!" Comic Challenge, a joint initiative between Cartoon Network and the online comic platform Bitstrips for Schools1. The campaign gave users access to a drag-and-drop comic creator where they could build their own avatar, drop it into pre-made bullying scenario templates, and finish each strip with custom dialogue, characters, and effects1. The tool was designed to let students in grades 3-8 role-play as bystanders, victims, or bullies facing consequences1.

Almost immediately, people discovered the comic creator could be used to make absolutely anything, and the results were rarely educational. The parody comics share DNA with Law For Kids PSA parodies, both being humorous takes on earnest educational content4.

Origin & Background

Platform
Bitstrips for Schools (comic tool), Reddit / Tumblr (viral parodies)
Key People
Cartoon Network and Bitstrips for Schools, Shahan Panth, Jacob Blackstock
Date
2011

On October 3, 2011, Cartoon Network partnered with Bitstrips for Schools to launch the "Stop Bullying: Speak Up!" campaign during Bullying Prevention Month4. Bitstrips, a Toronto-based company founded by Shahan Panth and Jacob Blackstock, had been running since 2008 and already had over 100,000 teacher accounts1. Students had produced six million original comic strips on the platform before the anti-bullying push even started1.

The campaign released new comic templates each week throughout October, each setting up a different bullying scenario like cyberbullying or cell phone harassment1. Panth described it as giving students "a creative way to talk about what they can do to respond to bullying"1. Finished comics could be published in an online gallery where other users voted on their favorites4. A Facebook page for the campaign had been created in August 2011, months before the official launch4.

How It Spread

The Huffington Post covered the campaign on October 4, 2011, framing it as a creative educational tool1. Two days later, on October 6, a link to the comic creator appeared on YouChew, a forum associated with the YouTube Poop community2. This was an early sign the tool would attract a very different audience than intended.

On October 8, 2011, Reddit user dantecd posted a thread to r/funny titled "Cartoon Network lets you make comics to stop bullying…this is what my friend did"4. The post hit the front page and pulled in more than 1,300 upvotes, exposing the comic creator to a massive audience primed for mischief4.

By October 10, an unofficial single-topic blog launched on Tumblr to curate the best parody submissions4. Over the following months, users shared their creations through Reddit's r/bitstrips and the Tumblr tag "#stop bullying"4. The Facebook page crossed one million likes by June 20124. Bitstrips for Schools also released the first volume of the Stop Bullying: Speak Up Comic Anthology as a downloadable PDF in May 20124.

The platform where it all started, Bitstrips for Schools, eventually shut down3. The closure came earlier than planned, with the team emailing teachers links to download their classwork and releasing a downloadable Activity Book with over 25 printable comic activities3.

How to Use This Meme

The original format worked like this: users would create a personalized avatar using Bitstrips' drawing tools, then drop that avatar into a pre-made comic template depicting a bullying situation. From there, they'd add dialogue bubbles, new characters, props from an extensive library, and special effects to complete the strip1.

The parody approach typically involved ignoring the anti-bullying premise entirely. Users would take the serious scenario setups and fill them with absurd dialogue, non-sequitur punchlines, or deliberately inappropriate responses to the situation. The comedy came from the contrast between the wholesome educational framing and whatever chaos the user injected into it.

Since Bitstrips for Schools has closed down3, the original comic creator is no longer accessible, making Stop Bullying Comics a relic of early 2010s internet humor.

Cultural Impact

The campaign had genuine institutional backing. The American Association of School Administrators supported the Comic Challenge, and it tied into the PACER Center's Bullying Prevention Month programming1. Ontario, Canada, saw particularly strong adoption, with nearly every school in the province producing comics on the Bitstrips platform1.

Bitstrips co-founder Jacob Blackstock, himself an accomplished cartoonist, had built the platform out of frustration with how long traditional comic-making took1. "It takes skill and patience to create comics. I grew frustrated with the time it took me to go from an idea to a fully executed comic," he explained1. The irony is that the same low-barrier tools meant to democratize classroom creativity also made it trivially easy to pump out joke content at scale.

The YouTube Poop community's early adoption through YouChew2 helped frame Stop Bullying Comics as remix material rather than sincere media, a pattern common to many educational tools that found second lives as meme generators.

Fun Facts

Bitstrips had over 100,000 teacher accounts and students had created six million original comics before the anti-bullying campaign launched1.

The unofficial Tumblr parody blog launched on October 10, 2011, just one week after the campaign started4.

Teachers could make class sets of students' avatars, creating what the platform called "a humorous alternative to school pictures"1.

Blackstock admitted he "got kicked out of class for drawing on my desk" as a kid, which he channeled into building Bitstrips1.

The campaign targeted students in grades 3-8 but found its biggest audience among adult internet users making parodies14.

Frequently Asked Questions