Far Out There - Scavaging Old Ideas

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I’ve had ideas for a LOT of other comics beyond Far Out There. The vast majority of them have never made it past the idea stage, or maybe a handful of pages that barely anyone ever saw. However, a LOT of those stillborn ideas have found a second life in Far Out There… or at least a few random parts have, mutated beyond all recognition. So let’s take a little trip down memory lane as I root through my old sketchbooks and see which of my failed ideas gave birth to something, ANYTHING appearing in Far Out There.

The Adventures of Geek Boy
I’m pretty sure this was my first ever attempt to do anything specifically manga-influenced (give or take a Pokemon fan-comic or two, I’ve forgotten which came first). The local B Dalton (RIP) had finally gotten a manga section –a whole shelf! – and I’d just devoured and entire omnibus of Urusei Yatsura. Like any young teenage nerd who’d just discovered a new thing he enjoyed, I immediately went home and ripped it off to vastly inferior effect. The Adventures of Geek Boy was the tale of an awkward, lonely nerd living in the country with no friends… who happens to find himself the research subject of an alien scientist. A green skinned, well-endowed female alien who always wore a silver bikini. Yep, this was the origin of Far Out There’s Neva, though she’s presented as a fictional character as there are no “real” aliens in that comic. And even then, she never ODES anything, we just see the character on posters and the like. When I started to write this, I was going to say that I didn’t take much else from Geek Boy, but looking over the notes again, I found a few surprises. Apparently, at one point, Neva was going to have a boss who may or may not have been a little girl, a LOT like Ichabod’s boss Sophia. Even more surprisingly, it looks like Gright the Suicide Doll originally began as a doodle for Geek Boy. I had COMPLETELY forgotten about that. It’s hardly surprising, though, since the overwhelming majority of ideas were still absolutely terrible. I managed to draw several whole chapters (rewriting the first at least twice) before realizing what an embarrassing exercise in self-insertion it was. Would it surprise you to learn that I, myself, was an awkward, lonely nerd living in the country with no friends at this point? Or that the titular main character (eventually named “Marshal” when I realized that having people literally call him “Geek Boy” was funny exactly twice) just happened to be a pasty redhead with glasses? Or that every single thing he hated about his living conditions just HAPPENED to be stuff that Roughly 14 Year Old Me also didn’t like? Yeah, it’s not a fun thing to look back at now.
…but now that I AM looking back, there is one other thing that strikes me as interesting. Geek Boy had a few siblings, the younger of whom (alternately a boy or a girl depending on which draft you read) had an evil split personality that would randomly kick in and threaten people… which bears a surprising resemblance to Megaweapon, now that I think about it. Not the split personality part, obviously (unless you want to count him acting nice in front of his Mom) but the idea of a cute little kid being hilariously over the top evil is pretty close. And actually, as continue to think about it, I probably should try to reuse the split personality gag at some point. Aside from the clear shift in behavior, the kid switched with an audible “PING!” that was actually pretty funny. A lot funnier than any of the other alleged jokes in this comic, anyway.

Rancho de Kanter
Remember what I said about how young nerds just loooooove to blatantly rip off any new interest? Well, another one of my early exposures to anime and manga was Tenchi Muyo, and Rancho de Kanter was my sloppy attempt to rip off THAT. In a future where Earth has contact with aliens, but not so much that people aren’t kinda spooked by them, Rancho de Kanter is an isolated resort where visiting aliens can relax without the dumb locals constantly gawking. On its own, that’s actually not a terrible concept for a sci-fi comedy, but I had to go and ruin it in several ways. See, one of the OTHER things dumb young geeks just LOVE is the thought of subverting and deconstructing other works (why do you think there’s so much “fridge horror” about completely innocuous kids shows?) and I just HAD to try and twist the whole Unwanted Harem formula of Tenchi into something new. This despite, you know, never having tried to write that formula STRAIGHT before and thus having no idea what actually made it work... nor having realized, as I soon would, that HAREMS ARE REALLY STUPID AND TERRIBLE FOR CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. This series was going to have a female focal point surrounded by male characters, and it’d be TWO female characters instead of just one central protagonist. Problem was, I didn’t get that the whole point of the harem formula is to have as many different fan service as possible, and I was clearly unqualified for coming up with hunky dudes that anyone would care about. And also, having TWO characters that the swarm of suitors would be interested in to varying degrees just made things too difficult to keep track of, and everybody knows that no one goes to a harem-based series expecting to THINK. And on a final note, the titular resort was envisioned as being on the side of a mountain, since Tenchi happened in the mountains and I couldn’t shake the image… despite clearly being called a “ranch”, which are generally thought of as being FLAT.
Thanks to all those foundational problems, I never got Rancho de Kanter beyond the notes and character sheets stage, but quite a few of those characters made it into Far Out There in one form or another. The most prominent examples are definitely Stilez and Tax, who ironically were supposed to be extremely minor characters here. And it’s only just now that I realize how much Stilez resembles Ryoko, only with cat stripes and waaaay less horny. Disonar de Kanter started out here too, providing the name of both the comic and the resort, which he was supposed to run. He was actually supposed to appear in Far Out There pretty early on as a former associate of Layla’s, but I ended up dropping the page. Good thing, too, because his original design didn’t feature the sparkly rainbow hair, and who wants to see Disonar without THAT? And then there’s Castral and Iconal, the two alien princesses who were supposed to be the focal point of all the other characters’ affections. They’ve appeared in Far Out There too… in much drunker, squatter form. Aside from now being a pair of hard drinking reprobates, the sisters have gone from normal sized adults to a pair of tiny, big-headed chibis. Why? Oh, the answer is so stupid. I was doodling a bunch of potential characters on a single page, and when the idea struck to include Castral and Iconal, there wasn’t much room left. So I drew them really short and squat. And I never stopped.
There’s actually one or two other characters lurking in the pile of old Rancho de Kanter notes that I’ve been holding in reserve for use in Far Out There, but I guess they technically count as spoilers, so I won’t bring them up specifically. Speaking of which…

Middle Eight
Hey look! Another blatant attempt by young me to rip off a popular anime! This time, the victim was FLCL, and here I at least knew enough to recognize that the “point” of FLCL wasn’t the story, but the collection of wacky characters doing even wackier things. Alas, I drastically underestimated my own ability to come up with setting and set pieces even remotely as interesting as what the Gainax crew could crank out, so Middle Eight never took off. The setting was just straight up FLCL all over again (sleepy town with mildly odd people has some aliens and space cops show up and disrupt everything) only with new characters, and while I did actually manage to come up with decent bunch of characters, I sure as heck couldn’t come up with anything for them to DO. The closest thing I had to an idea was naming characters and things after really awkward rock and roll references (even the title was a songwriting term), and even that seems quaint now that I know that JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is a thing. Actually, I tell a lie. I DID have a few goofy, surreal ideas… that were supposed to be used in The Adventures of Geek Boy. There was going to be a beat up old French car that was actually a sentient transforming alien weapon and that a bunch of high school girls formed a cult to worship… geez, I have NO idea where I expected that to go.
Unfortunately, as with Rancho de Kanter earlier, I can’t go into too much detail about most of those characters, since I’m still holding the good ones in reserve for future Far Out There plots. Yes, even after all these years, there’s still stuff I’m meaning to get to. What can I say? I write slow. But I CAN tell you about one character who found new life in a different comic. I mentioned earlier that there were going to be Space Cops running around town fighting space crooks, remember? Well, instead of ray guns and other future tech, their only “tool” was going to be a little furry critter who could be (painfully) stretched and molded into other shapes and used as whatever his owners needed. Even after I realized Middle Eight was going nowhere, I knew I was on to something with the little critter and decided to reuse him for another idea… an idea for a mascot I could draw while struggling with Writer’s Block. Yep, this failed FLCL rip off is where Scribbles came from! How about that?

Deviation Corps
I’ve had it in my head for years and years now to try and do a superhero comic, a complicated proposition seeing as how I’ve never really been a big reader of super hero comics. Oh, I grew up watching superhero TV shows and movies, so I’ve got plenty of love for the character trope, but I still don’t really know all that much about how writing that kind of comic book works. So of COURSE I got it into my head to write an epic deconstruction and reconstruction of superhero stories! Because it’s not like anybody’s ever done THAT before! Deviation Force was basically X-Men and Teen Titans and a bit of Watchmen thrown into a blender and made really terrible. It’s the future, people have super powers (called deviations, not mutants, cos this it totally an original idea), some of them are superheroes, and there’s this complicated government organization to keep all the heroes under control and working together. The twist, which I actually DO still like, is that the heroes at the heart of this story are all former sidekicks of really Big Name Heroes (who we never actually see) trying to make a name for themselves. Actually, I guess it’s less Watchmen and more Astro City, suggesting a long history behind the specific story being presented. And then there a lot of pretentious meta stuff about trying to reclaim the idea of “being heroes” from lots of grimdark depressing stuff that’s not even worth talking about cos there’s no way I’m ever doing anything with THAT part.
But what does a superhero story have to do with Far Out There? Well, as part of the whole “Government keeping tabs on them” idea, the team of heroes were going to have a robot who looked after them and kept records of everything. A robot in the form of a little girl. A little girl who was basically indestructible, possessed a tremendous intellect, and could occasionally perform weird feats of technological slapstick. Now, this wasn’t SPECIFICALLY Avatar, the look of the characters were completely different (and Avatar’s not a robot), but there’s still a lot of overlap between the two, so I thought it was worth mentioning. Also, now that I think about, two of the main characters were a short, sullen, grumpy girl and a tall, skinny, cheerful girl who were best friends. Where have I heard THAT before?

The Mad Scientist & His Daughter
This one barely even counts, since I barely even got past doodling the characters before I gave up on doing it as a standalone series. But those characters were Tabitha and her Dad, so it’s important enough to mention here. I’m not sure what I was ripping off to come up with this idea, but its well established at this point that I have no original ideas of my own, so I must have seen SOMETHING involving a flamboyant sciency guy with a teen daughter at some point. But yeah, that was the original idea: a really showy, over-dramatic mad scientist guy with a teenage daughter he’s always annoying. Cue sitcom theme. To emphasize the hi-LAR-ious friction between the two, I figured the daughter would be really into magic and fantasy. Like, unicorns and wizards and generally doing decidedly NON-sciency stuff at the same time that Dad was playing with all his cutting edge modern technology, presumably resulting is wacky chaos. Will they EVER be able to find common ground????
…I dunno, because I ran into a fundamental problem right away. See, I knew right away that the daughter needed to be the viewpoint character, since that’s just how the Wacky Character/Straight Character dynamic works. Except, well, I don’t really like fantasy all that much. Not as much as science fiction, anyway. So I just couldn’t come up with a Science Dad/Magic Daughter situation where I wasn’t feeling more sympathetic towards the Dad, which wrecked the whole dynamic. The obvious solution was to flip the characters around, making the DAUGHTER the mad scientist and having Dad be, like, a wizard or something. That was a little better, but it resulted in another problem. The more I thought about the Tech vs Magic set up, the more it started to come across as a Science vs Religion kind of thing (especially now that Science Character was officially the Main Character). I’m sure there’s plenty of fedora-wearing types who would have loved that, but I didn’t have any interest in writing anything for them, so I started looking for new directions from which to approach this idea.
Everything clicked when I started thinking that Dad might not be a wizard per se, but more of an alchemist. Now, the only things I knew about alchemy were what I’d gleaned from various anime, so I started poking around Wikipedia for something SLIGHTLY more accurate. After a while, it struck me that a lot of self-proclaimed alchemists would find the conflict in this story to be fairly absurd. After all, a lot of these guys figured what they were doing WAS science, and to an extent, it kinda was (yes, there’s plenty of other people who got all into spiritualism and stuff, this isn’t a dissertation on the history of alchemists). So the thought occurred that maybe father and daughter were BOTH mad scientists, but the latter had gone SO mad that he didn’t even realize what he was doing anymore. That’s both funny and kinda sad, and it made the relationship a LOT more interesting than a simple culture clash would have been.
Alas, despite all these breakthroughs with the characters, I still couldn’t come up with any decent stuff for them to DO. I mean, even in the rambling, aimless filler fluff that is Far Out There, I have SOMETHING for the characters to actually spend their time doing, but I was drawing a complete blank here. Fortunately, Far Out There already existed by this point (at least in its prototype stage) so I figured this was a sign that I should just wedge these characters into THAT story. Good thing, too, since Tabitha and her kids have definitely become some of my favorite characters.

C.S.S. Perseus/Valkyrie’s Crest
I really went back and forth on whether or not to even mention this, because there’s not a lot I can say without unleashing a deluge of spoilers. These comic ideas, which honestly are the same basic idea smooshed into two separate molds, is the origin of a lot of material that will EVENTUALLY turn up in Far Out There, but virtually none of it has actually happened yet. Even with Middle Eight, which is ALMOST all stuff I can’t reveal, still had Scribbles to talk about. But this? Well, I can at least give you the rundown of what I ripped off to come up with the ideas, because seriously, the lesson here is that EVERY IDEA I’VE EVER HAD IS STOLEN FROM SOMETHING ELSE.
So, C.S.S. Perseus was a big ol’ mashup of Babylon 5, classic Battlestar Galactica, and the Star Trek: New Frontier novels. The titular starship is sent by Totally Not The Federation to be the lone peacekeeping force in a highly unstable corner of the galaxy, resulting in lot of political intrigue and space opera drama. And also the ship has a full complement of space fighters for dogfights and they all wear jackets that are really astonishingly similar to the ones Viper Pilots wear. So there’s that. Once again, I never really came up with any actual plots, just a pile of character profiles that I can’t talk about yet for fear of giving away Far Out There spoilers. Well, I guess I can mention that I had crazy ambitious plans to avoid the whole “aliens only have one culture” cliché. I mean, that IS kinda lazy if you stop and think about it. Like, in a galaxy full of alien races, humans are the ONLY ones who ever splintered into more than one society? So, I had these crazy elaborate plans to have at LEAST three or four distinct cultures for every species, and have that cultural identification every bit as important as the race itself. Heck, I even wanted to have at least one person from Species A have migrated to Planet B and be considered totally part of that society rather than any from his planet of origin. I’d actually still like to see this kind of thing happen more often, though I totally get why it doesn’t. That’s a LOT of world building, and I can see why a lot of people wouldn’t think it’s worth the effort. It was definitely too much for ME to deal with.
So, what’s up with the second half of that heading? Well, while flipping through my old notebooks, I found I’d actually ALREADY cannibalized C.S.S. Perseus once, this time for another idea that ALSO never went anywhere. Valkyrie’s Crest could be said to take place in the same universe, if either of them had ever existed long enough to claim any universe as their own. Really, it’s more than I just recycled a lot of names for things because I couldn’t be bothered to come up with anything new. Aside from ripping off my own unused notes, Valkyrie’s Crest was a hodgepodge of stuff from novels I’d read about Star Trek’s Starfleet Academy and Star Wars’ Jedi Academy, plus liberal doses of… *sigh* the first Harry Potter movie. It was basically a boarding school setting, only with aliens and spaceships instead of magic and wizardy stuff.  Again, I never actually had a PLOT, just a whole bunch of characters and some settings.  What’s weird, to me at least, is that I can’t find any character art for Valkyrie’s Crest, just written the notes. Since my creative process at this point (beyond ripping off whatever I watched last) consisted of drawing characters first and then making up stuff based on the result, I’m really not sure happened here. Then again, I clearly never did anything with this idea either, so maybe that just goes to show how little of a crap I gave.
Anyway, like I said, there’s a lot of little details that will eventually turn up in Far Out There, I just can’t give away how. Come back to this in a year or two, and think to yourself “Oh yeah, this sounds like *insert reference to future story arc*, so THAT’S what he was talking about.” And speaking of spoilers…

Release Force
Man, that’s a completely generic name. Not only does it tell you NOTHING about the concept of the comic, but it doesn’t even fit in with the naming conventions of everything else. All the main characters, locations, and relevant plot doodads were named after really strained, awkward Rock and Roll references. I have no idea how “Release Force” tied into that (Was it “release” like… when an album is released in stores? That’s… really stupid)
Anyway, Release Force was basically Powerpuff Girls, only with a bit of a magical girl anime look grafted onto it… and I WOULD make a joke about me predicting Powerpuff Girls Z here, but I know for a fact that untold hundreds of fanartists beat me to that. Anyway, a mad scientist creates a team of color-coded superpowered girls to fight crime, and names them all after models of electric guitars for some reason (which would have been just BEGGING for copyright trouble). And then lots of fight scenes happen. There’s a couple of ideas in here that I still kind of enjoy, such as the girls using an Thgunderbirds/Evangelion-style network of chutes and catapults to travel around under the city. And then there’s a whole bunch I DON’T, like the inevitable reveal that mad scientist Dad was caught up in all sorts of horrible government plots and the girls were basically zombie pieced together from unwilling accident victims because LOOK AT ME I’M SO EDGY AND GRIMDARK.
So, what does any of this have to do with Far Out There? Not, it doesn’t mean that Layla’s going to join any superpowered magical girl teams. Once again, the part of this comic idea that made it into Far Out There hasn’t actually been seen yet, so I can’t go into detail without spoilers. However, unlike the C.S.S. Pereus example above, this one isn’t ENTIRELY in the future. There is one character who’s already been introduced in Far Out There, but has a big giant crazy-spoilerific secret that began its life as one of the Dark and Edgy Twists of Release Force. The Far Out There version will be considerably less edgy, but still kinda dark, and hopefully a big surprise. I look forward to seeing which reader manages to successfully guess what it is! (because WOW you guys are good at that)

…and I do believe that’s all the unrealized comic that have contributed to Far Out There so far. Rest assured, though, that’s FAR from everything I’ve got lurking in my old notebooks. Pray that I don’t dig any further, your mind may not be able to handle the amateurish mediocrity.

Oh, but as long as I’m talking about other comic ideas that I stopped working on, don’t forget that I’m TOTALLY GONNA HAVE NEW BECKY & GILB COMICS COME THIS CHRISTMAS!

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