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Weinersmith, Zach

Entry updated 12 January 2026. Tagged: Artist, Author, Comics.

(1982-    ) US author, illustrator and cartoonist whose birth name was Weiner; when he and Kelly Smith married they adopted the combined surname Weinersmith. He is best known for the long-running and long very very popular webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, launched in January 2002 as a three-panel strip about the ups and downs of college students (Weinersmith was then in college) and switching later that year to single-panel gag format, though both single- and multiple-panel strips currently appear. The online Comic is usually updated daily. Genre SF tropes which constantly recur in the strip – often treated in Absurdist SF mode – include AI, Computer and Robot threats; Aliens in UFOs with a penchant for Invasion or abduction; Gods and Demons including the biblical God; and Superheroes. There is a tendency to deflate human aspirations and self-importance, as conversations with AIs, aliens or God often provide unwelcome information about the universe and our position in it. Also mercilessly examined are Economics, Linguistics, philosophy, Physics, Psychology, Religion and Sex, with many Thought Experiment strips in which offbeat or whimsical notions are taken to extremes and beyond; the range is comparable to that of xkcd by Randall Munroe [whom see] but the tone can be darker. There have been several printed Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal collections, one devoted entirely to riffs on religion [see Checklist below]. The strip won Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards as outstanding single-panel comic in 2006 and 2007.

Weinersmith's other works include the sf Gamebook Trial of the Clone: An Interactive Adventure! (2012) with Chris Jones. He has co-authored two ventures into nonfiction Futures Studies, both with his wife Kelly Weinersmith, an academic with a doctorate in biology: Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything (2017) discusses various Near Future possibilities for Technology; A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (2023) takes an informed sceptical view of sf and real-world advocacy of the Colonization of Other Worlds, even one as "close" as Mars. A City on Mars won a Hugo as best related work, and also received the 2024 UK Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize. Bea Wolf (2023) is Weinersmith's updated and gender-swapped retelling of the fourteenth-century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, illustrated by Boulet (pseudonym of Gilles Roussel). [DRL]

Zachary Alexander Weinersmith [born Zachary Alexander Weiner]

born USA: 5 March 1982

works (selected)

graphic works

series

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

individual titles

nonfiction

links

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