Far Out There Christmas Leftovers (Patreon)

I know, right?  We're a week into January and somehow I'm STILL inflicting Christmas content on you?  How could I POSSIBLY have any holiday content left after everything I inflicted on you all over December?  Well, to tell the truth, I don't REALLY have any new Christmas stuff... but I've got some OLD Christmas stuff that nobody saw the first time around!

Yes, in a twist that honestly shouldn't surprise anybody who's been paying attention, I got on such a roll creating art for the Avatar Christmas series his year that I wound up with a surplus.  I lost track of just how many pages I actually had finished, and ended up spending a whole night starting work on not one but TWO pages more than I actually needed.  Well, it seemed like a waste to just toss them out, but the odds of me actually using them THIS year seemed slim at best.  So instead, let's just show off the rough drafts here, and maybe turn it into a bit of a window into my creative process...

This one made it a bit farther along in terms of the physical drawing itself, though it probably would have wound up needing far more editing than the other.  Basically, the idea was to set this one in space, hence the "falling" look, with some kind of colorful nebula in the background.  The color of the background would have also been used in that Christmas Tree Orb or whatever it is.  My vague plan was do turn this into an animated image, with the orb either pulsing or strobing through a series of Christmasy colors.  Of course, as is usually the case, that probably would have resulted in a LOT more tinkering with layers and layers of color gradients, even for just a few frames of animation.  All the more so if I'd decided to actually color Avatar in fully instead of just doing a colored outline or only using a few colors for the whole image.  I was leaning against doing that, though, since I already had two other pages in the stack I was planning to color in that way.  Specifically, page 22 with The Kid was also going to have a strobing animation effect as well, so as soon as I realized I'd miscounted the number of comics I still needed, I decided to scrap this one and focus entirely on THAT one as the designated gimmicky animated page.  The irony upon ironies, of course, is that the background of the page I DID do wound up being extremely disappointing, which is the one part of this comic idea that I definitely would NOT have had trouble getting done.  Oh well.

Okay, the second one is actually two separate drawings I was planing on mashing together, so I'll introduce them separately.  And, obviously, I hadn't made it past the rough pencil stage before I came to my senses, so these are gonna look even more chicken scratch than the first one.  Anyway, this one is also in space, because I was feeling like I'd maybe leaned a little TOO hard on the generic holiday imagery and hadn't taken enough advantage of Far Out There's scifi setting.  And even outside of the Christmas setting, it occurred to me that we hadn't seen anything that took advantage of Avatar's ability to just hang out in the vacuum of space.  So here we have Avatar just riding around on the back of what was GOING to look like a deliberately old-fashioned 50s-style rocket.  At least, that was the initial plan, but it probably would have wound up changing due to the second element of the comic:

Yeah, this one wasn't gonna just have a generic nebula in the background, though I won't lie, I probably still would have used something like that as the bottom layer of the image.  But the big gimmick of this picture was going to be a space station Avatar was apparently flying towards, one that just so happened to look suspiciously like a Christmas wreath.  I was trying to think of what generic Christmas props I HADN'T used yet, and a wreath was all I could come up with, which immediately made me think of all those ring-shaped space stations in old school scifi.  I think I was also inspired by this painting of some kind of space ship version of a Christmas cracker... which also inadvertently underlines the problem with this whole idea.  If you'll look closely at my drawing, you'll pick out the early stages of a "bow" that's actually a few giant radar dishes and solar panels.  That was going to be the real gimmick, that the station wasn't DELIBERATELY designed to look like a wreath, but the pile of future tech just so happened to come together in a way that that resembled one.  But really look at that painting I linked to, even with the blatant Santa art painted all over it, the "cracker" is still covered in lots of realistic details to get across how big and futuristic it is.  Now really think about MY art, namely what I was just saying about the rocket Avatar was riding on.  My particular set of skills is much better suited to the smooth, clean, 50s brand of scifi art than the intricate, messy, detail-heavy, brand of spaceship design that I think this joke would require.  At the very least, if I AM going to pull off a really detailed design, I'll have my hands full just trying to get the surface level shape of the object right.  Trying to convincingly pull of one collection of objects that ALSO happens to sort of blur together into the impression of an entirely separate object is a bit above my skill set.  And judging from what art I actually did get done, if I HAD stuck to a smoother, simpler station design, the lack of detail would have made the wreath-ness of the station too obvious for the joke to land.  What's here doesn't look like a station that "unintentionally" resembles a Christmas wreath to me, it looks like Santa's space program deliberately constructed a holiday spacedock over the North Pole.  And that's not an unfunny idea, mind you, but it's not the one I'd set out to draw, and I'd still have had to re-draw a lot and add whole different details to actually make THAT joke land.  So as soon as I realized I'd miscounted, I was honestly a bit relieved to have an excuse to just bail on this one.  ...and then I showed it to everybody anyway!

So yeah, I've had plenty of Christmas comic ideas I didn't run with over the years, but I'm pretty sure this was the first time I'd actually made it all the way to the drawing stage on pages I literally didn't need.  I'm not sure if that's proof of how into the Christmas comics I get, or a sign that I need to worry more about my ability to count.