Far Out There

(Historical Notes: Okay, no capture of the original page’s commentary that I can finds, though with the high concentration of stand-alone one-panel comics around this point, I can imagine it probably consisted of a lot of groaning over doing the Halloween page.  And you know what? In the absence pf anything else to say, now’s as good a time as any to get into how much I was stalling for time at this point.  Because make no mistake, that’s exactly what I was doing.  Not just in the sense that I was pushing back more complicated pages that I didn’t have the energy for, though that was certainly happening too.  No, I mean I was deliberately keeping the entire Far Out There going in circles around this point because I was afraid of the next arc.  Obviously, the presence of both Stilez & Tax as well as the Short Pants Squad were intended from the start to resolve at the same time.  The arc about everyone finally reaching the Mob Moon of Threiad was convinced from the start as a wild, crazy, over-the-top mess of lunacy that would out-class even the Mad Scientist Convention for sheer wackiness… and I was TERRIFIED of it.  I still had some MASSIVE plot points not even remotely worked out, and if I couldn’t even muster the energy to write a page about some characters sitting on a couch half the time, trying to juggle multiple action sequences just sounded impossible.  So, more and more, I found myself willing to just stretch the current comics out and throw in more filler in order to push the next arc back.  Ostensibly, I was trying to buy more time to work out the plot outline of the next arc, but I still didn’t have the creative energy to actually DO that, and the defeatist grind of cranking out pages I wasn’t terribly proud of actually made it HARDER to get any planning done.  The funniest thing about it all, of course, is that even when I’m NOT deliberately stalling, I still take forever to get a plot going.  Even if I’d made a serious effort to “speed things up,” I still doubt I’d have actually started the main arc before SmackJeeves went sour, so we’d still have gone on hiatus before anything major happened in that direction.  Oh, and before anybody asks, the hiatus was a MASSIVE help in this department, and now I actually DO have enough of the next arc plotted out to actually be excited about working towards it again.  You know, eventually, if I can ever finish re-posting these old comics…)