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24 Hour Comics Day
Oct. 4th, 2009 01:26 pm24 Hour Comics Day is a challenge to create a 24-page comic book in 24 hours. I started yesterday at noon.
I call Noble Failure: the whole thing was scripted and laid out, but only pages 1-15 were inked; I got from noon to 3:30am before my drawing hand cramped up and my brain noticed that it had been running on Red Bull and cherry bakewells for hours. The planned power nap overran in epic scale and that's the deadline popped. I'll scan the completed thing, plus roughout pages for the unfinished stuff, and submit that; later on I'll finish the thing at the same pace because I wanna.
It's a weird challenge. 24 pages of anything is a lot of sheer output. The Nanowrimo schtick applies: quantity beats quality, because if you have two utterly beautiful pages you fail. I wonder if that's where Gaiman got stuck? Or perhaps it was where my nemesis kicked in, with six-panel pages rich in dialogue. Too much story and it slows ya down. I needed splash pages and some more decompression.
Thank the gods for Wally Wood - his 22 Panels That Always Work were to me like a thesaurus to an English student,
I call Noble Failure: the whole thing was scripted and laid out, but only pages 1-15 were inked; I got from noon to 3:30am before my drawing hand cramped up and my brain noticed that it had been running on Red Bull and cherry bakewells for hours. The planned power nap overran in epic scale and that's the deadline popped. I'll scan the completed thing, plus roughout pages for the unfinished stuff, and submit that; later on I'll finish the thing at the same pace because I wanna.
It's a weird challenge. 24 pages of anything is a lot of sheer output. The Nanowrimo schtick applies: quantity beats quality, because if you have two utterly beautiful pages you fail. I wonder if that's where Gaiman got stuck? Or perhaps it was where my nemesis kicked in, with six-panel pages rich in dialogue. Too much story and it slows ya down. I needed splash pages and some more decompression.
Thank the gods for Wally Wood - his 22 Panels That Always Work were to me like a thesaurus to an English student,
In a recent study, students were given three choices to hand in their work: All at the end of term; at three dates chosen by them; at weeks 4, 8 and 12. The students given the strictest deadlines got the best grades; the ones with the most slack in their schedule got the worst.
"Pressure is a privilege." Billie Jean King famously said that, and it's true: Pressure can create diamonds. It's not about the raw quantity, mind, it has to be the right kind of pressure or you'll buckle and meep and just plain fail. So: pressure gives you the chance to achieve beyond your presumed capacity. You'll never really sprint unless there's glory or squishy-under-traffic or velociraptors involved.
This is why I enter races. It's not about proving myself, beating anyone else, or even as markers in training or a celebration of how far I've come - though it was all that, once. Now I race because I know that the race will pull more out of me than I think I have to give, and I freaking love that. I've come full circle on the drill instructor demanding all veiny-necked to "Give me 110%, Marine!" I don't tolerate crappy maths; but my 100% threshold is wrong; it's these pressure events that recalibrate it, and that's a delight.
This November there's NaNoWriMo, a one-month novel writing challenge. Sturm und drang and doubtless a ghastly pot-boiler at the end of it, but talk about shooting for the moon! And on the 3rd October is an even more terrifying challenge: 24 Hour Comics Day. 24 hour, 24 pages. That's a stimulants-and-xylene mainline right there. But doesn't everyone think, "I could do that"?
"Pressure is a privilege." Billie Jean King famously said that, and it's true: Pressure can create diamonds. It's not about the raw quantity, mind, it has to be the right kind of pressure or you'll buckle and meep and just plain fail. So: pressure gives you the chance to achieve beyond your presumed capacity. You'll never really sprint unless there's glory or squishy-under-traffic or velociraptors involved.
This is why I enter races. It's not about proving myself, beating anyone else, or even as markers in training or a celebration of how far I've come - though it was all that, once. Now I race because I know that the race will pull more out of me than I think I have to give, and I freaking love that. I've come full circle on the drill instructor demanding all veiny-necked to "Give me 110%, Marine!" I don't tolerate crappy maths; but my 100% threshold is wrong; it's these pressure events that recalibrate it, and that's a delight.
This November there's NaNoWriMo, a one-month novel writing challenge. Sturm und drang and doubtless a ghastly pot-boiler at the end of it, but talk about shooting for the moon! And on the 3rd October is an even more terrifying challenge: 24 Hour Comics Day. 24 hour, 24 pages. That's a stimulants-and-xylene mainline right there. But doesn't everyone think, "I could do that"?
