Brothers, Family Business, and Change

Like many small towns, quite a few of the businesses in Loonfoot Falls are family-owned. Which means, obviously, working with members of your own family.

Like the Englebrechts, with their plumbing (and related) businesses, or Stan and Xul Parks.

Assuming that the Parks brothers get their enterprise off the ground.

Stan Parks runs S. Parks Computers: but he's also done work for Baum Media Productions. Which is a sort of family businesses, too: and the Parks are related to the Baums.

Stan and Xul Parks got the rights to Baum Media Productions' character, Galaxy Cadet, to make a comic book. Okay: this isn't your typical small-town family business, but I told Stan that I'd write about their project.

Stan worked on the two most recent Galaxy Cadet films, so he's familiar with the character. As an animator. Stan's a pretty good programmer, as well as a computer technician.

His brother, Xul, is an artist of the Salvador Dali variety. Sort of.

So, how is this collaboration of programmer and artist going? So far, Stan tells me, they've discussed several stories. Some of which had plots which Stan could follow. And none of which had, they thought, were worth developing.

I sort of liked the one about mutant squirrels, though.

The Engelbrechts went through something like this, too, when one brother took over the family plumbing business the other branched off into welding equipment. Then the other brother's wife started an 'everything but catering' wedding and event supply business: plus propane.