Badass Brat

The story of Henry

Posted on by Berg

I said at the end of my previous blog entry that my next webcomic after Badass Brat would be more ambitious, and yes, I was referring to Twice the Triplets. Before that, though, I had made a short lived comic – one I did end up showing online – called Henry the Comic Strip Character. It was just a silly little thing I felt like doing when I felt burned out on Badass Brat at one point. I wanted to just have fun making a comic, not work hard or worry about quality, just indulge my silliest impulses in the form of a crudely drawn comic strip with excessively stupid jokes and giggle at readers’ confused response. I didn’t much care if anyone other than myself found it entertaining at all, but judging by the response I got, some people did see the humor in it (though they would usually wish it had better artwork). If I am to be completely honest, I should admit that there was a touch of parody about the comic, aimed at the “intelligent, hard working wife and fat, lazy stupid husband” sitcom cliché, but I am not going to claim it had some sort of high-brow subtext.

Groundbreaking comedy.

Henry was originally written in my native Norwegian, and probably is read best that way, but I nevertheless translated most of the strips into English and made them available starting right here.

So. If I made Henry, then how exactly was Twice the Triplets my next webcomic after Badass Brat? Simple: After I made Henry, I made the last few Badass Brat strips after having had a break from it for some time. When the comic ended shortly after, the next comic I made which actually went all the way to becoming a webcomic was Twice the Triplets. So what I told you was true… from a certain point of view.

Buzz the Brat

Posted on by Berg

At some point after my fairly insignificant first webcomic, I started thinking up another comic that I wanted to do. My initial idea was to have it center around two kids, a boy and a girl, who lived in neighboring houses after one of their families – I forget which one – had just moved in. It was to have an extended cast featuring the kids’ parents and siblings, all of whom were going to have very distinct personalities and unique interpersonal relationships (their dads, for example, were going to hate each others’ guts for reasons I no longer remember).

I made two or three strips introducing roughly half the cast, before scrapping this version of the comic in favor of a much more ambitious one. This comic, I thought, was going to be so much more than a simple newspaper strip style comic. It would be so much better drawn than anything I had ever done before – dang it, I was gonna practice hard to make that possible – and it would feature a large cast of well rounded, complex characters, and it was going to lend itself well both to hilarious short gags as well as more dramatic storylines, and it was going to be presented in a unique format that would fully accommodate my vision, and it would be updated in chunks of pages at a time, pages showcasing the different aspects of the comic, and, and…

…and I ended up getting exhausted just thinking about it. This was never gonna work. So I created Badass Brat instead.

The first Badass Brat strip went online in November 2005

Badass Brat was even less complicated than my original version of my cancelled project. The premise: A little boy drives his family crazy with his horrid behavior. Growing up, I’d always loved comics about bratty kids doing bratty things – from The Katzenjammer Kids to Calvin & Hobbes (though the latter example obviously has more to it than just a bratty kid, including concepts and topics I didn’t fully understand as a kid), I couldn’t get enough of troublemaking little jerks. So why even try to make my own comic about anything more than that? Continue reading →