Far Out There

*sigh* Yeah, it happened again. Well, not really “again” since the delay this time was a LITTLE different. Rather than being a sudden, unexpected physical shutdown from lack of sleep, THIS was completely foreseeable exhaustion after spending all of Sunday running all over creation doing stuff. It’s a little hard to dive straight into drawing a comic when you just topped off a day of hunting down Japanese snack food by standing around in near-freezing temperatures surrounded by sheep for an hour… There is context for that sentence, but I’m not gonna provide it.

Still, I’m rather proud of this page, if only because THERE’S ACTUAL NEW CHARACTER DESIGNS! Not recycled from a Voting Incentive or anything! FINALLY! And I’m inordinately pleased with the references I was able to squeeze into our two favorite kind show starlets’ gimmicks, too. Maureen’s red triangle costume is inspired by the TERRIBLE yellow polka dot getup Dusty Rhodes wore when he was in the WWF, and as an added bonus, I was able to twist his “American Dream” nickname to suit Maureen’s manufactured communist revolutionary shtick as well! (and her costumes red! get it? Red? Commies?) Sandy, on the other hand, is basically in Finn Balor’s Demon King makeup, only it’s Gright, with those big white eyes where Balor’s giant fangs would be. It doesn’t work QUITE as well as I’d hoped… but that’s mostly just because the Demon is legitimately some of the coolest makeup I’ve ever seen, so of COURSE any changes are gonna dilute the effect. Still, it works better than it probably should, and I’m still proud on general principle that I could bend both these gimmicks to fit the world of the comic, rather than simply having two more characters cosplaying as something else.

Also, no disrespect intended to people who love hardcore wrestling… well, okay, maybe just a LITTLE, since the whole “all blood and breaking thing, no psychology or storytelling” thing has never worked for me. But really, this is more my observation that a lot of wrestling promotions seem to have That One Thing that they just don’t do well, and everyone tunes out for. I know for a long time WWE’s Women’s Division was the part nobody cared about, though thankfully it’s SEVERELY improved of late. I hear that now it’s the Cruiserweights everybody uses as their excuse for a bathroom break? Or maybe you have the misinformation of having a local fed that really likes midget wrestler gimmick matches. Don’t laugh, I’ve seen it happen. Well, seen it briefly as I was getting up to go make a sandwich. Anyway, in Far Out There Championship Wrestling, the lackluster part happens to be the hardcore matches.

…and they’ve got a point in that last panel. Can you imagine if all this was an actual thing, and somebody tried to actually do a hardcore match under THIS COMIC’S content restrictions? Trying to do bloody barbed-wire florescent light exploding ring deathmatches in a comic where people are barely even allowed to use real swear words? Far Out There Wrestling would make CHIKARA look like ECW.

One last thing: since the schedule went and got all lopsided again, there’s the very real possibility that you’ll be reading this sometime Tuesday, and that there’ll be a new Voting Incentive already up by then. There isn’t a new one as I write this, but I’m writing this a mere 6 hours before Monday ends, so… I dunno. There’ll be a new Incentive up SOMETIME tomorrow, probably before the actual Tuesday page goes up, so I guess just go ahead and check if it seem late enough. (I know, I’m sorry about all this)

(Historical Notes: If these comics had been done today, then Far Out There Championship Wrestling would have one token boys match that nobody cares about than THAT would be the AEW reference.  On a non-wrestling note, I think I actually like the Gright makeup BETTER now than I did at the time.  I really want to find an excuse to reuse this design in another comic one day.)