Far Out There

Christmas lights at night are pretty much the DEFINITIVE holiday image for me. I mean, when you grow up in The South, anything snow related is pretty much foreign, and pop culture provides few alternatives. Still, some of my favorite Christmas memories in some way involve the whole family driving around looking at lights. Good times, man.

Sadly, this is another page that didn’t really turn out as planed. For one thing, the character art here is OLD – as in Back When I Was Still Trying To Work Out The Cast’s Winter Costumes old – so it looks kind of funky to me. Also, this is ANOTHER page where I struggled to find a coloring/lighting trick that I hadn’t already used in excess this week. The colored line art is all I could think of, but I don’t think it fits with the photo well. Speaking of which, the only reason I used an actual photo for the house is, well, lit up houses are HARD TO DRAW. Like, even harder than REGULAR houses, and those bust my butt as it is!

(Historical Notes: I started to make a joke about how, after this failed experiment, I neeeeeeeever used real photographs in my comics again… but actually, it’s not much of a joke.  I honestly DIDN’T start doing that on a regular basis for YEARS after this, and even then it was way more prevalent in Conventional Wisdom before Far Out There. But yeah, this one is pretty underwhelming, and the uneven colors on the characters don’t help much at all.)