Big Fat Whale is a weekly comic strip by Brian McFadden. It currently appears in the Boston Phoenix, Portland Phoenix, Gayzette Denver, and a couple other awesome publications and websites. It has appeared in the Cleveland Scene & Free Times, Metro Spirit, Chico Beat, Buffalo Beast, and many other national and international publications.
Big Fat Whale began as a GeoCities website in October 2001. In July 2002, the cartoon moved to this little slice of the web. Later that year, it appeared regularly in Editorial Humor, a Boston monthly.
In November 2003, The Lonely Captain's Erotic Scrimshaw, the first BFW comic booklet, was made. A second mini comic, Sea Anomie, came out in the fall of 2005. In 2006, Big Fat Whale was featured in the third installment of Ted Rall's Attitude series of books and helped found Cartoonists With Attitude.
The first Big Fat Whale book, Fun Stuff for Dum-Dums, was released in mid 2009.
In addition to Big Fat Whale, Brian is also currently writing and drawing The Strip, for The New York Times' Sunday Review.
Brian McFadden was born and raised in Brockton, Massachusetts. After following the advice of the world's worst guidance counselor, he went on to study mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where he began the comic strip to escape the drudgery of computer-aided design and materials selection charts.
An avid comedy nerd, Brian dabbles in comedy writing and performing sketch comedy in addition to drawing comics.
He's 32 and lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.