page 934 – informative television
Man, Far Out There is fun to do. More and more, this comic is where I go to have fun after the Day Job that is Conventional Wisdom (not that I don’t LIKE doing CW, but it’s not the same). I got the first batch of Animazment comics finished and posted this weekend, so I went into this page kinda sorta really tired, but MAN was it worth it.
Really, I love any chance to play around with the insane pop culture looming in the background of Far Out There, ESPECIALLY after doing nothing but main character dialog for so long. While some of the stuff here is brand new (Ghost Brain: he’s the future’s most respected interviewer AND a terrifying specter of inescapable death!), most of these characters have either been glimpsed before, or at least been MENTIONED but only just not got a face to go with the name.
Skyscraper Girls were especially nice to finally draw, since now I have an option for Rock Star Jokes other than just reusing Vashti over and over. I’d speculated back in one of their mentions that, in confusing band name tradition, they’re probably an all-male group… though since I went and drew them with shack rocker hair, it’s not really that obvious. Also, the speech bubbles kind of help obscure the fact that I accidentally drew their instruments a lot bigger than they should be, making the band members look kinda tiny. Between that and my default way of drawing faces, it gives the impression that Skyscraper Girls is a band made up entirely of twelve year olds… and it’s been established that they’re one of Layla’s favorite bands… DANG IT, I honestly didn’t even mean to DO it this time! They Layla Likes Little Boys jokes have taken on a life of their own!
So, because of the speech bubbles obscuring things, today’s Voting Incentive is some rough draft art to give you a better glimpse of things… and TOTALLY NOT me cutting corners because I was too tired to do anything more elaborate. Nope, not at all.
(Historical Notes: The comment section really got invested in theorizing that Skyscraper Girls are actually a holographic band, to the point that Hatsune Miku even started a SmackJeeves account in order to join the conversation! Also, you an see this was the point where I also started experimenting with the automatic speech bubbles instead of drawing them by hand. I never really got the hang of the thing where MangaStudio was concerned, but now that I’ve upgraded to ClipStudio, it’s actually become more of my go-to thing.)
Several pages back, when Tax suddenly urged Stilez to move to a different TV (apparently to shield her from a news story about to come on that would upset her), I wondered if there was something preventing her from just changing the channel (from something simple like lost/broken remotes that the captain was too stingy to replace, to something weird like bargain TVs that are pre-tuned to certain channels and can’t be changed). However, here we see Vengeance changing the channel (and even the volume).
On the other hand, this looks like it might be Vengeance’s personal quarters rather than the common area that the others were watching TV in before, and since most of the time he doesn’t have arms, I’m not sure how he’s operating the remote. Maybe he’s generating the necessary infrared signal from his red eye?
Oh, it’s the public TV room, otherwise the door wouldn’t be open. I think you’re on to something with him changing the channel, though.
As for Tax, I think she’s used to watching TV pn store displays or in places she’s not supposed to be in. It may not occur to her that she CAN change the channel herself.
By the time Tax wants to change the channel, 99.99% of the TVs she’s ever been around have been destroyed already, either directly or as a result of secondary explosion damage. This is probably true of many things, not just TVs. Though I suppose she might have watched TV before she became Stilez’s sidekick.
In either case, it would seem unlikely that physical button pushing would be needed in the distant future anyway, brain wave triggering or eye movement or whatever would change the channels. Any good TV worth its circuits should be able to tell when it’s boring you and change the channel on its own anyway!