Far Out There

Dang it dang it dang it dang it and one further dang it just to remove any ambiguity on the matter. This is another one of those instances where I started work on one page, realized something stupid, then had to push it all to the side and start over with something entirely different. In this case, the page I STARTED working on jumped straight to Mariska touching base with Ichabod, but it hit me that the previous page, while reintroducing Mariska, didn’t actually feature her two younger sidekicks. They’re gonna factor into future events as much as she will, so they need a little refresher “Hey, we exist!” moment too… which I couldn’t figure out how to cram into the planned page. So now the page that WOULD have been up today is next Tuesday’s page, and I had to whip this one up from scratch… and fell asleep in the middle of it because I started over LAAAAATE.

The really frustrating thing about this is that I don’t even have a new TWC Voting Incentive to show you guys. I’ve pretty much exhausted my preview art (heck, at least one of the things being previewed is already happening right now!), so I was gonna take a brief break before the next set of Incentives start. And by “break” I mean “draw a bunch of Conventional Wisdom stuff for a local con this weekend.” But yeah, if I wasn’t gonna have any extra stuff to show, I would have REALLY liked to at least stick the landing on the main comic. Oh well.

(Historical Notes: Past Me isn’t exactly LYING, but there’s more to this page’s existence than just re-establishing Marshall and May’s presence.  Once again, there’s also the fact that Past Me was scared of diving into the upcoming arc and was seizing on ANY excuse to stretch things out until I felt more up to it.  Boy did THAT ever turn out differently than expected.  What’s more, the previous page had gone over so well that part of me though “Oh crap, something popular!  I need to do more of that exact thing, right away!”  You’d think that after more than ten years of doing this comic I’d have known better… and if I had more of an arc outline to stick to, I probably would have.  Alas, I was still writing from page to page at this point, and my desperation to figure out what was coming next felt me vulnerable to temptation.  And really, that just brings me back around to the part Past Me actually DID talk about, because if I’d had outlines and rough drafts of all these pages right in front of me, I’d have noticed the absence of M & M BEFORE it was too late to just add them into the previous page.)