This year, after dodging the past two years, I decided to give this a shot! A few nights ago a whole bunch of other folks and I holed up in
Dragon's Lair Comics & Fantasy here in Austin to attempt to write and draw a 24-page comic book in 24 hours. There must have been 20~25 people in there at the beginning of the night, by the time I went home it was down to maybe seven -- It's a hell of an endurance-trial! I lasted through the night, but around 1:00 pm the following day it became clear I wasn't gonna finish 24 pages in time.. So instead I steered it into a 12-pager and called it done at 21 hours. I might try again next year, and if so I'll simplify my drawing a bit and see if I can pull off the full page-count.
Anyways -- Hope you enjoy the pages..
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| (If you think she's overreacting a bit to a phone, a few bruises, and a
somewhat steep ledge, it's partly an echo of my own tendency to imagine
the worst possible outcome of any problem that comes up, projected on a
not-terribly-strong character. It's also partly because, to speed up
the story, I cut out a lot of other missteps and difficulties that would
have stacked up on each other more effectively.) |
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| (That first panel is one of the few where I think I actually hit the
age-group she was supposed to be in. She looks too old in most of the
story :\ ) |
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| (at this point I was still less than halfway on my 24-page plot outline,
I knew I couldn't do the rest in time to finish it all by 5, and I
wasn't prepared to give myself another project to work on during the
week. So after this page I derailed the story to its quickest, tidiest
conclusion available.) |
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(to give you an idea of how far afield this is from my original plan,
the birds originally reacted the way they did in the page 10 because a
panther was prowling nearby. Later she would have run into a tree
nymph, followed it to an ancient grove, and possibly have been turned
into a tree herself. THAT was actually the stuff I wanted to draw from
the beginning; ironically I never even got to it :D
The route I
ended up with has less going on, but at least it does focus more on how
the character's developed somewhat since the story began. And, y'know,
wrapped it up in half the time.) |
In the course of this I amassed a nice fat list of things I need to work on. Let's see how I do on my next project!
