Hands Up! Studio: Comics

Friday, November 9, 2012

24 Hour Comic Day 2012

On October 20th, 2012, I attempted to do a 24 Hour Comic Day comic. I started at 1pm and I failed miserably in my attempt to make a 24 page comic book from scratch in 24 hours. I didn't even complete a single page of finished art, but I learned a lot on what to do and what not to do for next year and I had a fun time doing it.

24 Hour Comic Day 2012: The Rundown

Plot, Character Idea, Prop design, and Page templates.

I started out with no concept, as per the rules, so I grabbed a dictionary and flipped to random pages with my eyes closed and pointed to words. I did this 6 times. I jotted down the randomly chosen words and with them started to mentally build my plot. I think I got really lucky as I the words I picked worked well in a crazy way and I got a basic concept down fast.

The words chosen were "Cleopatra", "Beatnik", "Invocation", "Fragment", "Seed", and "Fateful".

While I thought up my plot ideas I made a six panel template on a 8.5"x11" sheet of card stock, cut out the panels, and layed out light pencil panels on 30 sheets of 8.5"x11" bristol for my pages. I decided to go with 8.5"x11" because I figured the smaller size would be easier and faster to work on.

I then spent the next hour or so writing up the plot, making it work for page count, and creating my characters.

My page layouts for my 24 page story.

After a short break I went to work on my page layouts, to make sure my story fit the pages right, and with the idea that by laying it all out it would speed things up.

This took me forever. I lost hours. I lost Sooooo many hours.

By the time I finished the page layouts it was after midnight. I had trouble in a few spots getting things to work the way I'd envisioned them, and I stubbornly had refused to push on past them until I'd gotten them right. By the time I'd finished them I was so mentally exhausted that I knew I was done before I'd even really started.

Page 1. The First and only page I began.

I decided to give it ago anyways to see how long a page would take. After some very loose pencil work I went straight to inks. I realized I wasn't going to be able to squeeze in my word balloons and narrative boxes so I mentally told myself I'd do them on the computer after. To save time.

My inks went down fast. I was happy with the time I was making. Then on the fourth panel I realized that I had about 10 hours to do 23 more pages. I knew I wouldn't get done. I might hit page 10 by then, and that was all just build up to the actual story. At about 2:30am I threw in the towel and called it a loss.

I learned quite a bit for next year. I gained an interesting new story with a brand new character, "The Amazing" Gavin Solomon Quinn © 2012, who I'd like to flesh out and work on more sometime.

It was a fun experiment and I look forward to doing it again.