In the notes of the previous blog, I mentioned that we were getting into the second “volume” of character soundtracks; newer playlist for mostly newer characters that haven’t had as much fine-tuning as the original batch. Having said that, though, there’s a degree of overlap between these two “groups,” due to how long it takes some characters to finally make it onto the page. The He...
2020-03-20 07:54:31 +0000 UTC View Post
You gotta understand: the Carolina Theatre has two movie screen. There's the big screen, the nice big fancy theater that feels like one of those giant, old-fashioned movie houses... and the OTHER screen, which might as well be in a closet. The Disney double feature I saw Friday night was on The Big Screen, TMNT II wasn't. One was much, much, much more comfortable and relaxing ...
2020-03-20 07:33:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Back before everything totally blew apart and fell off the rails and whatever, the last Character soundtrack I’d posted was for Ichabod’s nitpicking boss Sophia, so it’s only natural that we should jump back in with her gun-totting, chain smoking, bespectacled assistant Claire. Like with her boss, this one was simultaneously a bit challenging and really freeing. On the one hand, we don’...
2020-02-12 00:58:35 +0000 UTC View Post
IT'S A MIRACLE! I actually AM still finding time to produce some new content in the middle of all the site rebuilding! THE BLOOD SACRIFICES WORKED!
Anyway, some explanation is probably in order here. The previous few cons, I'd sort of slacked off at taking decent comic background pictures, so I went ALL OUT with the photo documentation this weekend. Every room I wa...
2020-02-12 00:34:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, it’s time for another “reflections on the past year/thoughts on the new one” blog post! Actually, it’s well past time, but I’ve kind of been super busy lately with website and computer stuff. Which, ironically, is the one of the main things this blog needs to talk about. Also, I maaaay have thrown out the first draft of this blog for being too mopey and depressing. That’s a pr...
2020-01-24 10:48:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, last time I threw a bone to my holiday-hating friends and unleashed my bile and wrath over Christmas songs I DON’T like, so now the other shoe drops. As I said more than once in that blog, I actually LOVE Christmas stuff, music included. I fire up my massive holiday playlists as soon as Thanksgiving hits, and it’s literally the only thing I listen to for the next month. That’s not s...
2019-12-21 19:42:25 +0000 UTC View Post
...not that I really should have been surprised at myself for not spending money on food, I never do that anymore. I legit stuffed a cooler full of non-perishable food when I went Christmas shopping yesterday, and I'll do it again when I go BACK out tomorrow. No, the real surprising part of this was that I pulled the whole "eating camping food" trick WHILE STILL WITHIN WALKING DISTA...
2019-12-17 23:07:30 +0000 UTC View Post
(Okay, so the PLAN was to have some free bonus blogs coming out for Christmas, mixed in with all the regularly scheduled stuff, namely wrapping up the previous Conventional Wisdom set, launching the next anime series, and some new Far Out There stuff. But the plan didn't include SmackJeeves burning down and me having to suddenly set up a whole new everything right in the middle of the...
2019-12-06 23:48:14 +0000 UTC View Post
People who don't spend a lot of time at conventions probably think I obsess too much over the state of the bathrooms, but they don't understand. They CAN'T understand. Until you've walked into a high-traffic bathroom at midnight on Saturday, when the crowds are at their drunkest and the hotel staff as officially stopped caring, when half the toilets are broken and all the paper towe...
2019-11-24 00:52:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, so I have a list of all the Far Out There soundtracks with rough notes for the blog posts, and I’ve been sticking to the order of that list since I started posting these. I went and jumped WAY ahead for this one, though, because it’s character was actually appearing in the comics and I wanted to synch things up since I didn’t know when I’d get the chance again… and now I’m not...
2019-11-15 05:00:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Obviously, it's helps that I'm not "at" the convention in question, I'm just driving back and forth to Durham then sleeping at home. I WISH I could somehow get pages fully edited and posted while at the convention center.
Anyway, as befitting a tiny, one-day convention, there's not a lot of pages in the queue for this one. Editing them up shouldn't interfere noticeably with th...
2019-11-09 12:37:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Not gonna lie, though, this though continues to fester in my brain. It's pretty rare to come across a wrestling-related cosplay idea where I'm actually not quite overweight ENOUGH rather than the alternative That said, I do still have another wrestler cosplay that actually MIGHT see the light of day sooner rather than later...
Also, this is another instance where I still have ...
2019-10-29 22:00:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, it’s October, the spoooooooookiest month of the year if you happen to live in a region that celebrates Halloween. In that spirit (oooooh, you see what I did there? GHOSTS!) let’s do a character soundtrack about Far Out There’s creeeeeepiet character who probably isn’t that bad at all: VENGEANCE! With a buildup like that, obviously we need some spooky music for Vengeance’s ...
2019-10-12 22:03:53 +0000 UTC View Post
I literally had a whole page about the inevitability of Tominic's death all written out in my head, I was just waiting for it to finally happen before I actually started drawing. Good thing I waited, too. These comics took long enough to get done WITHOUT me spending time and energy on a comic I would never actually get to use. That's the danger of trying to get ahead on these ...
2019-10-10 02:13:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Last time we did one of these, it was for Mariska, and I was joking about how now we were digging into the really obscure and rarely seen characters. But in the time since I posted that soundtrack and this one, Mariska finally completed her YEARS LONG trip and actually showed up in the same room as Ichabod, so she just had a MAJOR upgrade in relevance. This time, though, THIS time we’re deali...
2019-09-22 23:40:53 +0000 UTC View Post
If life operated under proper comedic timing more reliably, then the second I put the phone away and actually TRIED to play, I would have lost horribly. But no, even after my right hand re-entered the fray, I still won by a comfortable margin. That's not me bragging...
2019-09-22 21:32:54 +0000 UTC View Post
...and that's basically how Giant Gorg goes.
I'd HOPED to finally wrap this series up and be started on Sabagebu comics by now, buuuut I kinda sorta bit off more than I could chew on other projects again. We ARE almost done, though! Big finish coming soon, and a whole new series coming after that!
Don't worry, past me. I'll only use that material for a Patreon comic, no barely anyone will ever see it.
But seriously, though, I'm so used to having a pad on-hand and jotting down every little thing that happens that it feels VERY weird to be in Con Mode and NOT have it right there. Like, losing my notepad is a thing that's happened, and things that happen get written down i...
2019-09-08 05:59:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Man, the joke for this one kind of got out of my control. The gag was SUPPOSED to be how lazy and lethargic and old I am compared to the kids these days, but now all I can focus on is the cameo kids in the back. Such scene stealers.
But seriously, who actually has the energy to RUN places anymore?
...also, I just now realized this explains SO MUCH about how late the comi...
2019-08-30 22:15:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, now we’re starting to get into the truly obscure secondary characters. You know Mariska, Ichabod’s nitpicking friend? The one with the goggles? She’s got a playlist too! Actually, hers is one of my favorite out of all the Far Out There playlists purely from a personal listening standpoint. It’s also one that I’m gonna have a harder time describing than usual, since most of these...
2019-08-26 13:26:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Look, I just really love the whole Space Battleship Yamato-style of aliens where it's just a different skin color and some really light hair. It explains a lot of Far Out There characters, doesn't it? Admittedly, the realities of this era of animation mean I COULD be a bit off here. Depending of the lighting, some scenes make it look more like GREY skin, with the blue/green ha...
2019-08-19 03:46:17 +0000 UTC View Post
I’m absolutely thinking too hard about this one. Mid-comic writing, I just had this sudden, irresistible urge to draw Yoink riding an atomic bomb, Major Kong style. No context, no joke for it to be the punchline too, just Yoink straddling a weapon of mass destruction from a cold war dark comedy. The weird thing, well, weirdER thing, is that I actually found myself really TR...
2019-08-13 03:02:44 +0000 UTC View Post
You know what? My constant, crippling schedule slip does occasionally have a silver lining. If I'd wrapped up the Giant Gorg comics weeks ago, like all logic says SHOULD have happened, this wouldn't have been one of them. Since I bought the DVDs at Animazement, Giant Gorg has been on rotation at Anime Night, and re-watching it with other people in the room provoked some comparisons ...
2019-07-28 14:47:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Quite a while back I did a blog about how I got into anime in the first place, and ever since then I’ve had the idea to do a sort of sequel dedicated to the stuff that specifically influenced Far Out There. I mean, anyone with eyes can see that Far Out There has a heavy Japanese influence on its art, so there’s obviously something to talk about there. Better yet, since it’s about anime, I...
2019-07-23 07:55:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Okay, of all the characters in Far Out There, Skye’s character soundtrack should be the most obvious, right? She’s a hippy chick who travels around with a space-van full of Jesus Freaks. Heck, we’ve actually SEEN her playing guitar on numerous occasions. Obviously she listens to psychedelic jam band rock, right? Well… yes, of course she does. It’s physically not possible for me to hav...
2019-07-10 16:21:10 +0000 UTC View Post
*gasp* There's another anime comic? But, but, it hasn't been two whole months since the last one! Weekly Anime Comics can't come out within actual WEEKS of each other! That's not how this works! It'll bring ANARCHY! CHAOS! THE END IS NIGH!
No, but seriously, the gist of this page was written AGES ago, pretty much right after I bough the DVDs, but I didn...
2019-06-24 22:11:13 +0000 UTC View Post
As a result, Jenna’s playlist is another one that’s pretty heavy on obvious, familiar choices. Not only is the afore mentioned “Take On Me” present, but so are a slew of other “play this song to immediately indicate that your movie is taking place in the 80s” standbys. “Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club, “Always Something There To Remind Me” by Naked Eyes, “Kids In America...
2019-06-23 02:30:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey, so remember how I said that that last page with all the mechas in the bar was something I’d been saving to be the big finale but needed to go ahead and use the idea early? Well, I kind of sort of lied a bit about how “final” that finale would have been. I was also sitting on this little bit of silliness to use at the VERY end as the denouement for this whole series… but now I need ...
2019-06-18 22:16:44 +0000 UTC View Post
Imagine all the gross, squicky, unsanitary, not-suitable-for-an-all-ages-comic reasons a person could have to suddenly leave a convention expressly to buy a bag full of emergency cleaning supplies. Sort through all the nasty potential details and compile a list of all the absolute worst options. Whatever you're thinking, it's undoubtedly WAY worse than what actually happened, but it...
2019-05-30 07:13:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Well, last time we had Stilez’s playlist, so it’d be downright weird if I DIDN’T follow it up with Tax. Obvious, anything Tax listens to is gonna have to be happy and boisterous and catchy and straightforward and… um… how do I put this… Annoying. Yeah, I tried to find a delicate way to say this, but Tax’s playlist just might be the most obnoxious collections of ...
2019-05-21 03:05:17 +0000 UTC View Post