Big Fat Whale is a weekly comic strip

Comic strip

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 drawn and written by Brian McFadden. It started on October 16, 2001, as a webcomic

Webcomic

Webcomics, online comics, or Internet comics are comics published on a website. While many are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers or often in self-published books....

, which the cartoonist described as "terrible, even by webcomic standards." Eventually, the strip improved, and the title-character was eventually dropped from the strip.

The strip began its print run in Boston's monthly publication Editorial Humor

Editorial Humor

Editorial Humor is a now-defunct Massachusetts newspaper that consisted mostly of political cartoons and editorial/opinion pieces. Founded by Dean Wallace, it ran from 1990 to the end of 2001....

in 2002. However, the publication went out of business and the strip stayed on the web for almost a year.

In February 2004, Big Fat Whale was picked up by Cleveland Free Times and later by The Boston Phoenix.

Big Fat Whale was included in Ted Rall's

Ted Rall

Ted Rall is an American columnist, syndicated editorial cartoonist, and author. His political cartoons often appear in a multi-panel comic-strip format and frequently blend comic-strip and editorial-cartoon conventions. The cartoons appear in approximately 100 newspapers around the United States...

 Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists.