Finally finished scanning and getting this baby up online! All this was written, thumbed, and drawn between 12:00PM on 10/20/12 and 12:00 PM (~9:30 AM, actually!) on 10/21/12.
Thanks to all the friends and family who visited, chatted, tweeted, and generally kept me alive, to atomic city for hosting us, and to all my fellow challengers for making my first ever 24-hour comics day a surprisingly enjoyable experience!
I’ll have a cleaned-up copy with a totally sweet cover (and maybe some bonus material?) for sale at locust moon comics festival, but for posterity’s sake, here goes. Read it here, or read on for thoughts about the day itself.
I heard from friends who had tackled it before that 24-hour comics day was a great way to learn about your process, if nothing else. For me, that translated into a crash course in getting really intimate with my biggest weaknesses. For instance, my figure construction is not awesome, and combined with a lack of inking practice, that means I need to work on pencils for a seriously long time before I can move on from there. Taking time to draw and redraw pencils means I don't often have to face this, but under time pressure, man- things look really wonky.
The actual day was kind of like a vacation, if vacations are stressful and weird. I spent the first two hours writing, scripting, and thumbing the comic, so I started out way behind, and it wasn't until page 6 or so that I caught up to the page-an-hour benchmark. Somewhere in there I hit a groove of a 40-minute page, and though I lost some time to movie-watching in the wee hours of the morning, I ended up finishing a solid 2.5 hours ahead- meaning I could've taken more time on pencils and ended up with a better overall product after all.
My other big duh-revelation was how shaky a thing focus is for me. If I took my headphones out for even a minute, I ended up completely distracted by conversations, shoppers, tv- you name it. I could still hear them with music on, but that little constant thread is apparently a necessity for me to stay on track. I also found that a timer/ buzzer going off every ~7 minutes is my sweet spot for checking in and staying productive on whatever I'm working on - whether that's pencils, lettering, or a tier of panels.
Overall, I'm really glad I did it, but I'm also glad it only happens once a year.
