I did a thing.

On 24 hour comic day I created a comic. It was 24 pages long, it made enough sense to be called a story and had characters in it and everything. I'm happy with the result. Above is a little preview of the comic.

I didn't ink the comic though I would like to, I'm saying this counts within the rules of cleaning up for printing. A comic in blue pencil won't print up too well. I'll put up a few more images once I've taken them.

Anyway, here's a thing:

How Britt Survived 24 Hour Comic Day Successfully

1. Bring lined (or squared paper) for planning, planning on plain paper which should be used for drawing the comic can lead to problems down the line, also squares make the layout stage simple.
2. Spend the first 2 hours on your plot, write notes, words, themes. 
3. Go out while it's still light, have healthy but filling food (I had sushi for lunch and noodles for dinner).
4. Spend another hour on your page by page breakdown and supporting thumbnails, this means that when you get to 2am and have a major motivation issue you don't have to think. 
5. Every 4 pages take a break.
6. Drink tea, lots of tea. Good tea. Green tea. Matt where did you get that tea?
7. Midnight snack, balance your sweet and savoury, sugar rushes will not serve you well.
8. Music. 
9. A sleeping bag for warmth... followed by a quick 2 hour nap at 4am - I'd finished.
10. Mess about for the last 2 hours with music and inks.

Note: this method is how I survived 24 Hour Comic Day, it's not the only method and it may not work for you. Sleeping before the end may lead to being unable to finish for some. 

The 'remake the rules to suit your requirements' approach

Having undertaken the challenge a couple of years ago, and struggled to create a 24 page story, I decided to take a different approach this year. Instead of creating a 24 page comic from scratch, I decided to create an 8 page picture book, that I'd already written most of the script for, and had completed a couple of character sketches for already too.

So how did it go? Well having far less than 24 pages to do meant I had plenty of time to tweak the script, to play around with characer sketches until I was happy with the way the stories single character looked, and to create 8 pages and a front cover to a standard I was happy with. Also I had some time to spare to take some time out and have a bit of rest in another room from the event part way through. 24 hr comic day purists will probably be shocked and appalled at my reinvention of the rules, but ultimately I ended up with something I was pretty happy with, which I don't imagine would have been the case if I'd stuck rigidly to the rules. I just don't work quickly enough to make a satisfactory 24 page comic book in as many hours.

So now what? I'm planning on printing up copies of the book to send to a couple of magazines to see if they might like to print a regular cartoon featuring the books character. Fingers crossed.

P.S. May I give Matt (left) a big thankyou for organising the whole event and allowing my picture book to get completed

- James