So, I re-read all of Far Out There… (Patreon)

If you’re following me close enough to actually pay money on Patreon and read this, you already know what’s been up with my comics over the past year plus. My old host SmackJeeves drastically changed format at the end of 2019, prompting me to finally get my own hosting and begin the arduous process of re-posting around twelve years of content. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I’d been horrifically burned out for SEVERAL years by that point and needed the break, not to mention it’s not like I was gonna have much ELSE to do during 2020. It’s taken a long time, obviously (long enough for my new sites to out SmackJeeves entirely), and as I write this it’s mostly still not finished. I mean, yes, the “main” comics are finally all up by now, but there’s still a ton of other content from across the old side that needs to go back online. This isn’t just because I’m slow and lazy (not I said not JUST) but because I’ve been re-editing and fixing as many little details as I could, plus adding extra commentary by my crust old man current self. Not only does this take more time than just a quick reposting, but it means I actually had to, ya know, READ every single page all over again. It’s been quite the experience, lemme tell ya.

Now, this wasn’t the first time I’d gone back and revisited old content, I’ve done that on plenty of occasions. Many was the time I had to go back and look up some random detail and wound up having to browse through an entire arc to find it. And I’m not gonna lie, there’s been plenty of times I’ve kept on reading even after I found whatever I was looking for, just because the trip down memory lane was so much fun. But those would almost always focus on isolated pockets of story somewhere in the middle of the comic, and I’d inevitably skip over stuff like holiday comics that weren’t relevant. I dunno if I’d ever done a complete, focused, exhaustive reread of every single page of Far Out There from beginning to now before.

If nothing else, I can say for sure that I don’t go back and look at the first year or two of Far Out There if I don’t absolutely have to. It’s one of the oldest clichés in all of webcomic-land, but MAN to the early pages of Far Out There suck. It’s so clear that I had NO idea what I was doing, either from an artistic or a writing or even just a purely technical standpoint. I didn’t even bother trying to fix stuff in most of those early pages because, I mean, what even is there to NOT fix? I’ve said on several occasions that I want to go back and completely redraw the opening arc of Far Out There, and being forced to revisit those early days again just drove home how a ground-up do-over is the only way to fix most of those problems. Don’t worry, I’m not talking about replacing all the old comics on the site, but rather doing up all those new comics in print form. Readers on the site would get the original arc as the “free version,” and anybody who wants the “REAL version” of that arc could go buy the book. And yes, I’d absolutely look into getting you patrons copies for as close to free as possible. Obviously, that’s still a project for way in the future, since I still need to actually finish getting the new site all set up, not to mention actually draw some NEW comics again. The important thing is, just like every other webcomic artist in existence, I cringe uncontrollably at the sight of my earliest work. It’s true what they say: you learn more in the first year of doing comics regularly than the entire lifetime of art lessons leading up to it.

On a happier note, though, I’ve mostly really enjoyed my trip down memory lane with Far Out There. It helps that, once I got past those earliest comics, I actually DID allow myself to go back and fix things. There’s little a creator hates more than looking back at a past work and seeing that one little flaw it’s too late to fix, even if nobody other than him even notices it. As a general rule, going back and obsessing over old mistakes is super unhealthy, especially if it eats into the time one SHOULD be spending on making brand NEW mistakes. However, with new comics on hiatus during the move anyway, I had no excuse NOT to try and fix some things, and that turned the whole experience into something surprisingly therapeutic. At long last, little errors that had driven me crazy for YEARS were finally getting cleaned up. That’s a great morale boost, let me tell ya. The really ironic thing, though, is how the amount of time I spent fixing little things was inversely proportionate to how little said little things actually were. Again, the glaringly-bad, fundamentally flawed pages were too big to fix without re-drawing things, so I had to just grit my teeth and let that stuff slide. But a minor thing like a misshaped speech bubble or some tiny defect in a character’s expression? Those things nobody other than the original artist would ever notice?  The very fact that they were small enough that I could justify not fixing them wound up be the very reason I COULD justify it. “Eh, it’s just a few stray lines I can clean up in GIMP, how long could it possibly take?” …and then suddenly it’s midnight and I’ve spent the entire afternoon tinkering with a single page. And THAT’S why it took me over a year to get through all these comics.

And technical fiddling aside, it’s been an interesting experience just to READ all this stuff again. Not just to skim over it looking for specific details, but to actually absorb the story in a linear fashion. This is another thing every webcomic artist says, but these things read a LOT different when you binge-read ‘em in one sitting rather than spreading it out across once-or-twice-a-week chunks. It’s especially been interesting to sit down and revisit the comics from around 2016/2017, since that was the peak of Conventional Wisdom’s frantic con trip/Artist Alley schedule, and a lot of those summers are just a blur to me now. I was surprised just how many little gags and story bits I’d just plain forgotten about because how busy I was al the time. Frantically trying to crank out pages in the breaks between trying to crank out OTHER pages doesn’t allow for a lot of time to dwell on the story being told, and a lot of little moments had fallen between the cracks for me until I went back and really paid attention again. That was fun.

What was LESS fun was re-reading the comics that came out in 2018/2019. Anybody with ANY familiarity with my output over the past few years knows I was dealing with absolutely hellacious burnout by that point, and it really started to show in Far Out There. Not so much visually, oddly enough. I actually thing this was around the point where I finally, truly hit my stride in making Far Out There look the way I’d always wanted it to look. Indeed, there’s quite a few comics where the art is all that’s there to elevate some substandard writing. But there’s a LOT of substandard writing at that period, and it’s all the more glaring when you binge dozens of pages in a row instead of one page every few days. If you’ve been reading all my “Historical Notes” on those pages as they went up, you’ve already heard me complain about all the blatant filler pages and awkward pacing and deliberate stalling, and you’ve already heard why that happened.

For one thing, I’d gotten too burned out to maintain my usual pattern of writing out rough drafts for multiple comics (usually four to a page) to straighten out the various little plot detail and just to solidify the big ones. Instead, I was just drawing up each new page completely from scratch with nothing but a Big Picture idea of what the whole story arc was supposed to look like. It’s way more tiring to come up with comic ideas this way, which exacerbated the burnout, but also made the writing a lot more sloppy since I kept forgetting stuff. Characters would disappear for pages on end, requiring unnecessary extra pages to re-establish them before they did anything major, and continuity flubs got worse and worse since I couldn’t remember what I’d done in pages that were mostly made up on the spot. And that’s not even getting into the pages that literally did nothing but fill an update slot because I didn’t have it in me to complete the planed page. And that’s the other thing: I was so burned out that the thought of wrapping up the current storyline and beginning the next arc honestly scared me. I knew it’d be a labor-intensive arc to do, and that it’d be too complicated to just make up page-by-page, but I also didn’t have the energy to sit down and work all those details out like I needed. So I stalled. 2019 in particular has page after page after PAGE of blatant filler that could be edited out entirely without changing anything, it’s just there because I wanted to push the inevitable end of the current arc back a little farther. I actually found that stretch even harder to re-read than the early comics, since at least then I didn’t know any better. Heck, it was exhilarating to actually be creating my own thing, even if it was really unpolished. 2019 Far Out There is just more polished artwork over a creaking void of writing.

Which is why, at the risk of sounding horribly insensitive, I’m honestly glad the past year turned out the way it did for me. Again, no disrespect to literally the entire rest of the world, but the combination of SmackJeeves change and Real World lockdown forced me to FINALLY take the break I’d needed for a very long time. I’ve mentioned this a lot elsewhere as well, but the process of editing an otherwise finished comic is a MUCH more relaxing process than writing and drawing one from scratch. Yes, the end result of creating something new is more exhilarating, but that Zen state of just sanding off the rough edges and making things more symmetrical and fiddling with teeny tiny little details is very restorative. Spending over a year of just doing that all the time was alone enough to recharge quite a lot of batteries, and now that it’s done I feel much more excited about doing new comics again than I ever did this time in 2019. That is to say, I'm excited at the prospect of making new comics PERIOD. What’s more, for all my complaining about the writing quality in the last batch of comics, confronting those comics HAS gotten me fired up to do something better. I feel like I get a lot of my best creative surges in response to something else, either because I see something I like and want to do my own version, or because I saw something I DON’T like and want to do something better. In this case, the thing I want to do better than is my own previous output.

More than all of that, though, the most important thing is that all this free time gave me a chance to PLAN. After all those months of making things up from page to page, I’m going into this new year FINALLY having a backlog of rough drafts to work from again. Even better, I took the time to really, extensively write out exactly what happens in that next arc I was so worried about. Not to the detail of drafting out individual pages, but laying out the larger strokes of the plot so that I know what needs to happen where in order to get to the next thing. Hopefully, it’s all planned out enough to get me where I need to go without any stress, but still with enough room to improvise and keep things fun. (One of the dullest parts of any story arc is when I finally have to start resolving things, because then I’m just tying together preexisting details and have no room to do anything new) Heck, I got in such a groove of writing down future plot details that I filled up a big ol’ Word document with EVERYTHING I hope to one day do in Far Out There. So, ya know, if I drop dead tomorrow, there’s at least an outline of what I was gonna do. It’s literally called “Read If I Die,” because I’m morbid like that.

And in the end, probably the nicest thing about reading through all of Far Out There again was just the realization that, for all my complaining,. I really do LIKE this comic. I’ve said it before, but Far Out There was always meant to be the comic I wished somebody ELSE would write so that I could read it. I’m just drawing it because because nobody else was. And even with all the hiccups and errors and year-spanning bad choices, it’s still the comic I enjoy reading more than anything else out there; the one webcomic that covers ALL of my various quirks and interests. If nothing else, I’ll always know I got THAT right.