24 HOUR COMICS DAY REDUX

I took part in 24 Hour Comics Day at the weekend. 10am Saturday – 10am Sunday, at the Dundee Comics Creative Space.

I've done it before. I was jokingly telling people that it took me 7 years to get over the previous go round, but there may have been a hint of truth in it.

I went into the event with a few lessons learned. Last time I did six panel pages throughout, and I decided to go between 1 and 3 this time. I also had a more square format page in mind rather than an A4. I was thinking of a comic like James Kochalka's Quit Your Job.

The best decision I made was to write and layout the whole story before I started drawing any pages. That really changed the feel of the entire day. Instead of blindly forging on, hoping it was all gonna come out okay, I already had my solid ground to work on.

As I worked through the day and night, I posted photos on Facebook and Twitter. Here's what I put up:

1.13pm: 2 pages done. 22 to go. Time for lunch.

4.11pm: Hey! 3 more pages. Coffee time.

6.58pm: Pages 6-10. Pizza has been ordered. 24 Hour Comic Day continues.

10.27pm: Here's pages 11-14.

12.49am: Pages 15 and 16. It's still 24 hour comic day even though it's tomorrow now.

3.20am: Here's pages 17-20. I'm still at it for 24 hour comics day. In body anyway, not sure where my brain's wandered off to.

5.20: Finished! My pages for 24 hour comic day, under the protective eye of a promo poster for DKIII: The Master Race.

Rebecca at the Dundee Comics Creative Space was also tweeting pictures of the event throughout. Here are a couple:

This event was attended by comics students and artists from the local area, and there was a lot of serious talent on show. The Dundee scene is truly booming and very inspirational at the moment.

HOW TO READ A COMIC ALOUD TO AN AUDIENCE

I had a blast performing three of my stories for DeeCap - an event held as part of Dundee Comics Expo last Saturday.
 
I had read Sam (Magic Whistle) Henderson’s article on reading comics aloud to a group at tcj.com and had thought it interesting but strange – besides self-promotion, why is doing that a good idea? A notion that is looked at in Henderson’s article. I didn’t think much more about it until I received an e-mail from cartoonist Damon Herd asking if I’d like to take part in DeeCap. I found myself saying yes because despite the above concerns, I also thought “why not?” It would be an interesting challenge to covert the usually private reading experience into a group event.
 
Comics creators are often reticent to use silent panels on their pages, but I’m not as I think they’re powerful. I’ve dealt with them before when reading comics aloud to someone else. You’re reading away and then go silent while they look at the picture. Do you let the panel be silent or not? I decided yes, if the comic is strong enough the information will get across.
I wanted to control the timing of the story – so split up three stories into 139 single panel scans on slides, and used a remote to control the speech patterns. In the event, this decision allowed me to linger on any that were getting a good laugh, or had some chicken fat I thought might be picked up by the audience.
 
Interesting thing about this is that the comics page became irrelevant. I’m increasingly thinking the comics page as a unit, while of great interest to me as a comics reader/practitioner is of no interest to a casual reader. I think a page of comics is sometimes too daunting to a non-comics reader. They are accustomed with a regular novel to starting on word one and continuing in that fashion until the book ends. I have observed that James Kochalka’s ‘Quit Your Job’, with its panel a page is an easier read for some. I can see myself trying something like this in the future when the right story or idea comes along.
There were three other presenters and all our styles were different. We had running the perimeter of the room around the audience, a ticking sound effect and a good old fashioned sing-along. The event was good fun and the audience really seemed to enjoy it.
I also put the cover of Dump #2 onscreen as part of my presentation. Here it is…