I’ll likely be working up the final strip or two over this weekend, but there’s enough interest in my decision to close the book on Brick House to merit an early blog posting or two. This first post is a retrospective on the Brick House – a bit of its history and how things progressed behind the scenes.
I started the comic over seven years ago, back in September of 2006. I didn’t really have any idea what I was doing. My site was already pretty popular thanks to the Mini-mizers and LEGO creations, and I wanted to try something new. There weren’t many big brick-built comics out there, and I thought maybe I could carve a niche for myself. I mean, why not?
I was inspired by the comics I grew up with – Bloom County for its amazing writing and lack of fourth wall. For Better or For Worse for the slice-of-life characters. Calvin and Hobbes taught me that a comic could be smart and meaningful and still funny. I was also inspired by the ones that didn’t impress me. I remember being very down on Ziggy, for example; surely I could write something funnier than that.
I was also inspired by my contemporaries – Legostar Galactica’s polished format, great MOCs and commitment to story gave me a goalpost to aim for. Irregular Webcomic fit the smart-and-funny angle, and its readership was something for me to envy. I really liked the story structure and layout of Order of the Stick. And while not LEGO based, XKCD was (and remains) my personal gold-standard for what a web-comic could be.
I’ve always been a big fan of pop culture, so my first idea was to parody the “Real World” style quasi-reality shows that MTV was producing. I planned to fill a house – a Brick House – with LEGO versions of movie and TV characters, including seventeen versions of Kevin Bacon (each based on a different movie role of his). I built the house for them to live in, and started trying to write up some sort of pilot episode.
I still wonder how that idea might have worked out. But, in the end, I decided I wanted to tell my own stories and not rely on other people’s creations and characters to populate my world. I knew I’d end up using pop-culture characters at some point, but I wanted them on the periphery as much as possible. So I started again, creating a cast that I could call my own.
I’m pretty sure Whiskey was the first to really gel. I wanted to put a “WTF” joke into the strip at the core, but I couldn’t use “Whiskey T. Foxtrot” because it felt like I was creating a false link to Amend’s Foxtrot comic. So he became “Whiskey Tango.”
Scotch was named to continue the boozy naming convention. I don’t remember why I decided he should be a frog. I think that was probably a Calvin and Hobbes trope – a boy and his frog instead of a boy and his tiger. Scotch was intended to provide an outsider’s perspective on things, a character trait that never really manifested as much as I thought it might.
Luka was named and created purely for the Suzanne Vega reference. I’m sure there’s a reason Donut got his name, but I don’t remember that either.
My initial plotting was focused around the Cola Wars. I wanted that to be the background story arc that carried Whiskey and Scotch through their other adventures. I had also worked out the one-step-back story arc of Scotch’s history as the root cause of everything. I didn’t have a lot of individual strips planned; my storytelling style has always been pretty improvisational in nature, and I knew that plotting to that level would just be wasted as the story moved itself in new directions.
“World Building” is a pretty apt turn of phrase for LEGO-based comics. After a few days I had enough set dressing to start putting actual comics together. I was using Paint Shop Pro at the time, a software package I had learned to use at my day job. It was free, and that price point worked well for me.
Those early strips were very ambitious, and I think they’ve held up very well. There was no story too big, no MOC that I couldn’t put together. I had time, energy, and something new to do.
And that early NRE (new relationship energy) lasted for a good long while. The cast of characters expanded rapidly, the story grew ever more complex, and slowly my readership started to grow.
Looking back, I was making some mistakes that would lead to the strip’s eventual crash and burn. I kept introducing new characters and plots left and right. While this made my world more real and interesting to me, it also meant that soon there was no way I could keep everyone and everything in focus. I started out telling Scotch’s story, and I ended up writing for a “core” cast that would make 1995’s X-Men roster feel inadequate.
And that, I think, is the core reason I was never able to make this comic a popular success. The comic didn’t fit a “joke of the day” format that could be easily passed around – you had to know what had happened in the hundreds of previous strips for context. New readers just didn’t have the motivation (or time) to do that sort of archive binge. As a result, the fans I did have were very loyal and devoted – but it wasn’t a rapidly expanding pool. I think at its peak Brick House had a readership of 2500 or so. That’s pretty respectable, but not nearly what I thought I could do when I started this.
Meanwhile, I continued to have responsibilities outside of the Brick House. I had an increasingly stressful day job, family health issues, and a far too complex personal life. By 2010 I was in a pretty rough place, and things were continuing to go downhill. This was reflected in the strip in subtle and obvious ways. The jokes got darker; the plot was either ham-handedly forced or abandoned completely. The lush backgrounds and set pieces vanished as I relied more and more on the stuff I had built early on.
I think you can see it most clearly with the way Whiskey’s relationship to the Doyle-avatar developed. Whiskey started to speak in the frustrated voice I imagined my readers to have – always disappointed with the unfulfilled potential of the comic and, by extension, with me. Whiskey would berate me: “Things could be better, and they should be better and why aren’t they better?”
I never had a good answer for him.
But I kept trying with the Brick House. I took a page from mainstream comics and tried rebooting my universe, tried to refocus the story on neglected characters and story arcs. I changed the strip’s format, tried mini-hiatuses, slowed the frequency down to a few times a week. I took things in new directions, throwing things at the fourth wall and hoping something, anything, would stick.
But things kept going downhill, both in the comic and in real life.
By the start of 2011 my “joke” end-of-the-strip arcs were becoming more and more frequent attempts to let myself get off this ride. But I’d always be pulled back in. I was disappointing my readers. I was disappointing myself. If I just tried harder I could bring in the new readers. If I just tried harder I could bring this sinking ship back to shore.
It wasn’t meant to be.
In Part 2 I’ll talk more about the past couple of years, and the final decision to let the Brick House go. In Part 3 I’ll talk about the envisioned fates of at least some of my cast of bajillions. If there’s something/someone in particular you’re curious about leave a comment to this post and I’ll try and answer it in Part 3.
Thanks for reading.
Not a question about a specific character, but a personal request: can you update the archive? It’s been missing the more recent strips for years.
Although that said, I do have a couple of questions:
What exactly *was* Butter Scotch?
Was there ever any sort of plan for the “Prologue Protagonists'” missing father?
Hello, I’ve been a long time reader, few time commenter. I am quite sad to see the comic go, but I understand you have your reasons, Chris. I hope you have a bright future, and I hope to see more Lego ingenius from you in the future.
On a side note, I do have a small list of questions for you concerning the storyline… I understand if you do not have time to answer them all.
1). What happened to Luka, Donut, Frobot, and the others after Grinchley was you know… given the axe?
2). Why did you erm… decide to use magical dog pee for the story?
3). I don’t exactly quite understand how Donut regenerated and met his future self or something around strips 700-800? In my understanding, the future Donut came to save the past Donut by encasing his head in that dome, and then the past Donut was captured, and then future him came and crushed him with a car, causing him to regenerate into the current Donut… sorry if that makes no sense.
A random thought, I think the Bucket deserves his own spinoff series.
Well, goodbye Chris, and good luck on your future endeavors. Merry (belated) Christmas.
What happened to the guy with the skin condition that made him look like a pineapple ? Also what happened to Luka, Donut, and El Stud back at the Brick House? We haven’t seen them in like 3 years! (Pineapple guy was last seen in a gust strip during a hautis a year or two ago.)
Chris, I completely understand your decision to let go of TBH. Family and/or health issues are a very serious matter and jobs can take the worst out of you. I can not nearly compare my situation to yours, given that I’ve never had the discipline to make a strip every week, but I’ve been there and my spare-time-work suffered from it as well.
That being said, I, and many others with me (even though they do have some curious ways of telling you sometimes), will miss the comic. I remember one night, some five, maybe six years ago, when I first stumbled on your work through some Irregular Webcomic link. I had a buttload of homework to do, but instead I read through the whole damn archive in one run. It’s been the best laugh I’d had in ages. Of course I had to stick around for the many, many strips that would come after. Yes, you have introduced a bajillion plots and characters, and yes, some may have deserved more spotlight than they eventually got, but I always thought the Eric Cartman-style way in which Whiskey would suddenly lose interest in a storyline and leave it to rot was kind of the TBH charm. There are so many ways in which this could have been done wrong, but you somehow always knew when to sneak some old plotlines back in and (more importantly) when to draw the line and resolve some of them for a change.
I must admit, I haven’t noticed Whiskey’s role as “The Voice of the Reader”, mostly because he’s been complaining about where you took him since day 1, but also because I never really felt this way about the comic. Not all your strips were golden and, okay, there has been some noticable decline in the comic over the past years (even though there still’ve been some good laughs even in the last few storylines), but with an output as huge as yours, such is only natural.
Christopher Doyle, I salute you for all the good effort you put into TBH, and I really hope you’ll find your way back to webcomics some day. It would be a waste of a heck of a storyteller if you just turned your back on it forever. Heck, I’d pay triple to see a Lego Movie with you as the screenwriter!
Thanks for the write up and the years of entertainment. I’ve enjoyed it and when I found the comic I did go all the way back to the beginning to start reading.
Best wishes in your future endeavors. I hope you’ve settled in and enjoy your new surroundings.
So, I was reading this again (as a cautionary tale for my own planned webcomic), and another question occurred to me – one that I actually wondered about from time to time well before TBH actually ended: why didn’t you end the strip with the “King Me” arc and the 2009 Advent? Between them, those two storylines came *very* close to wrapping up all of the standing plot points; most of the ones that didn’t were things like the Cola Wars storyline that hadn’t been mentioned in a long time. It seemed like a good potential stopping point, and it sounds like it was around the start of time you were starting to get frustrated with the strip, so why did you keep going? Was there any particular reason, or had ending TBH just not occurred to you all yet?