Far Out There - figuring out Ichabod (Patreon)

Gosh, it’s been a while since I did a Far Out There blog, hasn’t it? Well, I’ve been working on posting the old Voting Incentives on the

new gallery page

, which means looking at a lot of reeeeeaaaaally old Far Out There art, and that’s got me feeling all nostalgic. Well, that and deeply ashamed of the terrible early art, but that’s how every webcomic artist feels. The point is, it’s making me realize just how much the comic and its characters haves changed over the years, especially Ichabod.

The catalyst of all this was a series of early comics and incentives where ichabod is daydreaming about being an evil dictator. The idea was, since this guy spent all his time pointing out what other people were doing wrong, eventually he’d start wanting to just force people to do stuff HIS way, right? Well, no. I couldn’t really think of anything to do with that character quirk, and as time went on, it fit him less and less. This was a guy who didn’t really care if anyone actually followed his advice as long as he got paid for offering it, and would actively avoid being saddled with any kind of responsibility. The thought of him wanting to actually run a planet (or whatever) just didn’t make sense. But that’s the thing about Ichabod, it took a LONG time for me to work out just what the heck he was about as a character.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere (including other blog posts), Ichabod was intended to serve as The Dorctor of Far Out There, with Layla, Trigger and Avatar being his Companions. He would be the character driving the events of the comics, while the rest of the cast would be the ones experiencing character development. And right away, you can see the problem: I’d established a ‘character” who didn’t have any character traits, just a role as a plot device (also, I’d rather grossly misunderstood how Doctor Who works, but that’s something else entirely). That’s the main reason the kids ended up taking over the comic, not only were they more fun to write, they were EASIER to write since I had a clear understanding of their personalities and what they’d do in a given situation. But Ichabod? I had no clue who this guy was, which made it very difficult to write jokes for him.

I’m not sure how much it shows, but over the first couple of years I tried out several different personalities for Ichabod, none of which really worked out. The first version was Chessmaster Ichabod, a guy who’d play mind games with people in order to teach them Important Life Lessons. You can see traces of this in the way Ichabod tried to explain away ruining Layla’s life as being for her benefit. Unfortunately, anyone who goes back and reads those early pages can see why this version of the character didn’t work. That kind of plot twist is HARD to write, and I didn’t do it well at all. And even if I had pulled it off, it would’ve been even more difficult to make this kind of character actually be FUNNY rather than just a preachy bummer. Early Far Out there was too talkly already, the last thing it needed was a guy who lived to give people lectures.

Ichabod Take Two was tied in with a number of subplots that never actually saw the light of day, thank God. Like so many terrible writers, I went through a phase of believing the key to brilliance was sudden, jarring shifts into dark, disturbing territory. Remember the Aborted Arcs Tabitha’s Kids or La Faulx? Yeah, Ichabod was going to be tied into that brand of ill-advised dark & edgy plots for a while. The idea was that Ichabod would maintain a calm, easygoing exterior was a cover for his willingness to Make The Difficult Choice and Do What Needed To Be Done or whatever other clichés people use to justify having their hero do morally reprehensible for cheep shock value. I kept trying to come up with a plot where Ichabod would have a Nitpicking job go really, horribly wrong, to the point that he’d manipulate the various parties into destroying each other in a deliberately heartless manner. Sort of a nerdy combination of Light Yagami and Jack Bauer, I guess. In theory, this would be compelling and dramatic or whatever. In retrospect, I guess this idea was an outgrowth of the “wanting to be an evil dictator” plot thread. If nothing else, they withered up and died the same way. Like most of the “Dark & Edgy Far Out There” concepts, this idea was dropped once I realized how hard it would be to write, to say nothing of how I wouldn’t be able to go back to writing Ichabod as a comedic character afterwards. Besides, once Sophia and Claire had been introduced, there wasn't any need for Ichabod to resort to desperate measures to get out of a jam.

Ichabod Take Three was sort of the opposite of the previous versions. Rather than being completely in control of the situation, he would be an incompetent neurotic only barely holding it together. This would be a guy who used Nitpicking to hide his deep insecurities as a person, the only way he could feel in charge of a situation. In fact, I even toyed with the idea that Ichabod collected a menagerie of younger companions (or younger-looking, in Avatar’s case) specifically because he was too intimidated by “grown ups.” There’s some hints of this characterization in Ichabod’s fear of Stilez, as well as the idea that Sophia keeps having to bail him out of situations (and badger him into staying in contact). These ideas themselves worked out pretty well, though the character motivations behind them still didn’t. See, while this version of Ichabod was more relatable, and thus easier to write, he wasn’t more FUN to write, never mind fun to read. To me, he just seemed lame. That was the point, yes, but still, who wants to read about a lame character? I don’t. I put up with lame people in real life all the time. I want my entertainment to give me some escape from lame things, ya know? (I should point out that this version of Ichabod was also the one that came closest to being autobiographical, which tells you all you need to know right there)

Ichabod finally started to come together for real around the time that I went back to that whole “Ichabod as The Doctor” idea from the early days. I’ve freely admitted that The Killer Station of Deadly Doom borrows the broad strokes of its plot from the Fourth Doctor serial “The Ribos Operation”, so it’s no surprise that I wrote Ichabod very much like The Doctor in that story. Rather than being incompetent, Ichabod became hyper-competent, though so quirky that few people noticed. The whole point of The Killer Station of Deadly Doom was to force myself into writing Ichabod as more of a heroic character, and The Doctor is a pretty good template to follow in that regard. The only problem was, that incarnation of Ichabod has, well, kind of a spotlight stealer. He HAD to be, since Killer Station of Deadly Doom had so few characters, but it was hard to showcase that kind of personality in the ensemble cast of the main comic. That’s not to say this version of Ichabod is GONE, in fact, I’d say Killer Station of Deadly Doom is the birth of the “real” Ichabod. I just needed to figure out the best way to use the guy.

Ironically, the final key was going back to the very problem Ichabod had in the first place: my not knowing what was going on in his head. For the longest time, I tried to make sense of who he was and understand what his motivations were. But look at The Doctor, part of what makes him so interesting is what you DON’T know about him. At least in incarnations like the Fourth, there’s a fundamental alien-ness about him that ensures you never REALLY know what he’s thinking and why. So, rather than struggling with my inability to understand Ichabod, I decided to just embrace it and crank it up to eleven. Ichabod is just WEIRD. He’ll tell you a billion stories about his past, but they don’t really add up, and you don’t understand him any better than you did when he started. You have no idea why he’s into all the things he’s into, or how he gets his job done in spite of them. That was the big problem with the previous attempts to write Ichabod as smart: I was trying to write a character who as smarter than I was, and walk the reader through a thought process I couldn’t keep up with myself. By deliberately keeping that thought process a mystery, and actually playing that mystery up, I get to have the fun reveal of Ichabod being ahead of the game without actually having to be smart enough to get there myself. To add to the irony, this kind of brings Ichabod back to being more plot device than character: somebody to spout exposition and weird bits of backstory when he’s not being the deus ex machina. But you know what? At least he’s FUN now. Writing vague, confusing bits of Ichabod’s history is one of my favorite things to do in the comic right now, made all the more fun by the fact that I don’t understand the person telling these stories anymore than you guys do. This is supposed to be a comedy, after all. At the end of the day, Ichabod just needs to be entertaining. Consistent, yes, but you can keep a character consistent without really understanding him as a “person”, IF you do it right. It’s taken many years, but I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of that.

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