Far Out There: That thing with all the cameos

It’s kind of amazing just how much stuff I forget that I’ve done. And I don’t just mean all the times I’ve forgotten about a load of laundry after starting the machine, which is a LOT. Like, enough to make me genuinely worried about the state of my brain. It happens a LOT. ...what was I talking about? Oh right, forgetting about stuff. Far Out There turned ten years old this year, and that’s a lot of stuff to keep track of. I have to go back and re-read older stuff quite a bit just to make sure I don’t accidentally contradict myself, and a lot of times I end up stumbling over stuff I didn’t even remember was there. Usually, that means one-off gags I didn’t remember writing or little details I’d fallen out of the habit of including, but sometimes it’s bigger stuff. Like, special event that spanned several months level big. Sure enough, while I was looking back over the REALLY early arcs to find some pages worth spamming tumblr with in honor of the anniversary, I re-discovered one of the most successful promotional stunts Far Out There ever pulled... even though I managed to totally forget about it afterwards.

Way, way, waaaaaaaaaaaaay back when Far Out There was still being hosted on Drunk Duck, I was still outgoing enough to actually engage with the rest of the user base on the site forums. (Yes, in my world sitting alone in a room while posting words on a forum counts as “outgoing”) As you would no doubt expect, said forums were constantly abuzz with people looking for some new way to promote themselves. Offers to do fan art or guest pages, looking for crossovers, 634,936,908 different “give me feedback” threads, that kind of thing. At the time, I was in the early stages of planning Far Out There’s first big plot arc since the debut: the Mad Science Convention. Well, the first since the bit that introduced Stilez & Tax, but this was going to be WAAAAAAAAY bigger, with a longer running time, more characters introduced (Tabitha, Bridget, Alphonse, and Skye just to name a few) far more elaborate set pieces, big ol’ elaborate crowd scenes, and chances to slip in a bunch of shout-outs to classic scifi. I mean, if I’m gonna draw the main characters walking past someone in the hall anyway, and it has to be someone who looks like a mad scientist anyway, then why NOT have it be Dr. Serizawa from Godzilla? But that got me thinking: what if I threw in some cameos from other webcomics?

It was kind of the perfect chance to pull a stunt like this, if you think about it. I wouldn’t have to actually explain anyone’s presence in-story, since the whole “giant convention” setting was a license to draw people just standing around for one panel. And it wouldn’t matter if a character didn’t look like he belonged in the Far Out There universe, since all these people would be flamboyant weirdos anyway. A strange visitor from another continuity would blend right in! So, once I had the story outlines worked out enough to know when the arc would begin, I hopped onto the Drunk Duck forum and put out a mass call for anyone who wanted a cameo.

Sure enough, there was no shortage of people who wanted in. And sure enough, the characters were from all over the genre spectrum. There were fantasy characters, superhero characters, gag comic characters, people’s Ocs, all sorts of stuff. I didn’t really have any rules beyond “your comic must be all-ages enough for me to be able to link to it without feeling guilty” so just about everything that was offered got in. Oh yeah, that was the REAL meat of the deal. Not only would I slip our character into a crowd scene, but I’d also include a mention in the comments of where he/she/it was, WHO it was, and post a link so you, the reader, could find out more. And, hopefully, they’d return the favor in the comments of THEIR latest page, and I’d get a nice traffic boost from their readership coming to see what’s up. It wasn’t an art swap “I’ll draw you a cameo if you draw me one” type of deal, I wasn’t asking for anything in return. I figured the more I asked of the other people, the fewer people would actually take me up on the offer. Keeping it as selfless as possible would, paradoxically, increase my chances of gaining something off it all. 

The Mad Science Convention arc technically began on page 123, but cameo fest itself officially began on page 129. That first page alone already had a whopping seven separate cameos in one single panel, not to mention shout-outs to everything from MST3k to Gigantor. All in all, I managed to squeeze in sixty-two separate character appearances before wrapping the Cameo Fest up on page 150, which, fortuitously enough, was right around the time the story shifted away from crowd scenes anyway. Kind of hard to have somebody show up in the background when the page is just of Trigger crawling around in an air duct, after all.

From what I can recall, the Cameo Fest was rather successful at the time. Incredibly, the old Far Out There site on Drunk Duck -*ahem* sorry, I mean “The Duck Webcomics”- still has all its old comments despite all the site redesigns over the years, and there’s a remarkable absence of people complaining on the internet. I know all the cross-comic did, in fact, bring me a nice spike in traffic, and looking back over the comments, it does seem like at decent few people who showed up just to see their characters stuck around for a while afterwards. I even managed to get a few unsolicited bits of fan art out of the deal!

I always said I wanted to do another cameo fest the next time an opportunity rolled around... but it kind of never did. This arc happened it 2009, and the next story to take place off the ship didn’t start until 2014. And even then, that was the one with the black market gun show happening behind the rock concert on the derelict space station. Somehow, none of those settings seem to offer the same plot-free implications that the mad science convention did, so dropping any and every character under the sun into them wouldn’t have seemed so unnaturally natural. What’s worse, though, is that I’d long since moved from Drunk Duck to SmackJeeves by this point, and I never really bothered to worm my way into the forum community the way I did on that previous site. That’s not making any judgment on which community is “better”, I was just already getting over the whole “talking with strangers about nothing over the internet” part of my life in general. Without that pre-existing connection to a whole swarm of aspiring comic artists, it’s hard to imagine that another call for cameos would draw in anywhere near as many characters as the old one did.

One really morbid thing I couldn’t help wondering about as I re-read those pages is just how many of those other comics are still around anymore. I mean, the jump to SmackJeeves was only in late 2010, barely a year later, and even THEN I was adding notes to the old comments that I was afraid to look and see how many of the comics might have quit updating. Add nearly a decade to that count, and I can’t help but start wondering how many of those comics might not even exist online anymore. Not everybody leaves their old archive in place when they move to a new host, after all. The Wayback Machine can’t remember EVERYTHING. Now even more than then, I’m afraid to look back and discover just how many of those comics that seemed VASTLY more popular than Far Out There have since withered away. I mean, that seems like the sort of thing I should be excited about, one more reason to brag about Far Out There making it to ten years. But I dunno, even if I never really read any of those other comics, I don’t relish the thought of outliving any of them.