Point Me At The Sky - What Happened?

(I was torn on whether to lump this in with the Far Out There blogs or make it some kind of standalone, but the later would make it hard to find again afterwards. Plus, these characters HAVE made cameos in Far Out There, so that’s good enough justification for me!)

Now that Becky & Gilb is officially revived, I’ve been getting questions about another early comic experiment that I left on a cliffhanger years and years ago: Point Me At The Sky . While not QUITE the first webcomic I ever did, it was still a very early step in my journey towards creating original comics for public consumption. It started out as a dozen-page comic one-shot I did just to make people aware of the fact that comics were a thing I wanted to do now. I posted it on Facebook, since at the time, that was going to be seen by more people than any hosting site (heck, that’s probably still the case), and also got it displayed in, of all places, my church’s art gallery. What can I say? We’re an eclectic congregation.

If you’ve never seen it (and I wouldn’t be at all surprised) the first chapter of Point Me At The Sky is the story of a little bug person being chased by a giant bug/monster/thing through a giant junkyard. He’s saved at the last minute by a superpowerd flying girl, but is too dumbstruck to say anything to her before she flies off again. Nothing too deep, the characters don’t even have names. It was mainly just an experiment in drawing cluttered backgrounds and contrasting them against cute character art. Actually, it was one of a BUNCH of short, almost-but-not-quite-plotless oneshots I was doing at the time, which is a blog post unto itself right there. Most of those never made it out to the general public, though, so I’ll ramble about them later. But Point Me At The Sky did, and got enough good feedback for me to put it up on my then-host Drunk Duck and start making a continuation.

It still needed a name, though. I’d originally titled the comic “Unexpected” but that was pretty boring, and wouldn’t apply to subsequent chapters anyway. So I randomly grabbed the name of a Pink Floyd song I happened to be listening to at that particular moment and called it a day. Yeah, nothing too deep about that one.

Anyway, I managed to get one more chapter  completed and posted onto Drunk Duck. In this one, Bug Boy gains the ability to deliver emo narrations as he draws Flying Girl’s picture and searches for her. Sure enough, he stumbles onto her again as she fights another big gross bug monster. This time, he actually tires to help her out but, well, what’s he gonna do? She doesn’t even notice him anyway, instead opening a sort of space portal thinggie to escape. Bug Boy jumps in too, and eventually wakes up in the MUCH nicer looking world that Flying Girl is from. While they don’t cross paths in the end, she is hit in the face by his drawing of her, leaving everybody to wonder what comes next.

...and there’s the problem. I didn’t know what came next. Or more to the point, I kept changing my mind about what came next. I made three or four attempts to do a chapter three, each proceeding in a very different direction, but none of them ever came anywhere close to completion. Part of the problem was artistic, as I wasn’t that pleased with how the Roger Dean meets Dr. Seuss look of Flying Girl’s world turned out.  I kept trying to come up with something even more fantastical, but still within my artistic capabilities. I consistently failed on both counts. And then there was the question of length. Chapter two was already nearly twice as long as the first one, and every time I revamped the story for chapter three, it got longer and longer. By this point, I was doing Conventional Wisdom as well as Far Out There, and it gradually sank in that any third comic I DID manage to do would need to be a lot less time consuming than Point Me At The Sky would be.

AAAAAAAAAAND then there’s the more embarrassing behind me letting this comic fall by the wayside. In its own way, this comic was kind of autobiographical. No, I’m not secretly part bug nor do I live in a massive garbage dump (though some who’ve seen my room would argue the latter). However, I did have a MASSIVE crush on a girl when I drew the first part, and an awful lot of those emotions found their way into both chapters. This made writing further chapters all the more challenging, for several reasons. First off, even a social misfit like me realized that depicting these characters life Happily Ever After when their real life inspirations were nowhere NEAR that would be... kinda creepy. Kinda REALLY creepy. And speaking of which, Real Life soon turned into a long, awkward realization that the crush was one-sided and eventually shifting gears into Just Friends mode. That, of course, threw any further Point Me At The Sky chapters into further disarray, since now I felt like I’d have to find a way for Bug Boy and Flying Girl to become Just Friends and still have it be a happy ending. Not that such a thing wouldn’t be possible, mind you. I did come up with several ideas, but they all involved introducing more characters and doing a lot more world building and other stuff that would make the whole thing even more labor intensive than it already was. Again, I was doing both Far Out There and Conventional Wisdom by this point, so I only had so much time and energy to spare on other projects. And, well, with all that emotional baggage, I kinda sorta didn’t WANT to revisit Point Me At The Sky all that much. Not enough to overcome all the other obstacles, at least.

So that’s why Point Me At The Sky’s been sitting unfinished for so many years, and why I never even bothered to port it over from Drunk Duck to SmackJeeves. To be honest, though, I DO find myself a bit more favorably disposed to it these days. These days, I think I’m far removed enough from the Real Life inspirations that I can finally look at the comic as purely fictional rather than some kind of symbolic autobiographical whatever. Just allowing Bug Boy and Flying Girl to meet up and live Happily Ever After probably wouldn’t be too big of a deal at this point.  I'm much more of a believer in Entertainment as Comfort Food these days anyway, so it's kind of a given that I'd give these two as happy and ending as possible.  Granted, there’s still the issue of finding the time to actually DO another chapter. But hey, that’s why I stopped doing Becky & Gilb, and THAT came back, so who knows?

Previous  -