Kool Aid Gets Fired follows the misadventures of the Kool Aid Man, after he is fired from his job of 55 years, promoting the kool-aid soft drink. However, years of leading a sheltered life as a corporate spokesperson has left our hero without skills to make it in the bigger world.

Underneath, Kool Aid Gets Fired pokes at large corporations that only look at doing business, not people, and how companies often have more rights then people do.

Kool Aid Gets Fired started out with a simple drawing of the Kool Aid man having a small exestential crisis moment of questioning who he is. From there I wondered what his life would be like if he had to live like a regular person, how would people react to him. Would they think that he was the person they saw in the TV commercials? How would they act around someone who’s been the center of several scandles recently? And how would Kool Aid handle having to deal with the every day issues most of us deal with?

KAGF was written and drawn under the dead line of having it ready for the MoCCA festival. There were parts that I had to leave out, to make it in time. One choice about the comic that I think was particularly effective was the choice to make only the corporate mascots the only ones to have color.

Here are some early sketches and color samples I did.

Below are pages from KAGF. Currently I’ve run out of copies to sell, but I’m in the process of getting the book reprinted. Since people have asked for more Kool Aid, I’ve decided to include an additional story that will be about 10-12 pages, taking the total to about 40 pages. Send me an email (timpiotr @ gmail dot com)  about Kool Aid, and I will keep you updated about the reprint, or just check back here. Until then, enjoy these pages.

Below is an animation I did of Kool Aid, as a lesson while learning Flash.

One Response to “Kool Aid Gets Fired”

1. Laura Kaczmarek says:

   October 26, 2009 at 8:23 pm

   Love the animation, Tim!