What…the heck…IS this?
I’m glad you asked.  Brawl in the Family is a comic strip centering on Kirby and by extension, many famous Nintendo characters that have appeared in the Smash Bros games.  There are also cameos from other titles as well.

How did this horrific monstrosity ever come into existence?
Great question!  The strip began as a series of doodles during one of my many art history classes in college.  Eventually, they sort of merged with my notes in my disorganization.  To this day, I still think King Dedede built the Baldacchino.

Yick.  So why’d you have to slap it on the internet and subject the rest of the world to it?
I was bored one night and doodled up six comics, then put them online on a message board on IGN.  From there, people seemed to enjoy them, so I put them up at a few other locations, such as GameFAQs.  It was there that I found a host, and Chris was able to design the site for me, so here it is.

So there are several people to blame for this ordeal.
It began as a comic about the Kirby characters, but once I added the Smash Bros cast (and Kirby’s interaction with them), the scope of the strip expanded significantly.

How did you manage to mangle these classic designs to such an intense degree?
Brawl in the Family is drawn in Adobe Photoshop (99% of the time) on a Wacom Graphire drawing tablet.

Have you no shame?  These aren’t even your characters!
That’s a good point.  Here is the needed legal mumbo-jumbo for this strip:

Most of the characters in Brawl in the Family are parodies of characters that are the property of their respective copyright owners (mostly Nintendo Co. Ltd. and Masahiro Sakurai–keep up the great work, guys!).  This is a parody strip.  I did not create the original characters, merely these bizarre interpretations of them.

OK, enough.  Please bore me with some technical stuff.
Brawl in the Family is best viewed on a computer, specifically one that can display 1024×768 resolution or higher.  You can use pretty much any browser you want and that should work just fine.  This site was made using Wordpress and Comicpress.

Brawl in the Family is:

Matthew Taranto (TriforceBun) – Comic Artist/Writer, Site Graphics
Chris Seward (fiftyeighthens) – Creative Consultant, Tech Stuff, Legal Stuff

Feel free to contact us regarding just about anything at the following email address:
staff (at) brawlinthefamily (dot) com. (It’s written like that to avoid spam robots.)

Entertaining thousands of people is hard work! If you’d like to show your appreciation for Brawl in the Family in the form of a monetary donation, please use the following link. All proceeds go towards giving you more of the funny.

Thanks for all your support, and thanks for reading.

What follows is an account of our Haiti donation saga! Thanks to all who contributed!

Major Update: The Haiti Drive donations have been donated!

The grand total of $607 has been donated to CRS to be used expressly for Haiti relief!

Here’s the story, in brief. In late January, we started a ChipIn donation drive to raise money for the people affected by the earthquake in Haiti. We surpassed our initial goal of $500 quite quickly thanks to your generous donations! However, on our way to our new goal of $1000, the account was locked by Paypal – they said they needed some documentation from us to (basically) prove we’re collecting for the charity. Sounds simple, right? Wrong! It took us weeks of calling and emailing the charity and Paypal before we were able to get the right documents sent to the right people. It was pretty dang frustrating! Fortunately, things are in the clear now, and Matthew paid CRS the full amount using his credit card.

We’d like to apologize to everyone who donated for this delay in the donation procedure. We wish we’d been able to continue the donation drive as planned because we’re totally sure we could have reached $1000 by the end of the drive. In retrospect, we probably should have contacted the charity before starting the drive to see if we needed to do anything special to collect money without a hitch. But hindsight’s 20/20, eh?

Thank you to everyone who donated! Your donation has gone to a great cause and is helping people who are desperately in need.

________

(older) UPDATE: Paypal has put Matthew’s account on hold while requesting additional information about this donation drive. Any donations made on Jan. 28th or later have likely not gone through as a result. We will post updates in this space when we receive them. Unfortunately, the drive is on hold until then. If Paypal forces us to cancel the drive, all donations will be refunded and we will encourage everyone to donate via other means.

The nation of Haiti has been devastated by a massive earthquake. We’re donating our money to the relief effort, and we’d be honored to have you join us.

CONGRATULATIONS! We’ve met our initial goal – thank you all so much for helping us achieve this! Since we met our goal so quickly, OPERATION SUPER BITF CHARITY CHALLENGE is now in effect!

Our initial goal was to raise $500 by February 5th. We at Brawl in the Family put up the first $100, and we were blown away by the response – you helped us reach our goal in only a few days! That’s why we’ve raised our goal to a new OPERATION SUPER BITF CHARITY CHALLENGE level of $1000! Can you help us donate this staggering amount to the Haiti relief efforts? Just click the “ChipIn!” button above to donate!

Every penny donated will be given to the Catholic Relief Services organization, which is an outstanding relief organization that makes excellent use of charity dollars. You can read more about them on their website or at the Better Business Bureau. The goal of CRS is to get help to those who need it as efficiently as possible, and in this, we wish to support them.

We are using Matthew’s Paypal account to collect the donations. At the end of the drive, the full amount raised will be withdrawn and donated. Photographs of the check and the act of donating it will be posted here on BitF. The money will be donated through Matthew’s church, St. John’s, which is collecting donations for CRS.

Thank you for your support of our goal!

BitF’s Advertisement Philosophy

Project Wonderful, our ad provider, gives us the ability to personally approve each ad to ensure that the ads come from quality sites. We’ve taken serious advantage of this approval feature. We will be mainly following the below criteria when deciding whether to approve an ad:

1. Is the advertised site worth your time?
2. Is the advertised site generally appropriate for a wide audience? (Nothing that couldn’t be considered PG-13.)

With these policies in mind, you can expect that the quality of our advertisers will be high, so give ‘em a look! We are confident that Project Wonderful will enable the ads on our site to be a point of interest, something that our readers can benefit from. We don’t like bad ads, so we won’t be running them.

- Chris and Matthew