A lengthy Far Out There ramble.

(This is actually one of several blog posts I started working on at the same time, but it's the only one I'm making available to the public.  Don't worry, loyal patrons, you'll have some exclusive stuff again shortly)

I haven’t done a big, rambling “here’s where I am as a creative individual” in a while, which I’m sure not one single human being on the planet has felt worse off for. But I kind of stumbled backwards into an idea for a spiel that might actually be amusing and even illuminating to somebody, somewhere. More importantly, though, it’s something different to do that’ll break up a little creative monotony, which –if you DID read any of those previous rambles- you’ll know is kind of a bid deal with me. If you DIDN’T read them, good for you, because they’re all way too long and unfocused. Basically, I’m terrible at time management and avoiding burn-out, not to mention a repeat offender at depriving myself of the very external stimuli that drives me to get creative in the first place (“I can’t take time to watch/read/do this thing that gets me exited to work on my own stuff because I need more time to work on my own stuff… WHY AM NOT EXCITED ABOUT MY OWN STUFF ANYMORE?”) The larger behavioral patterns that gave rise to these flaws still haven’t been fully dealt with, as demonstrated by the update schedule, but I have made a few small-scale breakthroughs. I’m about to share one of them now… in probably the most roundabout and rabbit trail-laden way possible.

Recently I’ve been making an effort to go back and watch through Adventure Time again. There’s about fifty other shows I’ve been meaning to watch, either again or for the first time, but the one that comes in ten minute chunks was the easiest justify to take time out for. I’ve had a weird rollercoaster of a relationship with Adventure Time over the years. When it first came out, I thought it looked like the stupidest show I’d ever seen: nothing but ugly garish art and bad music and sooooo muuuuuch shouting. And to be fair, I’ve NEVER really liked the noodly art style, I actually like the hipster soundtrack even LESS now (I swear, this generation has damned the ukulele for all eternity), and there really is way too much yelling. And yet, eventually, Adventure Time sucked me in something fierce. Of all things, the experience reminds me of Monty Python. See, I spent a good chunk of my childhood under the tragic impression that Monty Python was a vapid, brainless orgy of mugging and slapstick, all thanks to what might be the single worst commercial I’ve ever seen. It was this Time-Life VHS set of the show, and the commercial was a montage of contextless clips of The Fish Slapping Dance, Gumbys hitting themselves in the head, and worst of all bits of the Upper Class Twit Of The Year with all the play by play replaced with zany cartoon sound effects. If that was their only point of reference, ANYONE would assume Monty Python was the kind of boorish buffoonery that would make Benny Hill feel like his intelligence was being insulted. Basically, a bunch of idiots in a field hitting each other while making goofy faces. Fortunately, I had nerdy friends who wouldn’t quit quoting The Holy Grail, which I eventually saw and realized how unfair my initial impression had been. Likewise, when enough friends wouldn’t shut up about the unexpected backstory of Marceline and The Ice King, I finally bothered to watch more than a few seconds at a time and realized how much more Adventure Time had going for it. Yes, it was garish and loud, but not only was there genuine character depth and world building lurking behind the random silliness, but that upper strata of silliness actually made the deeper bits even more impactful. For a few years, I was hooked. I watched the show religiously, references started to pop up in my own comics, and I even had a mad dream of cosplaying as Simon Petrikov for a while (and only partially because of the name). Even now, going back and rewatching the show for the first time in a while, it was quite invigorating to rediscover the rush of seeing such boundless energy and creativity unfold before me.

…and it means a lot for me to say anything nice like that, because HOLY CRAP did Adventure Time turn into a smelly doo doo pile after a while. Yeah, when I said I was watching through the show “again,” I was being a bit misleading, as it implies that I ever made it through the show’s entire run to begin with. No, I bailed on that show WELL before the end came, and I mean I consciously dropped it. That’s a rare thing for me. There’s plenty of shows I never finish because they didn’t grab me and I got distracted and just never got around to revisiting, apathy dictates much of my viewing habits. But to deliberately, intentionally make a point of saying “I will actively avoid seeking out any more of this” is something else. While it’s still fresh in my mind, I HATE to leave anything unfinished. For me to deliberately choose to do so, I have to think something is REEEAAALLY bad. Like, Star Trek: Enterprise-level bad. And boy, did Adventure Time hit those sorrowful depths for me. I didn’t even get anywhere near my original bail out point before giving up on my rewatch, and all the signs of the decline in quality were evident even earlier with the benefit of hindsight. It’s amazing to think about, honestly. How does a show that originally repulsed me for being too hyperactive and noisy end up losing me because it’s so crushingly, exhaustingly, excruciatingly DULL? I mean, this show was a CHORE by the time I gave up on it; an task to be performed purely out of obligation, bereft of any personal enjoyment. Whatever fun I may have once derived from watching this show was completely smothered by the flabby, gristly bloat of its excessive continuity and overblowing character studies and general, unremitting SLOWNESS. The more seriously the show took its lore and character development, the less every individual episode could actually DO. There was less and less STUFF in a show that originally made its mark by bludgeoning the viewers over the head with more stuff than they knew what to do with. And it’s a funny thing to be complaining about, since –again– the presence of depth behind the madness is what got me watching in the first place. But there’s a delicate balance that needs to be maintained, an even mixture of serious and silly, and Adventure Time ruined itself with FAR more serious than the silly could handle.

I bring all this up because Far Out There has the same problem.

This comic has been going for over a decade now, so of course there’s a lot of fluff built up, but that’s not the part I’m talking about. No, I’m talking about a BRUTAL one-two punch of dragging pacing and lack of creative energy. Again, if you’ve read other blogs, you know this isn’t a new thing. I’ve been saying for YEARS that the hardest part of any story arc is around three-fourths of the way through. The initial thrill of starting something new wears off, the formerly blank slate just waiting to have ideas thrown at it turns into a tangled web of pre-existing plot threads that need to be moved around to reach some kind of payoff, and the art inevitably gets more and more complex. The next the thing I know, I’m tired and restless and bored and just wanna do something else (like, say, writing a lengthy blog post). It happened during the Mad Scientist Convention arc and again during the Rock Festival/Black Market arc, just about EVERY extended storyline hits me with this at some point. And you know what? It’s happening again right now, and I totally didn’t even realize it.

It helps to understand that, for a while, Far Out There ran on sort of a “Real Plot/Filler Arc/Real Plot/Filler Arc” cycle for a while. The ship would arrive at a given location for an extended storyline, leave when that story was finished, then there’d be a string of either stand alone comic or brief storylines during the trip to the next place. I’m not smart enough to actually PLAN this, but those filler arcs turned out to be an extremely useful period to recover from the longer storylines and just play around with silly gags. This way, I could go into the next long arc all refreshed and recharged… but then something happened. Over time, the “filler arcs” became less and less filler and more actual for real plot arcs, just happening on board the ship rather than someplace else. And this isn’t anything recent, either. All the way back at the story with the energy draining weapon and the Alphonse hologram, I’d already started labeling these “filler arcs” as regular arcs in my comic folders, and what could be more serious than deliberately choosing NOT to write “Filler Arc IV” on a folder only I will ever see? The important thing is, for several years now, Far Out There has been running all plot, all the time. Really, there’s been one unbroken sequence of events ever since Trigger figured out he could call Skye and finds out where she was going next. From there he dragged everyone to that concert, which led to the whole weapons dealer shenanigans, when resulted in Stilez and Tax camping out on the ship, which drew Tabitha in, and how all that’s collided with the Super Stupendous Kids. There’s been brief digressions, sure, but no clear “this story is over” moment, and certainly no extended periods where I was just drawing comics without trying to fit them into something larger. It’s just been stringing along one continuous chain of events. SINCE 2014. That is a LONG time without a creative break. 

But the thing is, I was SHOCKINGLY oblivious to the fact that this was happening. Somewhere in my head, everything since the ship pulled out of that space station with Stilez on board still counted as filler, since that was The Order Of Things. Somewhere between the Stilez & Tax stuff, the Tabitha stuff, and the New Kids stuff, I apparently expected to find some creative down time before the next “real” arc came up and I started setting up the new plot threads. Except, I was already doing that. I’ve been doing that for YEARS now. All this stuff on the ship has been introducing characters and establishing details are supposed to come into play once they finally reach that destination. Stilez and Tabitha being on board, finding the Kids and having Mariska come get them, the big stolen super ship, Ichabod’s plan to get rid of Stilez, that’s ALL “set up” for future events, a new story that’ll kick off once all the necessary pieces are in place. Except, that WON’T be the start of a new story, that’s the climax of a story that’s already been happening for ages. Whether or not I file the pages in the same folder or not, this has all been one continuous, uninterrupted plotline, and right now I’m stuck in the middle of that three-fourths of the way through doldrums. This is the part where I’m worn out and bored with tying things together. And I’ve been in the middle of it for over a year now. No WONDER I’ve been on such a low ebb.

Don’t worry, this isn’t another “guy who sits in front of a computer and draws pictures is complaining about how hard he’s working” sob story, there’s actually something useful to take away from all this, and it even incorporates that rant about Adventure Time eventually. See, the problem isn’t just me feeling burned out or bored. I mean, it is, but that’s just MY problem, you all don’t have to deal with that. No, you have to deal with the side effects: really dull comics. I’ll just come out and say it, Far Out There’s kind of sucked for the past year or so. I wouldn’t wanna read a lot of the stuff I’ve put out recently, so I can’t imagine how boring a lot of this dreck must seem to everyone else. Even if you ignore the inconsistent update schedule (WHICH YOU ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT) the plot’s taking way too long to move forward, with way too much of characters going from room to room saying things to each other without actually accomplishing anything. As long as I’m being honest, I’ll admit that some of this wheel-spinning has been a deliberate choice on my part. There were some big picture plot problems in the next arc I was still fiddling with, and part of me was worried about moving ahead too fast and getting stuck in a plot hole I couldn’t get out of. I’ll wait a moment for you to get finished laughing at me being afraid Far Out There might move too fast. But more than that, as the creative funk set in again, I started to deliberately push more complicated pages back a few days in favor of something simpler to draw, because I just didn’t feel up to the more elaborate thing. Sure, sometimes it was a matter of time or sheer physical exhaustion where I literally COULDN’T do the planned page in time, but there’s been plenty of instances where I was just too bummed out to be bothered drawing too many panels in a single day. Instead, I’d just cough out another page where several cast members say generic on-brand quips that don’t do anything but reinforce their personality, but it’s easy and, well, it’s fun to just let characters I’m invested in bounce off each other. But it’s still not something anyone NEEDS to see, nor is it anything I would have drawn were it not the evening before a scheduled update and I needed to have SOMETHING to post. And then I’d be underwhelmed by the result, which would just make me more bummed out, and the cycle would continue. And you, dear reader, get stuck with mediocre content. Everybody loses.

Which, if you can believe it, actually brings me back around to that Adventure Time rant. I don’t pretend to know what actually went on in the writer’s room there, but watching the steady decline of that show reminded me of the downward slide I’ve seen in many, MANY other works. It’s something that, honestly, I’ve known about ever since I was a little tyke writing fanfics: having a plan can be very, very dangerous. I mean, yes, it’s also incredibly important.  You don’t want to ask the audience to commit to following you on a journey where you don’t already have the destination worked out. And for all my complaining, sometimes is VERY helpful to just fill in the blanks of a preexisting outline rather than have to invent the next page from the ground up every single time. That gets exhausting real quick. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen writers get so wrapped up in the Big Picture overall plot of their story that they grossly neglect the nuts and bolts of actually WRITING it.  You know that old adage about how one good idea does not a story make? Yeah, that’s where this problem is most obvious, when some kid who doesn’t know any better has an idea for a TOTALLY AWESOME TWIST ENDING or a SUPER AMAZING MAIN CHARATCER or a COMPLETELY ENGROSING SETTING and bashes together an utterly dreadful story to justify that one inspired element. But there’s other, more insidious versions of this problem. It isn’t always blindingly obvious from the start that a work doesn’t have enough content to justify its own existence. Sometimes it actually does, at the start, only to gradually lose track of some of them along the way.

That’s what I felt like I was witnessing when I watched Adventure Time again. In the Big Picture sense, I’m sure it looked incredibly exciting to probe deeper and deeper into the past of Marceline and The Ice King, to cut off Finn’s arm after ages of teasing it, to flesh out the broader history of Ooo, to give Lemongrab an actual storyline, to make Jake a friggin’ father, and all that other stuff. Once you’ve invested time and energy into conjuring up a cast of characters, of course you want to poke around all their various crevasses. (I immediately regret that sentence) Slowing down the pace of a show known for its energy? Worth it if it means giving this mythos-crucial moment time to breathe. Revisiting a setting we’ve already seen rather than doing something we haven’t seen before in this show praised for its imagination? Worth it in order to foster a greater sense of continuity. Take an entire minute out of a cartoon that’s only twelve minutes long in order to fit in a really unimpressive song? …well, they were doing that right from the start. The point is, it looked like the creative team got so caught up in telling a bigger, heavier fantasy epic that the fun, silly little action show they started out with got crushed under the weight. And don’t misunderstand; I have nothing against giving big moments room to breathe or maintaining continuity or whatever. Again, it was the tales about the show being deeper than expected that got me to watch Adventure Time in the first place. But all that stuff had to be present ALONG WITH the silly, surreal stuff for the package to be complete. Once the show got myopic in its focus on one aspect, the result was a lesser, disappointing show. Oh, I’m sure there was a feeling that, in the long run, the Big Picture payoff would make any lulls in the individual episodes worth it, and no doubt plenty of Adventure Time superfans agree. But I have no idea how everything paid off in the end, I quit watching long before the show’s final stretch because it was just so sinfully BORING. That’s what makes the Big Picture so dangerous, most of the time you’re the only one who can see it.

You know what? I’m gonna try for a x2 Double Callback Bonus Round and incorporate that Monty Python story into my point here (originally I just included that because it’s a funny story I don’t get to tell very often). The editor who put that commercial together might have known full well that the true meat of the Upper Class Twit Of The Year sketch is John Cleese turning the slapstick into both a parody of sports broadcasters AND a satirical jab at British society, and that replacing the audio with stock cartoon sound effects ruins that effect. But hey, this is just a quick advert to get people interested in the videos! As long as they see the full sketch contained on one of those tapes, a few hiccups in the advertizing will hardly matter, right? Well, it sure mattered to young me watching that commercial, because I was turned off to Monty Python for years as a result. All I knew was what I was seeing on the screen at that moment. If what I was seeing looked stupid, then what I was seeing looked stupid. The existence of a funnier version out there somewhere where I couldn’t see didn’t mask the deficiencies of what I was witnessing in the moment. Likewise, even if Adventure Time somehow stuck the landing of being a sprawling fantasy epic (and that’s a big if), I wasn’t bingewatching the entire season to get that whole sprawling story in one sitting. I was watching isolated twelve minute shorts. If the show couldn’t be an entertaining twelve minute short, then it wasn’t being entertaining. End of story.

Which brings us back around to Far Out There again. The part of the problem that isn’t just boredom and burnout (in fact, part of what kept me too distracted to notice that stuff) is the allure of the Big Picture. When I’d try to get myself hyped for the comic again, I never seemed to focus on what I was doing right then, but what I’d be able to do LATER once I’d powered through and reached the next arc. Oh man, there’s gonna so much cool stuff in that story! There’s all the different space mob families and their color-coded visual styles, the tragic  ongoing lovestory between those two background characters, the unprecedented glimpses into Nitpicker culture, the metafictional deconstruction of burrito ingredients, the amazing new characters joining the cast, the horrifying secret of Cap’n Crosby’s wartime past, Blip transforming into various giant robots, Layla’s meteoric rise to the top of a criminal empire, the keytar ninja monks who brainwash Trigger, Stilez and Bridget’s apocalyptic final showdown, the tie-in rock opera soundtrack, the limited edition licensed ice cream flavors, and so much more! (Have fun figuring out which of those I’m actually serious about) In the face of all that cool stuff to come, who really cares if I phone it in a bit on this one filler page? The art may be a little sterile, the panel layout might not flow quite right, and the jokes might not, strictly speaking, actually be funny, but this is all just setting the stage for the REAL good part! It’d be like critiquing the art quality of a sign for the Louvre’s parking garage, save that for the main attraction, right? Except, the main attraction of Far Out There is, by definition, whatever the newest page happens to be. To ME, the current page might just be a minor transitional piece of set up for something else, but to anyone just visiting the site, it’s the single most important page in Far Out There HISTORY. It’s the page that needs to motivate them to go back and read what came before, or keep coming back week in and week out to see what happens next. Nobody passing through can see all the future ideas I’ve got kicking around in my head and make their decision based on that, the newest page needs to justify its own existence solely based on its own quality. And I have severely slacked off in that department.

So, what do I do about it? …heck, I dunno. If I didn’t I wouldn’t need to write a blog like this in the first place. I have been making some efforts in the past few weeks to spice things up a bit, to make things more interesting both for readers and myself. Paradoxically, this has included speeding things up to get to the next big payoff moment faster, and also being more willing to step away from the planed next page and just follow whatever I feel like at the moment. Neither is perfect –speeding things up too much runs the risk of me falling in further behind schedule, and working without ANY plan can easily lead to even more severe burnout since it’s more exhausting– but SOMETHING obviously has to change in my process. Actually, the biggest thing might be something that literally only just hit me as I was typing this out: the degree to which that whole “three-fourths doldrums” problem and this Big Picture distraction actually feed into each other. Yes, getting bored and burned out on the current story makes it easier to pine for something else, but works the other way around too. The more time I spend daydreaming about comics I’m NOT working on right now, the more I make the stuff I’m SUPPOSED to be working on feel tedious and old, which just makes me even more eager to get it over with at any cost. Heck, would I even BE as bored tying up all the plot lose ends if I didn’t let myself get more focused on the broader story demands than each individual page? Maybe I wouldn’t need to worry about giving myself time to recover if I didn’t unintentionally engineer the very situation I need to recover from. I’ve been creating this whole problem for myself in the first place, haven’t I? Perhaps. Again, I’m still trying to figure all this out. At best, I’m hoping somebody else will benefit from hearing about my own screwups and know better afterwards. At worst, airing this in public will (hopefully) force me to be better about addressing it, since nothing prevents fixing a problem quite like the hope that nobody noticed it in the first place. I mean, I know that you know, there’s a reason Far Out There’s readership has dropped so bad, but now I KNOW that I know that you know.

In conclusion, mostly because I couldn’t find a place to fit this in elsewhere, a thought: ignoring the little details to focus on the big picture is a contradiction, for what even IS the Big Picture but all those little details viewed at the same time? Even if we ignore the fact that most of your audience won’t stick around to see that awesome payoff if the buildup is dull and boring, there’s still the assumption that a creator who keeps making dull and boring stuff even CAN manage an awesome payoff in the first place. There’s a world of difference between having an idea that sounds cool in your head and actually creating something that stands up as awesome on its own merit. Does it really make sense that a guy who repeatedly botches simple pages of characters sitting around talking will, somehow, instantly nail an elaborate scifi action climax just because he imagined that he would? We only do as well on the big stuff as we learn to do on the little stuff. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go draw the EVERLOVING HECK out of some characters sitting on a couch.