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.

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 →