24 Hour Comics

What is a 24 Hour Comic?

It's a 24 page comic completed in 24 hours, a challenge originally issued by Scott McCloud to Steve Bissette in 1990. Since then, 24 Hour Comics Day has become an annual event, observed by groups and individuals around the world.

The purist approach is to begin with absolutely nothing-- no characters, no outline, no storyboards-- and to then concieve, pencil and ink the whole story in the allotted time. Breaks are allowed, but the clock keeps ticking.

Click the thumbnails to read the comics, or scroll down for more obssesive author's notes.

My first 24 Hour Comic happened in July of 2006, at the home of illustrator and comic author David Chelsea. He hosts a 24 Hour Comic session every year, and half a dozen veterans were in attendance. I started with a character created years ago and improvised the story page by page.

I stopped after about 20 hours. Everyone else had either finished or quit. I had 23 pages penciled, 15 inked, and I couldn't imagine a 24th page. However, I kept working on it in the following weeks and finished in 24 non-consecutive hours. I'm not sure if this is a recognized "noble failure," but it should be.

Dictata Obscura (Or, The Cheating Author's Direct Explanations)

One reader asked me, "What's with the wrenches?" They're flying monkey wrenches. Get it? Flying monkeys? Eek eek?
I had recently read The DaVinci Code, which I thought was pretty terrible. All references to Earth-shattering secrets and historical puzzlemasters are meant to satirize Dan Brown.

On October 7 2006, I worked with Rachel Mendez and Anya Hankin to host a 24 Hour Comics session at PNCA, and took up the challenge again. As with my first attempt, I couldn't sleep the night before, so I was somewhat sleep-deprived from the get go. Despite that (or maybe because of it), this second attempt was much more successful for me. I used a random seed generator to get a starting location (treehouse), then made up all the characters along with the story. I tried to move in a surprising direction on every page. My goal was to get out of the way and let the story occur as honestly as possible. The result may not look very personal, but my most authentic self-expression tends to manifest as strange little creatures. (How's that for an artist's statement?)

I finished with about 3 hours to spare. There are a few points that don't come across very clearly, but I consider this a good rough draft for what may eventually be a larger story.

Dictata Obscura

Winkie cannot pronounce double vowels. This started out as her saying "Dweb" because there wasn't enough space for "Dweeb," and became one of those barely noticable running gags.
Although Winkie and Quibbel go to the dance together, they go as friends, as a remembrance to Nudd. It was pointed out to me that if Feenk was there with them, their intention would be clearer. I'm terribly tempted to Photoshop Feenk into the scene, but I hesitate to pull a George Lucas.

David invited me to another gathering at his house on April 21, 2007. This time, I planned to do it right. I got plenty of sleep the night before, stocked up on ink and remembered my ruler. To keep from getting too comfortable, I decided to try for a 4 act story, rather than 3. I arrived a few minutes early and got started on time. With another random seed from my favorite generator (circus acrobat, illustrated manuscript, in the belly of a beast) I was off.

This one got frustrating almost right away. By page 6, I was already imagining the conclusion, and suddenly I felt trapped, with 12 pages of filler ahead of me before orchestrating the climax. Somehow I lost the page-by-page approach that worked so well in The Danger Club. I tried to veer away from my own setup, and felt like it just wasn't going anywhere. Around 7 pm, a mere ten hours in, I started to feel exhausted.

I had more energy after we broke for dinner, but I still didn't think much of the comic. It wasn't unitl the weest of wee hours that I started to like it. Despite the inconsistencies of my approach, the story came together, perhaps in the truest spirit of the 24 Hour Comic. I'm very happy with the artwork, which I feel stayed surprisingly tight for most of the exercise. I sort of feel like revising or continuing this one as well, but I also sort of feel like it can only exist in it's current form.

Dictata Obscura

The eagle who shows up on page 4 was originally a parrot, with a tiny pirate on his shoulder. I tried to give the parrot a feathery beard, and gave him a dark coat, and he undeniably became a bald eagle. By then I had already decided the little guy shouldn't be a pirate, because I'd done pirates in The Danger Club, and anyway there's just too much pirate stuff out there already. So, he became a tiny astronaut, called Buzz instead of Polly. His radio static is meant to mimic the squawks and whistles that pepper parrot speech. What, you didn't get that? Just because the gag had been self-referenced three times before ink hit paper?
The Ringmaster always talks through his bullhorn, except on page 6 when he looks through it like a telescope.
Note the appearance on page 13 of The Bearded Accountant.
The mysterious manuscript clearly had to possess some terrible power, but once again, I felt like I was retreading, what with all the conspiracy theory and magical tuba in Hercule Blinkey. So I let the book just sit there in the background until something suggested itself. It turns out the book has the power to transform even a soulless, treacherous bureaucrat into a curious, adventurous, all-around decent critter, if said soulless bureaucrat contemplates the book on a deserted island for three years. The Triplicate plotline is pretty inelegant in its final form, but I'm happy with where it ended up.

PNCA hosted a second annunal 24 Hour Comics Day gathering on October 20-21, 2007. My goal this time was to draw for the full 24 hours, even if I went over 24 pages (I quit early on Blinkey and finished early on The Danger Club and Zigzag). As it turned out, I finished page 24 with just enough time to go back and finish inking some previous pages. Without the committment to a specific page number, it was easy to get away from thinking in terms of three 8 page acts, which bogged me down somewhat last time. However, I kept everything too open with Abe Snowman, so much so that the characters don't develop and the story doesn't go anywhere. I think the art on this one is the best yet, but the story is the weakest. I'm eager to try again.

Dictata Obscura

Page 7 is my response to the grossly inappropriate use of Iggy Pop in cruise line commercials. No one gets that.
You may notice a stray "beep" on page 19. Originally I had little Stella Beretta pressing a remote control and blowing everything up. After inking the text, blowing up a school (even a spy school) suddenly struck me as in very poor taste. I try not to censor myself just to protect anyone's delicat sensibilites, but with the story so thinly developed I couldn't see a compelling reason to keep the bomb. So I changed it to a sewer escape, which gave me a little more to work with anyway.

It’s looking like all my 24 hour comics take place in the same universe, and the various characters could run into each other at any time.

This is a short one, only 19 pages. I’m happy with it though. I sort of meant to go political (three guesses who the Ultimate Overlords of Unspeakable Malevolence are. Also, Blankwater? Blackwater? Missed that one, didn't you?) but never got around to it. I did not allow myself any “filler” pages; every page had to advance the story somehow. Even the splash pages have additional inset panels. Also I was performing certain host/organizer duties that kept me away from my table for at least a couple hours. So even though the page count fell short, I consider it a success.

Cap'n Bill Buckstar XB-19

I'm quite happy with this one. At 26 pages it is my longest 24 hour comic. It's also probably the tightest story, with early random elements coming back around to significance later on. Marcie's comment (after "You're messed up!") was that it's less esoteric than my previous efforts, which suggests that I was able to make the narrative-driving gag structure more readily apparent, and that less explanation is required here.

A little explanation nonetheless: as usual I started with my favorite random story seed generator, and got a robot-cowboy-spaceman-pirate as a character (traditional pub was the place, overclocked kitchen appliance was the object). I built the whole story on the overloaded nature of Cap'n Billy's identity.

I've said before that these manic, surreal funnies tend to produce my purest form of self expression. Now, with a few days distance, I can see what Billy Buckstar has to tell me about my own overclocked self. (I'm a cartoonist! No, an animator! No, a writer! But what I really want to do is direct!)