24 Hour Comic Day!!!

[Kris Lachowski]

My finals also conflict with today. So, I celebrated last weekend....

When I first heard about this event, I was pretty gung ho to go for it. As it approached though, I found a slight conflict. It seems my professors all like to give these things called "finals" at the end of the semester, and this is uh... pretty much the end of the semester.

Me too, I have shload of projects and finals this week and next. Was the month of April picked for any specific reason? I imagine just by picking this date literally millions of potential 24hr comic creators were lost.

[Greg Stephens]

I think that there are two factors (guessing, here, becuase I'm not one of the organizers):

The first is that the sheer numerology of 4/24/04 is too good to pass up for 24-hour comics.

The second is that 4/24 this year falls on a Saturday, which is a good day of the week for many people (most full-time workers can blow their Saturday and still have some hours on Sunday to rest before going back to the salt mines).

[Dea]

Question! Important question for Scott!

Rather lengthy lead up to question: I just finished celebrating 24 Hour Comic Day, and I did so in a rather unusual manner. You see, I couldn't find an event to participate in. None of my comic shops was participating (I did ask. And nudge. And wheedle. No luck ).

But it just so happened that 24HCD coincided with a local-art related event, which got my wheels spinning. 'Cause y'see, April 24th was the day for our monthly Artist Trading Card trading session.

Artist Trading Cards are an idea that started in Zurich in 1997, and has since spread to other parts of the world. Basic idea: Trading cards are pieces of cardboard about 2.5"X3.5", which one collects. ATC's are trading cards that you make yourself, and trade with other artists.

They can be made out of anything, and anyone can participate. I've been making and trading them for a few years now, and I've traded with professional artists and plumbers and little kids, and I've gotten cards made with crayon and acrylic paint and stickers and old pop cans and stained glass (STAINED GLASS. Dear God.) and gingerbread and just about anything you can think of. It beats the $*^# out of collecting stamps, let me tell you.

So, 24HCD and ATC trading day are the same day, and I'm thinking: how can I combine the two? How can I get the ATC people interested and involved in 24 hour comics, and make a comic that makes use of the ATC concept?

What I came up with was a sort of 24 Hr Comic kit: I'd make a series of ATC-sized comic pages, with panel borders and some word balloons, but no art, story, or dialogue.

I would then give these away, 24 at a time, at the trading session, along with a set of the rules and the url for www.24hourcomics.com on another card, and encourage people to take the challenge and fill these in by next month's trading session.

I spent a few weeks designing empty panels and wordless word balloons, a few minutes every other day or so. Then Friday night around five I started arranging the cards into sheets of nine identical cards, printing them out on card stock, and cutting them up. I had designed around 34: I wanted people to have a bit of choice.

Around 1:40 am on Saturday I finally finished printing and cutting all 306 cards (333, counting the 27 copies of the dare), and about then I guess sleep deprivation drove all sanity from me, and I thought: I should do a comic with these cards, as a demo!

So I picked out 24 of the cards, pretty much at random, I think, and I started drawing. Drew 'til around 5:00 am, fell asleep, got up around 10:30 am, and finished the comic around 4:15 pm, just in time to pack up and leave for the trading session.

The result is rather a silly little thing, but I like it. And this brings me to my question(s): I think I'd like to submit my comic, "The World of Billy," for consideration for the 24HCD book, but I'm not sure what the format should be, or if it even qualifies. I did start designing panels and page layouts several weeks ahead (even though I didn't know what was going to fill those panels with, or which pages I was going to use, or even that I was going to be doing it), and the pages are much smaller than normal (as stated, about 2.5" by 3.5"). So does it qualify? And if it does, how should I send it in? It's on 24 trading cards. Should I send in 24 cards in plastic card collector sheets, or photocopy them onto paper, in groups of six or so? Should I send along a set of the 34 "blank" pages, for reference/comparison/point of interest? And what should I put on the form as the start time? The time that I started printing and cutting, or the time that I lost my head and actually decided to participate in this madness myself?

I need this info, not just for myself, but possibly to pass along: I gave away quite a few sets of blank cards at the trading session, and many people expressed interest in the project. Who knows; there might be more comics completed in this format by this time next month.

Dani Atkinson

[Greg Stephens]

I will elaborate more after I sleep, but I just completed my very first 24-hour comic. You can see digital camera photos of the pages online here. This is the most comics work I've done in any one session (I'm sure I'm not alone on that score) and it's even more than I've done in the last couple years. It was great to prove to myself that I could do it.

True confession time- I ran over by about 20 minutes. I was done with pencilling the last page and had about 2 minutes to ink before the clock ran out, but inking was required and I hadn't come this far to stop. Even so, and even considering there are a few pages I could live without seeing again, and even considering the story made no sense (though it sort of does work itself out to a coherent narrative that I'd never even intended)-- Even considering those flaws, I impressed the Hell out of myself and I feel that I really earned the right to take some sleep right about now. And isn't that was 24-hour comics are all about?

Edit: Rested and refreshed after a good night's sleep, a shower, food and some vege-time, I'm gonig to start the long process of scanning each page in (requires four scans per page, since my scanner isn't nearly big enough) for digital presentation. According to the notes that I wrote on each page telling the start and stop time, I was actually only 10 mintues over schedule, not 20, which psyches me up even more. Not only did I complete the thing, but I did it quicker than my sleep-deprived brain thought I had.

[russ]

It was pretty cool seeing 40 or 50 people making comics at Austin Books yesterday afternoon. Made me wish I'd paid more attention to this event and planned to participate. But even as an observer it was fascinating to see the unusual weird communal energy in the room, with art supplies, computers, reference books, and whatnot spread all over the place and a big table of shared food, and watch all the different approaches, styles, techniques people use to make comics.

Another neat thing was seeing a mom and young daughter who happened to wander into the store just to buy some Archie comics, not knowing about the event. Several artists took the time to chat with them and explain what was going on and even gave the little girl some paper and pen - she started drawing her own page of comics!

[buzzard]

Congrats Greg.

One suggestion, although it's kind of crazy: if you find yourself still not writing comics, and wish you were, continue doing 24-hour comics on your own once in a while, just as a way of getting yourself back in the swing of it. (I've written seven 24-hour <i>albums</i> since Scott posted about them many months ago.)

[Greg Stephens]

Thank you. I don't know about doing one of these too often, but now that I know I am capable of doing it, I'd be willing to it again. Feeling much better about my ability to make comics at the moment. We'll see where it takes me.

[russ]

Inspired by these zany shenanigans, but finding the idea of a 24-hour comic with 24 pages to be a bit daunting, I got the idea to do a 24-minute comic with 24 panels on one page.
http://www.kofightclub.com/d/20040426.html
Totally stupid results, but surprisingly adrenalin-buzzing, having effectively less than a minute per panel, making it up on the fly. A wacky fun experiment that certainly requires much less stamina...

[Greg Stephens]

Excellent! You may also want to post in the 24-minute comic thread here.

[Greg Stephens]

Well. It took me over a month to get all the components of it done, but I've finally put my 24-hour comic online with extensive annotations.

The pages are formatted with CSS and work in the browsers I tested- MSIE 6 and FireFox 0.8.

[Scott McCloud]

Looks great, Greg!

Gotta a link to it ready to post in tommorow's blog.

[Greg Stephens]

Cool, thanks!

Now that I've had some rest- I was up real late both Friday and Saturday working on this- I've gone back and corrected a few mistakes on some pages and cleared up some passages that were less than clear. Readers may still stumble across some errors, grammatical and otherwise, but it's mostly correct.

Now it's time to move on and possibly create some new comics.