Far Out There: So, wait, WHAT'S going on?

Okay, I think I’ve fallen into another one of those slumps where I’m even worse at communication than usual, so let’s have one big blast of info to try and keep everyone up to date. Earlier this month, I finally finished re-posting all of Far Out There’s old comics, and I’d HOPED to be able to dive straight into resuming some kind of regular schedule for new comics right after the comic’s 13th Birthday. Alas, that hasn’t happened, and I want to lay out all the reasons why. There’s still a LOT of website stuff left for me to finish setting up, and I don’t just mean the behind the scenes technical junk… though that IS still a problem. (Anyone out there know how to fix a broken RSS feed?) No, I’m talking about all the non-comic, or at least non-MAIN-comic, material that still needs to get up and running again. All this crap is why I won’t be going back to a twice-a-week schedule when new comics DO start, and at least one of them is why comics haven’t started at all yet. But what IS this vaguely defined “website stuff” I keep blaming the delays on? Well, in the interest of communication and transparency, here’s a quick rundown of everything currently on my To-Do List, in roughly the order I’m worrying about them.

CHARACTER PROFILES

Yes, it sounds like a minor thing, but I’ve forbidden myself from starting any kind of regular comic updates until the Character Profile pages are finished and online. And that’s because the whole time regular comic updates WERE happening, updates to the profile pages WEREN’T. Seriously, if you weren’t there then you don’t know, but the old Profile pages were in SHOCKINGLY bad shape by the time Smackjeeves went down. Multiple important characters weren’t listed at all, several of the ones who WERE had badly out of date information, and worst of all, only the very main characters had any pictures on their profiles. All the lesser, secondary characters only had names and blocks of text. This on a section that only really exists to help out readers who don’t REMEMBER a character’s name and want more information. What’s the point of a profile section which only somebody who already knows all of the characters can even use?

So that’s what I’m working on right now, drawing up new profile pictures for every single Far Out There character that even remotely matters. At last count, that was over SEVENTY pictures, though thankfully they’re not all the same size. The MAIN main characters are all getting a new, big, full-body, color pic to accompany a few paragraphs of biographical info and a short FAQ about them on their own dedicated page. (Well, I say that, but some characters are getting doubled up, like Bridget & Alphonse being on the same page as Tabitha) Then there’s the Other Characters, like Jenna or Stilez, who still get a full body profile, but it’s smaller and with only a single paragraph of info. Also, they all get lumped in together on one long page. Then there’s the OTHER Other Characters who are all those random side characters who basically showed up for one arc and now just cameo randomly in holiday pages or whatever. Their profile pics will thankfully just be headshots, but still in full color because half the time that’s the only thing that makes characters recognizable. Finally, the last page will be Even More “Characters,” which if the quotation marks don’t give it away, will be for all the pop cultural figures we only really ever see on TV screens and the like. Yes, Far Out There is the kind of comic where that warrants its own complete section.

I’d really hoped to be able to get this stuff done while I was in the midst of all the re-posting… but then I’d ALSO hoped to spruce up some stuff back in the SmackJeeves days, and look how that turned out. Those Other Characters sections had “pictures coming soon” on them for literal YEARS without me ever finding time to do anything about it. I really need to take this opportunity to focus entirely on finally getting the dang things DONE, and if I don’t take the chance to do it now, I probably never will. With a comic as big and sprawling as Far Out There, that’s just not acceptable.

VOTING INCENTIVES

Okay, that first one was the only one I’m explicitly holding back on starting regular updates over. Starting here, I’m expecting to juggle my time between doing one new comic a week, and then the rest of this stuff. So what’s up with the Top WebComic Voting Incentives? Am I ever going to wrap up that “Tabitha’s Grounded” storyline? Where are all the old Incentives? Well, the current plan is to set up something pretty similar to how stuff on SmackJeeves was set up. I’m looking to set up a sub-page with the same ComicPress layout to serve as the new Incentive Gallery. Something like FarOutThere.com/Incentives or whatever. I still need to experiment with the set-up, but I THINK I’ll be able to do the same thing I did with SmackJeeves where I’d load a new image to the site, set the page to not go live for a few weeks, but still link TWC to the new image itself. Ideally, then the old Incentives will go public on their own and I won’t have to remember to re-post things myself, because I definitely won’t remember. My hope is to relaunch new Incentives along with new regular comics, both going live at the same time.

As for the re-posting on OLD Incentives, my plan is to follow roughly the same pattern I have with Conventional Wisdom where I post new and old stuff simultaneously. I’ll re-post all the Tabitha’s Grounded pages first, adding new pages onto it weekly, then re-post big batches of old Incentives backdated so they’ll appear behind the new stuff. This will result in an awkward arrangement for a while there there’s a mysterious gap between the oldest old pages and the new ones, but hopefully I’ll be able to maintain a much faster reposting schedule here than any of the other stuff. I’ve already decided to forbid myself from doing ANY re-editing or cleaning up of the old Incentives to save time. You’ll see every typo and stray line and random artistic flub in their original glory. Also, since pretty much all of the original SmackJeeves commentary is lost forever, I’m not even gonna bother doing historical notes on this stuff. Since the re-editing and extra writing was half of the work, I’m hoping this means I’ll be able to finish getting all the Incentives & Patreon stuff up WAY faster than the main comics took. Oh, and before you ask, yes. I DO still have the commentary for the Patreon comics, so I will at least be copy/pasting that over along with the original pages themselves. Oh, and speaking of which…

PATREON STUFF

Dang it, what happened here? I was finally getting back into a regular groove of posting new stuff regularly, and suddenly it’s all chaos and silence again! Yeah, sorry about that. SmackJeeves finally shutting down kind of threw me into panic mode and disrupted whatever routines I’d managed to establish. The good news is that SHOULD clear up once the big giant “get all of this done at once” website stuff gives way to more regular comic work. In the meantime, what’s up with the Jenna comics and when are we finally going to see that new MadLib series? As I’ve mentioned before, the MadLib series is entirely written and penciled, and I’ve got at least a FEW of them inked. The current plan is to post those comics one at a time as they’re done, rather than all at once like I did in the past, since that’d just take even longer than it already is. The big question mark is juggling that and the Jenna comic. I’d had it in mind to get the Jenna comic up to a natural cliffhanger, then put it on hiatus while the MadLib comics came out. But I also expected to get a few more Jenna comics done over the past month or two, which recent craziness made impossible. As it stands, I honestly don’t know if I’m going to keep Jenna’s comic paused where it is and dive straight into the MadLibs, do a few more pages of Jenna’s comic first and THEN start the MadLibs, or alternate between doing one page of each until Jenna finally reaches that pause point and I can focus just on the MadLibs. I’m kind of waiting to figure that out once I finally get back to drawing REGULAR comics and know how much energy I’ll have left over to do ANYTHING else.

I should also confess that I have NO idea when I’m going to start re-posting any of the newer Patreon content over to the regular site. I mean, I obviously have to set up the new Gallery first, and it seems like a decent plant to just make the new Patreon stuff public as soon as I finish getting the old stuff up. I just don’t like how vague that is, since I still have no idea how long that’ll take. All these years, and I still suck at planning.

FAQ

Okay, now we’re really getting into the minutia, the extra side pages of the old site that I’m DEFINITELY not going to worry about until after I get back into the groove of posting new comics. We’re also getting into some really embarrassing stuff, because I was SURE I’d posted a full Frequently Asked Questions page for Far Out There on SmackJeeves at some point, but it looks like that’s yet another thing I never got around to finishing. I’ve got multiple Word documents with half-finished FAQs on them, but it looks like the only stuff I ever ACTUALLY completed were the mini-FAQs I posted in the Character Profiles. So, yeah, that’s one more thing I need to finally finish up and post. After the past year or so especially, there’s a LOT of information that new or lapsed readers would really benefit from having all in once place. And speaking of which…

THE STORY SO FAR

One of the things I never really liked about the old site was the plot recap page. Don’t get me wrong, a comic as sprawling as Far Out There ABSOLUTELY needs a “New Readers Start Here” summary for anybody who doesn’t want to make the commitment to read over a decade of old comics right away. I just never liked how Past Me handled it: a big sprawling text document full of links to the pages being referenced. It was imposing and unwelcoming and not really all that great of summary for anybody not already familiar with what it was talking about. I think I can do this a lot better.

What I’d LIKE to do is make a sort of Far Out There Abridged comic, set up as another sub-page like I want to for the Voting Incentives. A picture’s are worth a thousand words, as they say, so I think I can summarize the essential story beats of whole arcs in just a few pages if I really try, possibly condensing the whole of Far Out There to two dozen pages or less. At least, I can do it enough to get the gist of what Far Out There’s about across to anybody who hasn’t read it yet, and hopefully make them curious enough to go back and read what ACTUALLY happened. What’s more, since I’ve learned so much more about how to actually draw since I started, it’d be a much better introduction than the ACTUAL first pages of Far Out There. Even better, if I DID draw a plot summary comic like this, it’d also be a great little mini-comic I could print up and use as a free handout at conventions (ya know, when that becomes a thing again) hopefully drawing in even MORE unsuspecting readers!

Again, though, this is a side project I wouldn’t be able to even start until AFTER I get back into the swing of a regular updating schedule. I can’t go devoting all my time to re-drawing old comics without ever making any new ones, after all… said they guy who’s basically done nothing but fiddle with old comics for over a year.

THE STORE

Man, where do I even begin with THIS one? I have consistently, continuously, without fail been TERRIBLE at doing Far Out There merchandizing. Yes, there’s that handful of Cafe Press store pages, but I was never all that impressed with their products OR the designs I came up with for them. I really want to look into what possible new online stores or products I could get into… but that is SUPER low priority right now. Even more than that plot summary thing, I can’t in good conscience worry about trying to merchandize a comic while I can’t even get new pages out regularly. So don’t expect a new store anytime soon. I’m not even gonna have time to seriously LOOK at the possibilities out there until I can get more of the stuff up above taken care of. Gee, if only there was some other way people who wanted to support me could send some money my way…

Oh, but I should probably mention that when I DO finally start looking into new merch stores, my top priority isn’t going to just be new T-shirts or coffee mugs or stickers or any of that stuff. I mean, sure, I’ll look into that, but my MAIN interest for the future is printing up books. I keep saying I want to do this one day, but I really want to fully re-draw the first arc of Far Out There specifically to be sold as a book. Obviously, I’d have to actually DRAW all those new comics first, so this wouldn’t happen for a while, but it’s yet another thing I’ll need to keep in mind as I research the various possibilities, whenever I can find time to actually do so.

CHARACTER SOUNDTRACKS

And this is probably the absolute lowest priority possible, since I’m pretty sure I’m the one person in the world who eve cares about these things. Back in The Before Time, one of the odder things on the SmackJeeves site was Far Out There Radio, a set of links to a bunch of Pandora radio stations themed to various Far Out There characters. Look, I like music, alright? The thing is, Pandora is limited to American user, so even if anybody out there really DID want to hear what kind of music Tabitha listens to, none of Far Out There’s significant non-US readership could make it work. But aside from that, Pandora’s whole randomized method of operation and limited choice of songs meant that none of the stations ever really sounded like what I actually wanted. I had fully customized iTunes playlists for every character that were WAY better than the Pandora stations, and since I haven’t even used Pandora for years I have no idea what any of those stations even sound like anymore.

When I was scrambling to come up with new material to start posting on Patreon, I finally started making those new Character Soundtrack blog posts/YouTube playlists based on my iTunes collections, and at some point I’m planning to re-post them into the public site. For the foreseeable future, this is the only Patreon blog content I’ve got any plans of cannibalizing for the public site, something I’d originally said I wouldn’t do, but since I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who keeps up with these things in the first place, I doubt anybody’s really going to be upset with this. And again, this is ABSOLUTELY the lowest priority of all. I won’t even begin tinkering with making a soundtrack page until after EVERY other item on this list is addressed.

Oh, but if you think that means I won’t be posting any more soundtrack blogs on Patreon, no such luck! As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, all those new Nitpickers introduced over Christmas were literally created soundtrack first/character second. You’d better BELIEVE I’m gonna be inflicting all of those soundtracks on you later on, as soon as I can get caught up on more of the actually important stuff.  THERE IS NO ESCAPE!

RE-RE-POSTING OLD PAGES

Last and most certainly least, there’s the one thing I said I was finally done with: re-posting old comics. Yeah, I know. Believe me, I know. Here's the thing: if you didn’t catch me complaining about it elsewhere, I spent the first few hundred pages of Far Out There re-posting just ripping the web-sized pages off of SmackJeeves instead of re-scaling my master copies. The thought was that this would be faster AND it would avoid any of those instances where Past Me only fixed typos on the web version instead of the master. It took me way longer than it would have to finally notice that SmackJeeves had started compressing the files and making them look even worse than they normally did, and by then I was too far in to just go back and start over. At some point, I need to finally replace the compressed versions of those early pages with ones from my files that only look as bad as they’re SUPPOSED to, but Lord knows I’ve already spent too much time re-posting to go back and do it right now. Maybe once literally EVERYTHING else on this list is done.

Oh, but that’s not even the only thing. One unexpected side-effect of SmackJeeves collapsing is me developing a whole new appreciation for Drunk Duck *ahem* I mean “TheDuckWebcomics.” It’s still up and running, and the original Far Out There page is still there in pretty much the exact same state it was when I first moved off-site. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of mirroring all the rest of Far Out There’s content onto the original site. Like, every month I’d go in and queue up 30 pages to go live, one page a day, and run on its own while I work on other things. Who knows? It might direct a few new readers over to the new site to see what happens next! And besides, if there’s one OTHER thing all this has taught me, it’s to never take for granted that your website hosting will last forever. An off-site mirror couldn’t hurt, right? Again, this is a VERY low priority, and I wouldn’t even begin tinkering with it while there’s still more important things to do, but it is on the to-do list, at least provisionally.

Dang, this list turned out a lot longer than I was expecting. See, this is why I don’t like trying to put out regular “here’s what I’d working on” updates. Still, hopefully this clears up why regular comics and Patreon content isn’t QUITE back to normal just yet.  Now, back to coloring in profile pictures...