Far Out There’s Alternate Universe comic?

While working on the April Fools comic for 2022, I found myself looking back over the previous joke pages, and was reminded once again of how much I just LOVE the 2021 page. For those of you too busy/lazy to click on the link and read the whole comic for yourself, the 2021 April Fools was an extended “preview” of a new alternate universe Far Out There story, with the same characters but in an entirely new setting. Basically a pile of standard anime/manga school comedy tropes but in a SciFi setting, this comic would have seen Layla as the heir of a giant technology empire (with BOTH parents still alive, BTW) and also the student body president of an extremely prestigious private school, where virtually every other young Far Out There character is also a student. When some mysterious saboteur starts wreaking havoc on the school campus, Layla brings in the family company’s private army to find him an take him down. Of course, that turns out to be Trigger, and of course Layla’s big sister instincts immediately kick in and drive her to protect him. That goes TRIPPLE when she discovers that Trigger was actually being held in one of her family’s secret labs, which Layla never even knew about. To make up for how badly he’s been treated, Layle basically adopts Trigger and enrolls him in the school. And thus, we set up three basic storylines: 1. Trigger tries to adapt to life in the outside world in general, and in this posh private school in particular. 2. Layla starts digging into just what OTHER shady projects the family business might have been up to without her knowing. 3. Layla has to balance her reputation as fearsome student body president with her newfound role as dotting big sister without compromising either. Oh, and everybody wears these cool student uniforms that are basically a combination of the classic seifuku and Star Trek uniforms. That’s important too.

And as I mentioned in the comments to that page, there’s a reason why that all sounds a lot more detailed than the April Fools gags usually do: it originally WASN’T one. Back when I was first coming up with the ideas for Far Out There, and not coincidentally when I was much younger and more energetic, I seriously thought about launching this SciFi school adventure as an actual for real Far Out There side-comic. In fact, I once had mad dreams of a different Far Out There comic updating ever single weekday. And yeah, between TWC Voting Incentives and various Patreon comics, I kinda DID end up launching multiple Far Out There series, the fact that I keep falling behind on those shows why this wasn’t a workable idea. Heck, even at the time I didn’t think Far Out There School Days would work as a one-page-at-a-time webcomic, and thought about releasing short multi-page chapters every month. After all, this thing would blatantly draw from manga tropes, so it might as well come out in manga chapters. Never mind that this actually would have required me to do MORE pagers per month that a one-page-per-week schedule would have. Like I said, this was back when I was young and stupid.

But still, I REALLY do like this idea. As much as reboots and remakes tick me off these days, there’s still a part of me that likes the sight of familiar characters in unfamiliar settings. I guess when you’re raised on a steady diet of kid/baby versions of older cartoons or seemingly mortal enemies racing each other in go karts or everybody just going to space for some reason, you just learn to like this kind of thing. And I really do think the established personalities of these characters would work pretty well in this different setting, and possibly even be opened up to some new possibilities. For example, while the April Fools comic only referenced Trigger as having is sabotage abilities as seen in regular Far Out There, my original concept for FOT School Days was for him to have some degree of unnatural speed and mobility as well. Like, running super fast and crawling up walls and other superpowers. Hey, if I’m gonna rip off a bunch of manga tropes, why not a few superhero ones as well? I didn't really think it out too far beyond the possibility of some Shonen action sequences as Layla’s army tried to capture Trigger, but there’s still gotta be some ways to do different stuff with Trigger’s character. One thing that immediately comes to mind is Layla tells Trigger not to use is superpower stuff around school, but he’s tempted to be good at the sports to be more popular. Also, the chance to see Layla actually interacting with her parents as characters instead of just referencing them would absolutely provide opportunities to do stuff that we haven’t seen in the regular comic, especially if it’s in the context of her rooting around the family’s shadier activities. This Layla, having thrown herself into the whole “being an upstanding student and school government leader” thing rather than running sketchy business, would have a very different reaction to that sort of thing than what we’re used to. Or maybe not, because even the “real” Layla is mostly only interested in money as a means of gaining power and being in control of stuff.

But the REAL fun stuff is what I could do with the secondary characters in this new setting. I’m always complaining about how I wish I could do more with the rest of this cast, so of course I’m tempted by the possibilities of playing around with them in different environments. For example, the April Fools comic depicts Avatar as the headmaster of Layla’s school… which, incidentally was a last minute addition. I’d actually forgotten to include her entirely, then realized mid-editing that her absence would ABSOLUTELY inspire complaints, so I had to come up with something pretty quick and copy/pasting a pre-existing picture of her as a bust seemed faster than another new drawing. But planed or not, I love that idea. In case you didn’t pick this up from Ichabod’s boss Sophia, I really like diminutive authority figures, and Avatar is nothing if not tiny. But even setting that aside, her well-documented intelligence and habit of being the one sane person surrounded by lunatics just seems a natural fit for a constantly exasperated boss in a school setting. The comment section for the April Fools posts is home to a pretty amazing theory about how the School Days version of Avatar could be the clone of the previous head of the school, who didn’t realize that having her clone made indestructible would also make her immune to growth, and I kinda like the sound of that. Another nice thing about an alternate universe spin-off is that I could afford to be more specific about origin details that I’m specifically leaving vague in the main comic.

Speaking of teachers, Ichabod’s not in the April Fools page at all, but I sort of imagined he’d be one of the teachers at the school. Probably the one loser teacher that nobody likes and Layla is always humiliating in public, Ichabod’s always good in that role. In fact, I like the idea of ALL the Nitpickers being teachers. Lord knows I had enough of them in reserve by this point, the big Nitpicker Christmas Party that introduced all those new characters was just a few months prior. Clare would be the gym teacher, Helmut would teach drama, Aunt Domino would be teaching something really dry and precise like math, the perpetually candy-loving Sophia would teach the health class, and it’d just get sillier from there. Maybe have Marshall as a child prodigy teacher who’s the same age as his students? Layla could have to step in and restore order in whatever class he teaches since he’s too mild mannered to actually reign the other kids in, preferably right after she’d been mean to Ichabod. That sounds like some comedy gold right there. Ironically, the one character I INTENTIONALLY drew in the April Fools comic for the purpose of being a teacher isn’t a Nitpicker at all, it’s Astrid. At the time, I think I just picked her because she’s really intimidating and seemed like she’d make a good foil for Layla, but upon further reflection there’s a LOT more potential there. After all, Astrid’s big reveal in the main comic is that she was secretly a cop the whole time, and I think the School Days setting could get a lot of use out of that as well. If Layla’s going to have an on-going plot line where she tries to uncover the shadier aspects of her family’s business, what if Astrid is doing the same thing and took on a job as a teacher just to keep an eye on Layla? I think there’s some potential there.

And that brings us to Tabitha. The April Fools comic shoes Layla confronting Tabitha in the panel talking about that quest to uncover said shady stuff, so it goes without saying that she’d be in this comic as an employee of the company. What’s NOT in the comic is an idea I had about Bridget and Alphonse. They’re in the April Fools comic right along with their Momma, but I had the idea that Tabitha would be introduced solo at first, especially nervous about Layla poking around the labs. At first, Layla would think this is because of some uber-shady project she’s not supposed to know about, but eventually she’d discover that Tabitha had made Bridget and Alphonse with company resources and was hiding them in her quarters for fear that her superiors would come take them away. Of course, Layla would do no such thing, providing another glimpse of the big softie lurking beneath her fierce exterior, and as a result Tabitha would be Layla’s new snooping around pal. Oh, and readers who remember that one TWC Voting Incentive will also recall that the April Fools comic implies that Tabitha also created Stilez in this continuity, which… yeah, I just threw that in as an easter egg. I have NO idea how that’d be worked in to the actual comic.

After all, the main point of a school comedy is the students, right? Trigger’s whole storyline would be trying to get used to being around other kids after spending all his time in a lab. We gotta have actual other kids, right? Well, I made a few… odd choices in which characters to slip into the April Fools page. For some reason, I prioritized characters we’ve only seen as pop cultural figures like Parker Renoir or Castral & Iconal, I guess because it’d been a while since I’d had a chance to slip any scenes of people watching TV into the regular comic. In an actual Far Out There School Days comic, though, there’s no way we couldn’t see Kevin or Megaweapon or Dr. Vanderslice kicking around the student body. Still, the panel showing Trigger “at school” does a good job of focusing on who the most important kid characters would be. Obviously, Avi and the rest of the Short Pants Squad would be the semi-antagonists. I dunno if I’d go so far as to depict them as full-on bullies, but they’d definitely be at the heart of any awkward situations that make Trigger feel like he doesn’t belong in his new surroundings. On the other hand, Trigger would also have some admirers in the form of Jenna and May and That Girl With The Hat And Glasses Who Took Over May’s Spot As The Mysterious New Character. I imagined this scene of Layla summoning those three to her office, which terrifies the other girls since Layla’s so scary, only for Layla to awkwardly try to make friends with them because she doesn’t actually know what normal kids Trigger’s age DO. That could be cute.

But will we ever see any of it? …probably not. Given how much longer it takes me to finish anything as it is, the odds of me every successfully launching ANOTHER Far Out There project are slim to nil. At least, not if it’s something I’d draw myself. If I ever found myself in a position where partnering up with some other artists were feasible, and I’d just have to come up with story ideas that someone ELSE would draw, then maybe it’d be possible. As you can see, I’ve always got plenty of ideas floating around. It's a whole heck of a lot easier to talk about what COULD be than to actually do any of it. I dunno, I might do something like the recent Young Mariska & Ichabod Adventures where I just draw “cover images” or something to summarize plot lines without actually having to draw the whole thing out. That way, it’d be up to ya’ll reading them to fill in the blanks, and I only have to come up with a few evocative images without any of that pesky “story” or “character development” or “internal logic” that makes actual writing so tedious. Or I could just write more blog posts about it! There’s always that!