Brad & Phil: Parallel Divergence 12 October, 2006

Since my son inspired me to start a blog and helped me with the layout, I decided to give him a little job.  A blog that’s just full of text can be pretty boring in spite of the best creative writing efforts that may have gone into constructing it.  A good blog needs a hook.  Now I know it’s been done before, but I think if I include a (hopefully) witty and original cartoon with most of my posts, then that may just be the hook I need.

But that’s where I step aside. I have no idea about creating cartoons and while I can draw a curtain, I certainly can’t draw anything else.  However, my son, despite his carefree and vital youth, has cartooning and comicing down pat.  For almost a year he’s been mastering the art of making comics using G-Mod – an add-on to the amazing Half-Life 2 PC game.  Using a PC, he poses the Half-Life 2 and other custom characters in varied environments with all kinds of props then captures each image that he needs for his idea. Then using a Mac, he imports those images into ComicLife!  and puts them together in comic panels to tell entire stories. He adds speech bubbles and other visual effects and publishes very high quality on-line comics that have been read and enjoyed by thousands of people. [When I was his age… aaah, forget it. Let’s just say there’s a whole lot of the concept of “parallel divergence” in father and son.]

One of the stories he’s been working on is actually a series, now into its third season.  It’s the story of two characters called Brad and Phil and you can follow their adventures and see many of his other comics at his website, Happydevil Comics.  Anyway, to wrap up this blog entry, he’s agreed to give Brad & Phil their own one-frame cartoon series exclusively for my blog – a series called Brad & Phil: Parallel Divergence.  The aim is that each cartoon will relate somehow to the blog entry. Well, that’s the aim. Sometimes people miss even when they aim. We’ll see how he goes.

So here’s the very first issue. Enjoy.

P.S. He even gave me another cartoon for my first blog entry. Go take a look.