24 hour comic crazy

Well, for the first time ever i had a serious crack at the 24 hour comic challenge. (www.comikaze24.com) It's this crazy thing where you try and write and draw a 24 page comic in 24 hours. I did it at a 24 hour event hosted my Melbournes only open comic studio, Squishface Studios. I was working with a pool of 4 writers, (Dale Maccanti, Jason Franks, Matt Nicholls and Georgia Quinn) who each wrote one short story for the project. Thanks to all of them for helping out and to dale for editing a couple of the stories to boot. I brought in a pool of writers so I could concentrate on drawing, although it did work out that i spend a lot of the first 2-4 hours talking through ideas with the writers, but i started drawing in the third hour of the challenge.

I wanted to do a EC and Creepy Mag inspired horror/sci-fi/crime anthology in the spirit of SHOCK SuspenStories. Well, i spent the first few hours talking through ideas with writers, the next 20 hours drawing, and the most i could manage was to pencil 7 pages and ink 2 pages.

I made a few rookie mistakes, one was drawing at A3 size when most of the other artists at the studio were drawing at the (smaller) A4 or (much smaller) A5 size. Drawing at A3 was not a good idea -- although it meant the 2 pages i finished will look pretty good when printed at standard comic size. It also showed my that i could never complete this challenge drawing in my 'realistic' style. If i want to try again, i will have to draw in my 'cartoon' style, as i can draw much faster in that style.

So here it is – the seven page story 'Solitary' drawn by me, written by Dale Maccanti. (Thanks Bro!) As always, click on each image for a larger version.