Far Out There

I wrestled with the idea of doing one big Gravity Falls reference this year, and I’m still not one hundred percent sold that it was the right move. Previous Halloween pages had a whole bunch of references, so even if you didn’t recognize SOME of the costumes, there’d be at least ONE you got. But here, if you aren’t already familiar with Gravity Falls, you’re kind of left out in the cold.

For the record, my ORIGINAL plan was to have everyone dressed up in costumes from different cartoons. Ichabod as Grunkle Stan was going to be the soul Gravity Falls reference, and everyone else was going to be from Futurama, Invader Zim, and the like. Problem was, the shows I wanted to reference had such a wide variety of art styles that I couldn’t figure out how to do costumes in MY style and have the source still be recognizable (my little doodle of Trigger as Spike from My Little Pony was funny, but no one would ever have got who it was supposed to be) So, I just went with Gravity Falls all the way and called it a night.

And, really, if you haven’t seen the show already, WHY? Gravity Falls is freakin’ AWESOME!

(Historical Notes: This remains the only Halloween page I’d dedicate to a single theme, because Past Me was right.  It really ISN’T a good idea to just assume everyone is going to get the reference simple because I did.  It’s one thing to not care about that on, say, a weekly Conventional Wisdom filler comic, where a different one will come along in just a few days.  But this?  There’s only one Halloween page per year, and treating it like this just feels wasteful.  I WILL say I’m both glad and amused that this silly little holiday page wound up landing in the middle what it did.  Talk about mood whiplash.)