Far Out There

Great googly moogly, I think the only thing that DIDN’T happen to delay this page was a power outage… and there’s still a few minutes left to go before I click “Submit” for that very thing to happen. As you can see (if you’re reading this right after it goes up) I’m posting a half-finished draft because, well, THIS THING HAS ALREADY TAKEN A STUPIDLY LONG TIME TO GET DONE AND I NEEDED TO HURRY UP AND POST SOMETHING.

So what happened? Well, first of all, I’ve been trying to get that last batch of Animazement comics finished over at Conventional Wisdom, meaning that I didn’t even get started on Far Out There stuff until waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too late. Then I went and started doing today’s Voting Incentive first, which also ended up taking waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long (though the end result was TOTALLY worth it) and made things even more late. And by THEN, I was so tired that I couldn’t physically make it all the way through finishing the page without falling asleep for several hours. AND there’s the little matter of me having to throw an entire draft of this page out and completely re-write it from the ground up. That’s a little bit of a time sink there (ESPECIALLY when you’re literally falling asleep in your chair while you do it)

See, this page was sort of a last-minute addition from the get go. Mariska’s original motivation for calling Ichabod was just fear that her career would be over if anybody learned about the whole “misplacing several rich kids” thing. Except, the more I thought about it, that didn’t really work. It was pretty selfish, for one thing, but compared to the kind of cosmic calamities we hear Nitpickers casually shrug off all the time, THIS hardly seemed like a career ender. Thus, I decided there needed to be some kind of additional stakes for innocent bystanders that Mariska was trying to protect, making her seem less self-centered and more sympathetic. Better yet, this provided an opportunity for some cutaway gags actually SHOWING these innocent bystanders, meaning I could draw something other than two heads talking to each other for page after page. Unfortunately, the part of my brain that wanted to shake things up visually wasn’t communicating with the part that loves to write nonsense dialog about events we’re never meant to see. I wasted HOURS trying to come up with a page built around some Mariska flashbacks, but it just wasn’t working at all. Finally, and I’m talking well after noon here, I gave up and rewrote the whole page to be purely dialog-based, and even THEN I had to re-re-re-rewrite things multiple times before it finally came together. (And it’s still not ENTIRELY together, if you’re seeing the black and white version)

For all the headaches, though, I do like the end result. I like the suggestion that Ichabod’s well-documented cynicism (remember “Nothing has unleashed more pain and suffering on humanity than good men trying to do the right thing” anyone?) is an unintended byproduct of Mariska being the opposite, and shifting the focus from her over to his reactions really helps bring that out more. At least, telling myself that makes me feel better about it taking nearly a whole extra day to draw two heads talking to each other.

(Historical Notes: I am really, REALLY getting sick of sleep-deprived Past Me rambling on about stuff that doesn’t really matter.  That said, this page DOES do a good job establishing the basic relationship between Ichabod and Mariska better than just about anything else in this set of comics.)