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!

"A Time to Thrill" on Top Shelf 2.0

Pink Hobo gallery is currently exhibiting a show of Pinewood Derby art cars. Unfortunately I missed the opening, but it looks like it was a ton of fun, as evidenced by this late night race and this eye-popping portrait. My contribution does not have moving wheels, unfortunately, so it had to sit on the shelf during the race. Or maybe Tim and Curtis threw it around like a football. I don't know. Anyway, playing off the ultra-cheesy theme that every car has a story inside of it, I decided to literally fill my derby car with a stream of consciousness mini comic, which you can read more about in the next paragraph.

"A Time to Thrill" is an automobile-themed comic strip I drew on eleven slabs of painted balsa wood. Unfortunately, when I joined all the slabs together to form a car-shaped sculpture, the world lost the ability to actually read the comic.

Until now.

Top Shelf 2.0 -- an online library of awesome mini-comics and serialized comics, updated daily -- has posted the complete comic! Go check it out! And then go check out the actual car at Pink Hobo in NE Minneapolis while the show is still running!

The Architecturons

Here's a story I've been working on in my off hours. It will appear soon in Ed Moorman's Xeric-winning anthology, Ghost Comics. I'm not sure exactly when it'll be printed, but in the meantime you can read the entire story online here:

{click to bigify}

pg 1



pg 2



pg 3



pg 4




To add to the nerdity, here is a Google map showing where all the bits of The Architecturons come from:

Architecturons Map

example:

The End of Big Time Attic?!?

Not quite, but Lewis Tuck makes a strong case for how it will all go down in the end:

click to zoom in



Thanks, Lewis!

If you'd like to submit a BTA comic, read more here.

Zander's 2008 24-Hour Comic is Online!

Here we are again.  I'm already forgetting how emphatically I swore I'd never do this again, sometime around 2 in the morning this past Sunday.

This year, I was forced to abandon my beloved Pentel Pocket Brush Pen by an errant air conditioning duct that somehow made the pen ooze ink out of the side of the bristles.  Sorcery!  So I had to scramble and quickly switch to Micron pens, and it actually made for a cleaner and sharper looking comic.  

As with every year, I decided on a genre (this year, a superhero thriller), and then drew a Pictionary card to determine the plot points.  This year, the card had the following words to be made into a plot:

Wing

Freezer

Brainwashing

Fig Leaf

White

Also, this is the first year that I have not actually accomplished the 24 hour goal.  I regret to say I had to turn in a Noble Failure: Eastman Variation.  I was not finished at hour 24, so I stuck it out and finished by hour 25.  This is not fun, when everyone else is done and leaving.  And sitting next to you saying nice, helpful, supportive things.  And your brain has almost shut down with fatigue and frustration.  

The reasons for this failure are several:  

1.  I drew too many panels (167; the accepted number for a qualifying online comic is 100)

2.  I ignored my own advice and pencilled the second half of the comic before inking or lettering it.  I was behind and I thought this would help.  Foolish.

3.  Working with a pen forced me to be a bit more precise than I would be with a PPBP, and so I had to think about the details of each panel a bit more so it wouldn't look bad.

4.  There were some very chatty people at this year's event, one of whom, whose name I will not mention, was not working on a 24 hour comic and so had just a bit too much time on his hands.

5.  I've been working on a similarly-formatted comic without such strict time constraints and got a little soft.

Anyway, the comic is called Golden Wing versus The Freezer, and it's not all that bad.  You know, all things considered.

Click on the following image to read this year's attempt:

If you don't have a Flash player on your computer, here is the comic in one long scroll:

Zander Cannon's 2008 24-Hour Comic

Warning:  It's 1.2 Megabytes.

Blotchmen

Man, what a great weekend! This was my fifth 24 hour comic day event, and it definitely went the smoothest. Most of that was due to working smaller and having more time each hour to walk around, eat food, and sprint around the building.

Anyway, here's my comic for this year. For reasons that will become clear when you read it, it was important to colorize this one.

The original intent of the story was to be a Watchmen parody, but it ended up being more of a parody of a few of my favorite children's books. Although, while not intentional, you could make a case for Harold = Dr. Manhattan, and Max = Veidt.

[click image to read the story]


Read all about our crazy day of madness at /24-hourcomic.blogspot.com/

Also... thanks for the press, Press!
- Comics Reporter
- The Beat

"Time Travel" now online!

You can now read all 48 pages of "Time Travel" (the latest Sloth Force Seven adventure) by clicking ... HERE.

Kevin and Zander's City Pages Cartoons about the Republican National Convention are in Print!

It's sort of a long story, but both of our Republican National Convention cartoons that we did for the City Pages have finally seen print! Kevin's in the July 9 edition, mine in the August 27 edition. Neither Kevin nor I are big political cartoonists, but the City Pages threw down the gauntlet and we obliged.

Kevin's "X-Cape From X-Cel"
Print Edition Online Edition

Zander's "Five Blind Elephants"
Print Edition Online Edition

NOTE: On City Pages' site, click the text link, not the image link
The people of the City Pages were good enough to put my cartoon in a later edition when an email mixup prevented it from being in the first one. Thanks, folks! You can find all of the RNC cartoons at the City Pages website; there's a heck of a lot of great stuff on there, and our beloved Cartoonist Conspiracy is well-represented.

This is the second year that the City Pages has put together a comics issue; last year's was "Tales of the Twin Cities", and Kevin's and my cartoons ran side by side in that one (as opposed to being separated by 7 weeks).

Muscles and Fights submission by Zander Cannon and Steven Stwalley

Steve Stwalley and I did another "Versus" comic for Muscles and Fights volume 3. Click on the below image for the fight of your life.



Also, here's the previous one Steve and I did for Muscles and Fights Volume 2:



And-- it just struck me. It seems counter to the spirit of the Muscles and Fights anthology to call the stories "submissions". Perhaps they should solicit "dominations" instead. Food for thought!

Muscles and Fights Vol. 3 submission

Hey folks, click the image below to read my 2-page Muscles and Fights Vol. 3 story.
WARNING: The story contains some swears.



[ click image for the full story ]

Far Arden: Chapter Thirteen (part one)

I'll be the first to admit that I've been a real putz lately when it comes to FA. Chapter Thirteen is a big fatty 48-pager, so I thought I'd post the first half instead of making you wait another month for the whole thing.

If there are any readers left, please enjoy.


Read Chapter Thirteen (part one).
Start from the beginning.

Zander's 24-Hour Comic Online!

I'm not quite as on-the-ball as Kevin is, but here's my 24-hour comic, The Caterpillar Space Force of Robots, in glorious black and white.

I do 24-hour comics as close to the original concept as I possibly can: I don't plan out what the story will be beforehand, write anything, or design characters. Partly this is to stick to the rules; partly it's to keep me (and others) from having high expectations for the story.

At the starting bell, I draw a Pictionary card from the box and use the five words that are on it to launch the story. Sometimes I do know what kind of story I want to tell, (this year I wanted to do a space adventure story) and that does help focus my efforts, but I never think about characters or plot until I draw that card.

This year's comic was pretty grueling compared to previous years, in that I had no idea where the story was going from page to page. I was almost halfway through before I had any ideas of how to conclude it, and so I was not that amped about the story anyway. Reading it now, it's not that bad. Kind of funny. Pretty random.

The Pictionary Card words were:

Caterpillar
Box
Sapphire
Victory
Yodel

Enjoy! Click on image below to start the madness:

SLOTH FORCE SEVEN

Here's my story from this weekend's 24 Hour Comic Day:

You can read all about the Minneapolis event and see photos of the artists and work in progress at 24-hourcomic.blogspot.com

Far Arden: Chapter Twelve

Uh ... please ignore anything I wrote about Far Arden on this blog over the past week and enjoy chapter twelve.

While there are still two chapters to go, this chapter fulfills my challenge from Mr. Steven Stwalley to complete a 288 hour comic book. The book actually stands at 290 pages right now due to a lengthy chapter eleven. So thanks for the prodding and cajoling, Steve!


Read Chapter Twelve.
Start from the beginning.

Versus: Round 3

Check out this story and many other brand new brawls in Bud Burgy and Amado Rodriguez's "Muscles and Fights volume 2," premiering at FallCon in a few weeks:

Uptown Girl Presents

UPDATE: "Uptown Girl Presents" will be available at FallCon, but in limited supply.
Here's a 2-pager I made for Bob Lipski's "Uptown Girl Presents." Not sure when this anthology is coming out, but seeing as Bob is the most prolific cartoonist in Minnesota, it'll probably be coming out soon.


Right now, a lot of you are probably thinking "Hey Kevin, it looks like you used a .80 rapidograph to crosshatch the title panel, while everything else was done with a .60. What gives?" You're so right. I inked the body of the story with a .60 (#2) but kept having flow problems. In frustration I bent the nib, little by little, until the thing finally snapped right off. Fortunately I had saved the title panel until the very end, so I finished that off with a .80 (#3). So now I have to go drop $25 on another .60 -- to replace the SECOND one I've broken in three months. I have to be more gentle or I'll go broke.

Far Arden: Chapter Eleven

Witness the latest installment of Far Arden, a novel of love and regret in the Canadian arctic.


Read Chapter Eleven.
Start from the beginning.

Big Time Attic: The Comic