Far Out There: The Vault of Forgotten Comics

A while back, I did a bunch of Voting Incentives that showcased unused Far Out There comic ideas. Some of them were polished up versions of pages I cut out previous story arcs, and others were summaries of whole story arcs that I never got around to doing at all. But there’s a third breed of unused comic that’s very different from either of those. Back when I was first working out the idea of Far Out There, I sketched out a lot -and I mean a LOT- of single page gag comics which have a WILDLY different feel than the series proper.

Obviously, I didn’t have a handle of how to write any of the characters yet, that’s kind of a given with these early draft sorts of things. As a result, most of the characters are pretty flat and unrecognizable. But it’s weird to look back and see how different the writing style was as a result. There’s no ongoing story anywhere and very little sense of continuity. The cast just walk into a room, something vaguely sci-fi sounding happens, and two pages later it’s over. Honestly, that was the point at this early stage. I was on a pretty big Douglas Adams kick at the time, and what I really wanted to write was a bunch of absurdist sketches with a science fiction bent. Actually, even calling them “sketches” is a bit of a stretch. They’re vaguely funny-sounding settings in which a story MIGHT happen, being passed off as the story itself. The characters were just there as an excuse to explain the settings, not to be… you know, actual characters. That might be forgivable if the sci-fi ideas were just so good that they could hold the reader's attention all on their own, but after browsing through all these pecil-on-notebook-paper doodles again, I can promise you they were NOT. It wasn’t until I got a feel for the cast as people, and actually started writing them AS people instead of Punchline Delivery Devices, that Far Out There really came together as a thing.

So what to do with all these older pages? At first, I’d planned to just throw them in whenever I didn’t have time to write up something new, but the current state of the comic would make that very difficult. With the stronger continuity, I can’t just throw something in at random anymore. Plus, the pages are so gag-based, they don’t really do anything to advance the characters. Then again, seeing how often modern Far Out There errs on the side of character at the expense of having gags at all, maybe it WOULD be good to revive a few of these early brain farts…

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