Hi. Thanks for checking out my website!
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My name is Dan Brooks, and I live in Vancouver Canada. I lived in Japan for 15 years, where I worked as a translator at the Tokyo headquarters of a large trading company. I still work for the same company, only I do so remotely now from Canada.
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I started doing comics and animation about ten years ago, hoping to apply it to some e-learning programs we were developing at work. My boss was a fun guy who liked using quirky doodles and animations in his presentations.
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To do this stuff, I used a "Wacom Intuos III" drawing tablet and versions 4.0, 4.5, 5.0 (pictured) and 7.0 of "Toon Boom Studio." This is all pretty old stuff by now. The Wacom tablets are way more advanced (bought a later, more expensive model for my brother Joel's birthday, and he promptly re-gifted it to a friend) and the "Studio" software has since been renamed "Harmony Essentials," which I guess has even more cool effects.
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I found this software to have a pretty steep learning curve, but then, I'm not too technically minded. The Toon Boom support message boards were a big help.
The name of this site, "Odd Blendz," was chosen for two reasons: (1) I can put anything on it, no matter how strange, random, bad or inconsistent, and it will be appropriate; and (2) My comic is called "Odd Blendz" (for the same reason I guess). The name for the comic came from my brother's coffee business, which was called "Office Blendz." The idea was that he'd have a few tabs on his website, all ending in "Blendz." There would be tabs entitled "New Blendz" and "Popular Blendz," directing visitors to pages for new and customer-favourite coffees respectively, and one more entitled "Odd Blendz." That was to lead to a page with a daily comic, just for fun. My brother originally wanted all the comics to be about coffee, and the first two I did for him are below:
The first of these is actually not bad, but by day two, I was already reaching. Coming up with a new idea every day is tough enough, but being restricted to coffee jokes would have been impossible (for me anyway). I argued that the comic should just be about anything that comes to mind, an "odd blend" of humour, so to speak. Anyway, it's a moot point, as sadly the business didn't take off. I also did a couple of sample animations for his site, at least one of which probably wouldn't have sold much coffee:
If you have any questions or comments about my site or its content, please feel free to contact me. Once again, thanks very much for checking out "Odd Blendz!"