24 Hour Comics Day EXPOSED

Check out Sarah Morean's great video of this year's 24HCD event in Minneapolis. Watching the documentary made me regret missing this year's event, but at same time I'm glad that I didn't set out the welcome mat to H1N1 like Sarah did.



Read the completed comics at the official Minneapolis 24HCD site! Zachary Garrett's wonderful watercolor strip particularly caught my eye. Congrats, everyone!

Zander Cannon's 2009 12-Hour Comic!

It's true, the pressures of having a child have caused me to dial back my output and led to this year's mere 12-hour comic, "The Mysterious Skeleton".

I completed it in the same manner as a 24-hour story, deciding the genre beforehand (a spooky mystery) and then drawing a Pictionary card to determine the plot points. The words this year were:

Skeleton (lucky draw!)
Gong
Fingerprint
Drought
Black Eye

I also had a cast of characters I had to name, so I drew another card for that:

Centipede
Earmuff
Amputate
Reporter
Pothole

The comic was completed in 12 hours, 1 hour per page. I wrote, pencilled, and inked each page before moving on to the next one in order to keep on schedule.

The result is obtained by clicking the link:



I also changed the formatting of the book from the 5.5" x 8.5" I've done for 24 hour comics in the past to basically a 5.5" x 5.5" format, where each page is half as wide and one-third as tall as an 11 x 17 sheet of paper--that's 6 pages on each side. That way I can photocopy a 12-page minicomic on one sheet of paper. No one ever said Zander Cannon wasn't thrifty!

There are also a bunch of names in this comic that are homages to friends and people who have interesting names: Jesse Gillespie, Alice McGee, Jason Horshaw, Danno Klonowski (nee Ochsendorf), Tom Nguyen, Shawn Van Briesen, Ryan Dow, Lupi McGuinty, and my grade school gym teacher, Mr. Udovic.

Many thanks to Steve Stwalley and David Steinlicht for their camaraderie during the event!

Go Nuts This Weekend

Mind Hacks has an interesting post about a marathon biker who hallucinates when he's out on the road for long stretches of time. I thought I'd quote it in honor of 24 Hour Comics Day this weekend.

". . . The last days are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages. Occasionally, Robic leaps from his bike to square off with shadowy figures that turn out to be mailboxes. In a 2004 race, he turned to see himself pursued by a howling band of black-bearded men on horseback . . ."

I normally hallucinate during 24HCD, although not as vividly as this guy. My episode usually starts around hour 20 and involves seeing little black bugs on the periphery of my vision. They don't actually look like insects, just blurry black moving things that my brain interprets as bugs. And of course, as soon as I try to focus on them they disappear.

If anyone else has a 24HCD hallucination story, please leave it in the comments!

Link to the Mind Hacks post
Link to the original NYT article

24 Hour Comic Day is Coming Up!

You've got a half a month to get caught up on your sleeping, because 24 Hour Comics Day hits October 3 & 4.

For full details, bookmark 24-hourcomic.blogspot.com, where you can read all about this year's event as well as scroll down and see how last year's victims (erm, participants) fared.

And finally, spread Dan Olson's poster around like it was peanut butter! Here are two delicious sizes to choose from:

download SMALL
download LARGE

We'll have more info on this blog over the coming weeks, but just think of this post as a "save the date" kinda thing.