Far Out There

Yeeeeaaaaaah, to the surprise of no one who actually reads this comic, we won’t be seeing that much actual WRESTLING in this wrestling series as we will people TALKING about wrestling. Hey, action sequences are HARD, man! And I still gotta do, like, twenty-two more pages of this stuff!

But seriously, situations like this are actually one of the reasons I insist on doing crazy, out-of-continuity events like these: it’s a chance to better flesh out the characters. See, all the events happening here may be out of continuity, but nobody’s actually acting out of character. Even if none of this stuff “really” happened, the cast is still reacting to it all the way they would if it DID happen in-continuity. So, even though nothing about the plot is being advanced, you the reader will still walk away from all this with a greater understanding of the characters. I mean, the Heroes Club kids haven’t even had their NAMES revealed in the main comic yet, but we’ve already seen more of what they’re like as characters here. And I’ve wanted to introduce the idea that Kevin and Dr. Vanderslice hang out together for AGES (what with the whole “Hector Family helping out mad scientists who accidentally blow up their homes” thing) but could never find an excuse to work it into a comic. This is good enough, though! This totally counts!

Anyway, nerdy reference time: Jenna’s gear is basically that of The Lighting Kid, aka X-Pac (and, like, a billion other things). As for Stilez… well, “The Infinite Renegade” is obviously an Ultimate Warrior reference, but it’s also a waaaay more obtuse reference to his WCW knock-off The Renegade. It’s not very obvious thanks to her pose here (though that one Voting Incentive from a while back is a lot clearer) but Stilez’s facepaint is actually a very stylized “S”, hearkening back to how The Renegade’s Totally-Not-Based-On-The-Ultimate-Warrior-What-Would-Make-You-Think-That paint was basically an “R” around one eye. See, this is how you know it was a funny joke, because I spent a whole paragraph explaining it!

(Historical Notes: I gotta say, it’s fairly disorienting to look back at these comics and realize that the jokes are completely bereft of any reference to AEW or even NWA.  There’s not even any Being The Elite in-jokes!  Man, 2017 sure was a weird time…)