The Short of It
Faraway Stars was a flurry of good ideas cobbled with poor execution and poorer art. Yeah, the story can carry the art, but only so far. I didn't like it and neither did a lot of other people. First lookers said "ew" and moved on.
You can read the long of it if you want, but sufficed to say that I never managed to keep a firm grip on the meandering story, never managed to improve the art and never managed to keep myself from taking every possible side-tangent I could think of. In sum, the story got away from the author and I got so far off-track from my initial goals that it became harder and harder to turn the ship back on course. I created 3 or 4 strips after the last posted strip, but they never worked and I had to fight and claw just to get them done, poor as they were. The spark was gone, the love was over and I wanted to move on and do something else.
The Looooong of It
In the beginning, I had a ton of ideas and the comics seemed to almost write themselves. The humor wasn't great, I admit, but it was at least present. The characters were sparsely fleshed out, but there was time. There was room, and I was enjoying it. I started doing the comic 5 days a week.
Then, things got complicated.
As the story progressed, I found it was taking a long time to get to the point. I cheated with a "sumup" page and got back on track, but I regretted it and saw it as a failure on my part. Then, I noticed that one of my characters was very similar to a character in a much more popular comic and I started to really worry about inadvertantly plagarizing other works. I wasn't happy with my audit, and made some changes to try and keep my ideas from including others.
Then, the comic took on a life of its own.
I couldn't control the off-tangent comics that became core canon. The sheer size of the character list was worrysome, but moreso was that I would forget to finish a thread and then go back and wonder what I had been thinking. My editorial control was non-existant. My notes were all over the map, my original story arc was all but forgotten. The humor dropped to zero, the art got even worse and I was losing what little padding I had. I started to dread starting a writing session and wasn't happy with what I had when I was done. It started to become a chore, not a joy, to do Faraway Stars.
And it just got worse from there.
The storyline spiraled out of control, Real Life imposed itself and I found that I couldn't keep up the 5 days a week schedule. I couldn't motivate myself to even finish 3 a week, and I hated every single episode I did. Once upon a time, I could re-read the strips and get new ideas, new motivation. Now it just depressed me that I'd lost so much focus. I did a "off-tangent" set of strips that I liked, and I found that more and more I could do fan-art or other stuff quickly and happily where doing FS was akin to writing a term-paper. I decided to let the strip run until the end of the set of strips I'd finished while I took a break.
And that was the last nail.
I took a long (4 months?) break and then tried a few strips to get back into it. The 3 strips I managed to write after that were terrible, so I deleted them. I sat back down with my piles of notes and came to several unavoidable conclusions:
1- The original arc was lost.
2- Half of what I'd written was below the quality I was happy with
3- I didn't remember why I'd started certain storylines, and my notes didn't help.
4 - I didn't like doing FS anymore
5 - The strip was dead.
I didn't want it to be. But here we are.
Will FS ever return? No, not like it is now. I may redo the strip based on my rebuilt arc with better art and a fixed cast and storyline. But it will be a ground-up rebuild. For now, I have other artistic vents and less time to enjoy them. I decided to do Tivar because it had a set story. It's written. It's mostly done. It will take a long time and it will require that I grow as a writer. So, I hope you enjoy it.
