Far Out There

COMIC STORYLINE CAN WAIT, HOW OFTEN DO YOU GET A CHANCE TO DRAW YOUR SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY SIXTH PAGE? This calls for Demon Girls and Pentagrights and Vengeance ghosts! (Not pictured is Ichabod objecting that connecting this kind of generic devil imagery with what may or may not even be the number mentioned in the Book of Revelation suggests a very shallow and incomplete understanding of apocalyptic scripture. You’ll thank me.) It’s silly, I know, but I’ve been waiting to do something crazy for this page pretty much all year…

…which makes it REALLY frustrating that the actual page ended up being so rushed. If you’ve been keeping an eye on the Far Out There Facebook page, you’ve already heard all this, but my scanner died on me the other night. Obviously, I’ve got a replacement now, but it meant spending the better part of yesterday getting it and actually making it WORK rather than drawing anything. Sooooooo, the comic ended up getting bashed out with WAY less polish than I would have liked. Case in point, all those generic bumps on the ground were supposed to be creepy skulls, but that would have taken, like, TIME. And just to add insult to injury, the Internet went out last night too, so even after all that scrambling, I couldn’t get the page online. Geez, it’s almost like the page that literally bears the mark of the dark one was CURSED or something…

Fun Fact: the top panel there is a leftover from a separate trashed page. I wanted to have a page of Avatar piecing together what Skye was planning despite Trigger’s frantic objections. We haven’t seen her do much lately, and most of what she HAS done was just reacting to something else Ichabod did, so I wanted to give her a moment of her own… except when I wrote it out, it ended up looking like a total rehash of that scene we just had between Trigger and Ichabod. That kind of defeated the point of the whole thing, so… HEY! Speaking of deleted scenes: New Voting Incentive!

(Historical Notes: I’m even less of a fan of this age now than I was back then.  I don’t like now off-center everything is, with the top panel weirdly too the right and everything on the bottom weirdly on the left.  Also, similar to the Disonar’s Hair Conundrum, I couldn’t clean up all those messy white pixels around the edges without making an even bigger mess of the background.  Ironically, this may be one of the few pages that genuinely looks BETTER on SmackJeeves right now, since all the compression on the image blurs some of that stuff out of existence.)