Far Out There: Origin of the Web-Species (Patreon)

The last couple of Conventional Wisdom blogs have been really nostalgic, so I might as well let Far Out There get in on the fun. I wanted to talk a bit about my primary influences during the creation of Far Out There… and I have to be really, super specific about that, otherwise we’ll be here all day. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I was raised on science fiction. Literally one of my earliest clear memories is of sitting on the couch with my parents watching first run episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. They brought me up RIGHT, dang it. Star Trek, Star Wars, Forbidden Planet, 2001, Battlestar Galactica, Godzilla, Space: 1999, Buck Rogers, and this list is starting to dip in quality so I’d better stop before revealing my irrational love for Message from Space or The Black Hole (oops). The point is, I loved spaceships and ray guns and goofy aliens a LONG time before I started drawing a webcomic about them. But none of them are in that little collage at the top of the article, are they?

No, the three catalysts that did the most to spark the creation of Far Out There, at least in terms of the raw idea of doing a scifi comedy in the first place were Bonus Stage, Doctor Who, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Let’s start with that one, since it takes the longest to write. The Hitthiker’s Guide was one of those things I’d heard about long before I got around to checking it out (read the Conventional Wisdom blogs and you’ll find that covers a LOT of things). I knew the series and books existed, but it wasn’t until the movie came out that I ever actually saw any of it. And yeah, the movie’s not as good as some of the other incarnations, but it still kind of blew my mind at the time. See, it somehow never crossed my mind that you could do a straight up scifi yarn AND a for-real comedy at the same time. Sure, I’d seen science fiction with funny moments, and I’d seen comedies with scifi trappings, but I’d never encountered anything that managed to strike such a balance of both and do right by both (In retrospect, this really SHOULDN’T have been so surprising, since I knew good and well that Futurama existed) That was the initial seed of Far Out There: a humorous romp through space with no real “plot”, just funny stuff happening to funny characters. A lot of the early material had a strong Douglas Adams influence as well, for better or for worse. Just look at the backstories of Trigger, Layla, and Avatar and you’ll find a common thread of pointless absurdity, the kind that goes along nicely with the thought of bulldozing a planet to build a bypass. In fact, even the all-white look of The Exposition owes a lot to the Heart of Gold.

At around the same time that the Hitchhiker’s Guide film was coming out, I’d also stumbled onto another interest: a flash cartoon called Bonus Stage. In keeping with my general trend of getting into things via the most convoluted means possible, I discovered webcomics were a thing as a side effect of watching webCARTOONS. This was back when Homestar Runner was getting big, and the notion of people doing cartoons and just unleashing them on the world via The Internet instead of TV was fascinating. One of my favorites at the time was Bonus Stage, originally a geek humor series that turned into… well, EVENTUALLY it turned into a person’s one-man war against his own fanbase, but before that, it devoted an arc to the characters flying around the universe in a spaceship… for some reason. As luck would have it, this happened at roughly the same time that Hitchhiker’s Guide movie hit, so that just fueled my desire to do some kind of scifi comedy. What’s more, it gave me the obvious idea of doing it on The Internet. I mean, I had notebooks upon notebooks full of my terrible ideas for movies and TV shows that I’d make if I ever had the chance, but I wasn’t GOING to get that chance, so that’s where they stayed (the world didn’t miss much). But now, since we were living in the future, a person could just post it online and immediately become rich and famous beyond his wildest dreams! Granted, at the time, I was imagining Far Out There as another Flash animation like Bonus Stage, which was pretty optimistic for a person who knew NOTHING about animation. But thankfully, watching Bonus Stage lead to rummaging around the rest of KeenSpot’s library, which led to my discovering webcomics like Dominic Deegan, which in turn led to the idea that the sort of art I DID know how to make could find an audience.

And that brings us to the final ingredient in Far Out There’s primordial soup: Doctor Who. The same time that Hitchhiker’s Guide came out, this other bastion of British science fiction was making its big comeback (Speaking of British scifi, sorry to anyone hoping to see Red Dwarf get mentioned here. While it’s an obvious pick for any scifi/comedy list, I never got around to watching it until AFTER Far Out There had already launched. Too bad, if I’d seen it in time, I might not have wasted Far Out There’s first page on the fact that there are no aliens as if that was a new idea) Now, Doctor Who isn’t a comedy like the other items on this list, but it still influenced the shape of Far Out There in several ways. Aside from a general idea of how to strung smaller stories together into larger arcs, Who served as the template I used to make the whole cast come together. At the time, I had a whole pile of characters I wanted to use, but no clear understanding of who they were, how they’d relate to one another, and what their roles in the story would be. Believe it or not, my earliest drafts had the central characters being a much younger Ichabod, an older (looking) Avatar, and of all people FRANK. In fact, Frank was the most prominent of the three, with Ichabod just sort of tagging along. Once I started watching Who, though, the thought occurred to change Ichabod’s role significantly. Originally, the “Nitpicker” was envisioned as an especially annoying sort of wandering bard, a very passive sort of character. But now, Ichabod was The Doctor: the central character in whose wake the rest of the cast traveled. Characters like Trigger and Layla only took shape once I started to imagine them as Companions: the side characters who tagged along to have things explained to them, to get in trouble, and undergo the sort of character development that the central character couldn’t. Granted, those kids turned out to be a lot more entertaining than Ichabod, so they get a lot more screen time than the “main” character. Still, that basic structure remains, the core around which the rest of the comic crystallized.

And that’s the basic ingredients that went into the original Far Out There concept. Hopefully, over the following years, it’s managed to mature into something all its own… or at least found enough extra things to rip off that no one stands out. That’s about the same thing as originality, right?

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