Hey everyone! As you can see, it’s a very special comic today, as I’m paying homage to the recently ended Brawl in the Family. BitF, for those of you who don’t know, is a wonderful Nintendo-themed webcomic by Matthew Taranto. A few months ago, Matthew announced that it would be ending, and today, he closed out with One Final Song, one of his trademark musical comics.

Brawl in the Family is one of my favourite webcomics, and I’ll be very sad to see it go. For me, its selling points have always been Matthew’s unique art style— his ability to effortlessly convey whatever tone he wants with each comic— and his amazingly awesome and ambitious musical comics, every last one of which is worth checking out (every last one!). Needless to say, he set the bar pretty high for us other cartoonists!

I apologize if this strip will seem a little nonsensical to those unfamiliar with BitF. I made this simple three-panel gag to harken back to the early BitF strips, many of which followed this exact formula (although with Kirby instead of Matthew). Kirby sees something, Kirby eats something, Kirby turns into something. I liked the idea of Matt eating Smash Bros and turning it into his own comic strip— in a very real way, that’s exactly what he did. He made the world and characters of Smash Bros his own in a pretty awesome way. Seriously, check the strip out if you haven’t already.

In a way, I wish I’d had the time (or the talent) to make a more ambitious homage, and find a more complete way to merge the worlds of BitF and LoM. But I didn’t want to focus too much on my own characters, and it took a somewhat disturbing amount of time to put together what you see here. As it turns out, pixelating other people’s artwork isn’t easy after all! While the pixelation is more my own style, some other aspects of the comic (the blue border, the lack of a text balloon in panel 1), were meant to imitate Matthew’s style.

So, in conclusion: the comic title says it all. Farewell, Brawl in the Family, and thanks so much for 600 comics’ worth of awesomeness! Best of luck in your future endeavours!

-Jesse