Kendall! is a twisted view of life in the fictional subdivision of Quigley, in Kendall (near Miami), Florida. Quigley lies just west of 167th Avenue, north of Sunset Drive. Nothing physically exists there...yet. :)

Storylines And Twisted Humor

Kendall! will eventually have rather convoluted and hilarious storylines, once I actually have time to spend on it.

Characters
Since Kendall! doesn't really have a single main character, these descriptions are just kind of in random order.

Christina: Official BOFH at Oakmont Internet Services. Christina was first introduced to computers at the age of 8 months, and has been learning how to make them do very strange things ever since... including making them WORK! Christina is 19 years old, and lives somewhere in Coral Gables, with her parrot, Andre. I have no idea how someone would make their hair look like that. :)

Fred: Working evenings as the web design person for an Internet service company isn't easy. His personal pet peeve is clients that want stuff done with Microsoft Frontpage extensions. He is 18 years old, and attends Quigley High School, quite possibly the strangest school on earth. Fred is a ham radio operator, and would rather be tickled to death by mutant ladybugs than use Morse Code. Fred lives somewhere near the west edge of Quigley with his parents and his cat, Zulu.

Julie: Once she joked about being from another dimension, and nobody really doubted it. Julie is 17 years old, and lives on the very edge of Quigley, with her parents, her younger sister, and an unknown number of animals. Julie attends Quigley High School, where she has slept through most of the 10th grade, yet is still passing with straight A's. She works on weekends at an aquarium store, and raises some bizarre and exotic fish at home. Her fascination with electronics has led her to be a ham radio operator, but, unlike Fred, she does not seem to be allergic to Morse.

I'll finish this soon.

Hardware And Software

My computer is an old Pentium 133, running.... you guessed it:

... Windows 95. My scanner is a Umax Astra 600P. It's a little on the slow side, but it works. :) My software is about as basic as it gets; Adobe Photodeluxe 1.1, and, for my coloring experiments, a circa 1991 version of PhotoStyler. I draw and color everything by hand, then scan it into PhotoDeluxe at 300 DPI, turn it right-side-up, and change the resolution to 72 DPI. This cuts the uncompressed working size down from about 21 megs to 1.2 or so. Then, I save to .jpg, or, recently, .gif format, and upload through Tripod's wacked out Homepage Studio thingy.

About The Artist...

Hello world.. I'm Tom Morris, but for the purposes of this comic strip and all related features, I call myself VXO. It's the kind of pseudonym that would sound too strange to me if someone called me that to my face, but I'm satisfied with using it. It's an acronym standing for Variable crystal (Xtal) Oscillator. I just thought it sounded really cool.

I'm 17 years old, living in the colloidal suburbs of Miami, Florida. I'm just on the outskirts of the suburban area considered as Kendall... although I guess one could call any unincorporated area of Miami-Dade County that. I live in a sprawling suburban house with my mom, dad, uncle, and typically obnoxious little brother. My mom once planned to have us move to an apartment, but gave up on the idea, thank goodness. Some random photos of my surroundings can be found here.

I can't really say how I got into drawing comics... I guess it started when I was in 5th grade, in one of the most violent, abusive, and oppressive little classes in the known universe... I needed some really good way to express myself that did not involve dealing with my peers or teachers, both of which were about equally dangerous... I started with really dumb stuff, no real story to it, let alone humor.. I was always better at writing funny stuff than drawing it. Nobody really wanted to see my work, so I became kind of secretive about what I was drawing... Later on, in 7th grade, I had several art teachers who had these distinct favorite students, whom they would give really good grades to, and they would give everyone else 5 F's for everything they turned in, and I became the first student in either of their classes to actually pass from the quality of my work. Wow.

My introduction to online comics: One day, while looking for a scsi card driver, I saw a little button thingy at the bottom of a web page for User Friendly, The Comic Strip. It was then that I realized I could be sharing my work with the world via the Internet... instead of stuffing it in the back of some notebook where nobody could see it. Unfortunately, I didn't really have time to draw much more. I was (and still am now) in an art class that requires about two hours of work every day, after which I cannot bring myself to look at my pencil and paper again. It kinda surprised me that I was able to get as far as (almost) setting up a page for Kendall!... Maybe I can surprise myself even more by keeping it going. -- EXIT --