Thor has a talent for picking winners.

The godlings’ hunt for a backup dad begins!

Here’s a page put together for fun by Brat-halla colorist supreme, Anthony Lee.  If you like coloring things and want to see how Anthony does it, be sure to check out his articles on coloring in Sketch Magazine #36 and #37.

#### News Alert ####

If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, Brat-halla’s great artist Seth Damoose has one of those actual printed comics out from the Shadowline imprint at Image Comics called “I Hate Gallant Girl”.  If you’re a big fan of Seth’s artwork, it’s worth the price of admission.  The first issue’s out already and it does look amazing.  With some luck, you might still be able to find a copy at your local comic shop (or they might be able to track one down for you if you ask nicely).  Not sure where your local comic shop is?  Try the Comic Shop Locator.

Looks like the brats plan on taking care of mom for a change. 

When Odin’s away…

The darkness doesn’t die easily… it just takes a new form.

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I’m almost caught up with things after my illness (still a little sick but doing much better), and I’m planning on spending a couple hours this weekend responding to comments.

And the Norse did believe in letting children suffer for the sins of their fathers.

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I’d like to give a quick bit of applause to MidnightWolf for being the first commenter to bring up the Princess Bride reference in Episode #323.

Xarenia (kinda) versus Pookah… to the death?

Trying something a little new here with Hod discussing myths and legends with the other godlings. There’s a lot more I can do with this idea, so let me know if you like it.

–Jeff

Seemingly walking out of dragon fire unscathed… they’re gonna have stories told about them someday.

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Sorry I haven’t been replying to comments lately. I’ve been working through illness, so all my energy’s been going to work and recovering (at least, trying to recover). I have read (and enjoyed) all the comments though, and I’ll get some replies posted as soon as I can.

–Jeff

I think Loki is on the verge of a panic attack.

They may not be villains, but they still have some villainous cutthroat in their personalities.

EDIT: Oops, my apologies to those that stopped by and couldn’t see the comic early this morning.  I forgot to take into account that I’m on East Coast time this week, so the post showed a date of 11:34pm yesterday instead of 12:34am today.  The Comicpress software uses the date to determine which image to display for the comic, and it obviously couldn’t find one for yesterday.   It should be fixed now.  Again, sorry for the inconvenience for those that already stopped by (and thanks to all the readers that contacted me and let me know there was a problem).

It was all a conspiracy!

It’s time for Sif to bring the thunder.

It’s another Unscripted episode. That means Seth is in the driver’s seat and I’m just a backseat dialoguer. We hope you enjoy this fun, extra (and out of continuity) episode!

–Jeff

I ran into one problem though… I can’t connect to my home computer to actually letter it. I’ve been working on figuring out the problem most of the evening and I’m waiting to hear back from tech support for the remote login software. I’ll get it done someway, somehow tomorrow and get it out there.

–Jeff

Hod is trying to share some wisdom with his battle-axe girl.

Aww, Pookah’s saying his first words.

I think Thor might have actually lost his appetite here.

Congrats to Anthony! I’m looking forward to reading it.

And yes, the server Brat-halla is hosted on is called “asgard”. When we get enough funds to cover it, we’ll get a dedicated database server as well… maybe I’ll name it “midgard” or “svartlheim” or even “yggdrasil”. ^_^

We did eventually come back online, but everything was running slow for a while until I was able to get in there and clear some things up. Everything looks good now, but if you encounter any major slowdowns or problems, please feel free to contact me about it.

–Jeff

Ooo… someone’s expendable.

This is a new extra Seth and I are adding to the site for fun.  It’s experimental in that Seth simply draws something… anything at all (a short, a splash page, a cover… whatever) as long as it includes a character that has appeared in Brat-halla, and I add dialogue to it.  They’re unscripted and random… just whatever Seth feels like drawing for fun at the time.  Seth will also be experimenting with different mediums with these (this one was done with colored markers), so there should be some interesting pages showing up in this section.

Enjoy!

It’s Odin’s turn now for the late night interruption.

Hod’s really pouring himself completely into this villain role.

He’s definitely not a momma’s boy.

Knock, knock… wham!

We haven’t heard from Thor’s goats in a while, so Hod just had to let them cameo in his comic.

This isn’t quite what they meant when they mentioned heroes get statues made of them.

–Jeff

Yeah, I’m still tweaking the new format for the Hod’s Comic a bit to see what format I enjoy working with most. Since it’s becoming a regular fixture around here, I wanted to maximize the fun I’d have creating it. I’m really liking this wide 3-panel format. It allows me to be wordy but not too wordy and since it’s a comic of words…

–Jeff

I keep various movies, video clips, songs, and books on standby to help with this. As a long-time RPG gamer, here’s one I always seem to go back to for some good laughs… College Saga.

–Jeff

Fighting deities takes a little creativity… a little more confidence might be helpful too.

This is an upcoming comic from the Shadowline imprint at Image Comics with artwork by our very own Seth Damoose! I can’t wait to read this book myself (Seth hasn’t been giving me any sneak peeks of it… probably to torture my innate curiosity with an overdose of suspense).

If you want to see some of Seth’s great artwork in print, be sure to give your local comic shop a call and ask them if they’ll be carrying I Hate Galaxy Girl because there’s no guarantee they will order enough copies for everyone. If you’re not sure how to contact your local comic shop, it’s as easy as plugging your zip code into the Comic Shop Locator Service.

And if you know of anyone who might enjoy this book, be sure to spread the word… let’s help make Seth’s big comic debut a real success (that way we get to see a lot more of Seth’s artwork in print).

–Jeff

And I think it turned out well. In fact, I liked it so much, I took the time to update all the previous episodes of Hod’s Comic to the same format. So, if you want to read some of Hod’s prior bits of wisdom from the earlier episodes, you can go straight to the archive for those pages. Enjoy!

–Jeff

I think I restored all my original tweaks and modifications back into the core software, but I’m human… I could have missed something. If anyone sees anything odd with the website now, please let me know.

Don’t make Sif mad… you wouldn’t like her when she’s mad.

I did like the pregnancy theory some readers were speculating about.  That would have been a really cool explanation, but there was one slight problem with it… according to interpretations of the myths, Magni was the son of Thor and his Jotun mistress Járnsaxa.

It’s all fun and games until someone loses a wall.

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Just a quick note.  We’ll still be on the once a week updates until at least the end of the month as we work to get ahead on other projects.  But I’ll throw another Hod’s Comic out on Friday as thanks for all the votes at the new Buzzcomix website.  And as an added bonus, here’s a comic my six year old daughter drew (her first time working in Photoshop).  And yes, she knows what a d20 roll is… I make sure my kids learn the important stuff early on.  ^_^

–Jeff

It just wouldn’t be Ragnarok without casualties.

…

Wait, I selected EVERY country.  So now’s your chance.  Go give it a read and let us know what you thought.

A big machine and an even bigger power source… sounds like a fun combination to me.

Creating is only half the battle.

I’m pretty sure I mentioned we were pretty new (and naieve) to the whole webcomics scene at the time.  We had some other site hosting us (one owned by a director Seth and I were both fans of), so we didn’t concern ourselves too much with things like navigation and archives and building traffic.  We probably should have done more promotion or more to make our comic more accessible, but we were focused on creating and having fun.

Conflict brings the eyeballs.

As we picked up momentum with our characters, we started throwing out some short story arcs that lasted 3-4 episodes, and response was good to them.  So we wanted to go into a much longer storyline… and that’s when I realized that my original antagonist, though mischievous, was really a “hero”, so I needed to find someone to really challenge these kids.  There are a number of villainous characters to work with in Norse mythology like the various jotun (the shape-shifting Thiazi, the nine-headed Thrivaldi, the fiery Surtr), the underrealm races (dwarves/dark elves), the offspring of Loki, and a number of others.

As I rolled all these characters around in my head, I decided to look back through our archives and as I skimmed over episode #5, I paused for a moment because I could swear the eye had a “you’re so gonna pay for this” look to it as it dropped into the well.  It made me think of an eye soaking up all that knowledge as it worked to gain its freedom from the depths of the well of wisdom.

And it just took off from there into our first lengthy storyline.  I thought it would be neat to reverse roles for this… to follow the origin story of the villain instead of the hero, so we ran with that.  It also gave us a chance to show off some other places in the nine realms of Norse mythology.  And the response was good to it, so he became our young godlings’ main adversary.  Someone to be able to prompt them into action.

And new story lines flooded our imaginations.  It’s funny how a good villain will do that.

We’re getting closer to the final showdown… but what is Hod really up to?

It started as a pitch…

A long time ago, in a comic kingdom far, far away, a call went out to creators young and old.  A spark of a dream to create for this comic book juggernaut.  And I answered that call.  At the time, I had done a number of comedic short story pieces for a comic book anthology, and I was already starting to feel the labeling effect (”Oh, he’s a comedy writer, what would he know about horror or realistic comics?”).  So, I set out to do some serious pitches.

All rejected.

So, I gave in and put together a comedy pitch.  I was at the park one day with my kids and noticed a group of elementary school kids horsing around when I started wondering what that same situation would be like if they were all gods of mythology (since I was a big fan of mythology growing up).  I quickly put together a pitch with the Norse gods as elementary school kids and sent it out.

No response.  Not even a rejection.  So, I tossed it aside and pressed on with other projects.

A fantasy land…

One of those was a fantasy comic… a “tongue-in-cheek jab at Dungeons & Dragons conventions” with this artist I had met at a comic convention in Chicago (where I had done a portfolio review for him).  We’ll call him Seth.  While we were working on this pitch for this comic, we talked about how it might be easier to pitch if we build up at least a small audience for our work.  We figured the web would be the easiest (and cheapest) way of doing that, so we discussed some ideas.

I went against doing Arazel & Xarenia (yes, the characters that have been guest appearing in Brat-halla) because I wanted to make a print comic of them and didn’t figure people would buy something they could read online for free (I was very naieve in the ways of the webcomic when this took place nearly 5 years ago).  But we wanted it to be in the fantasy genre, so the readership could easily translate from the web to the print endeavor.

The comic needed some stripping…

Among those original ideas, I pulled out that pitch for that Norse comic.  As a friend and successful comic book writer once told me (paraphrased), “if you have a good story, you should be able to pull out everything that ties it to one specific universe and it should still be able to stand on its own.”  So, I took the characters back to their mythological roots and reworked it as a Spy-vs-Spy type of webcomic with Thor versus Loki.

As I was working on scripts, I started looking around for a place online where we could host it.  I checked with a friend who was doing a fun little webcomic at fairly popular site.  And his comic was coming to an end, so there was an opening there.  We pitched the (still evolving) Brat-halla webcomic idea, and the editor there loved it.

But that was only the beginning…  (to be continued)

That’s just what those two need… more power.

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And for those that missed the announcement earlier this week, Seth and I will be dropping down to just Wednesday updates for a month (to make sure quality doesn’t suffer while dealing with hectic schedules with the day jobs), so there won’t be a Friday update this week.  We’ll be back to our normal twice-weekly schedule on August 15th.  Look for some fun extras to show up in the next couple weeks to help the time pass.

We decided to switch back to a once weekly schedule for just a month to get things back on track.  So, until August 15th, we’ll only be doing Wednesday updates here at Brat-halla, and then we’ll be back to twice weekly.  I’ll be using the time to get ahead on scripts and get some more stuff done with the website–some programming for a couple fun extras and some more blogging around here.

–Jeff