North East Geek Feast

Our 24 Hour Comic Event provides the main course of Episode Six of North East Geek Feast, newly minted for the Geek Syndicate network.

Experience Daniel's downward spiral into sleep deprived madness, and our miscellany of despair alongside reviews of season premiers of True Blood and Merlin with Lily, Daniel and special guests Lee Grice (Small Press Big Mouth) and Graham Pearce (Sgt Mike Battle).

24 pages from Helsinki

Today I unpacked my travelling bags and here are some of the pages I found from my time in Helsinki, doing my 24 hour comic.

Tomorrow I shall take them to Mailboxes to be copied, times 24, making 24 copies of a poor diary-esque and rambling comic.

Magic Beans and Son

That's me with my son, Dylan helping me on 24 Hour Comics Day. He's the main reason I wasn't at the glorious event with you all, but I literally couldn't help myself getting involved, so I decided to work from home...

This was my third attempt at 24 Hour Comics Day. The first one was a disaster best not mentioned, but also a valuable lesson in how not to do it! The second attempt was in 2008, which produced a comic amidst the desolation of spending a whole day in the house on my own, drawing comics.

I really fancied trying the group effort this time, but my family comes first, even *GASP!* before comics :)

But you know, it worked out rather well in the end. I wasn't alone all day for a start, just in the bleak hours of night, but Paul and the gang were just a text or phonecall away, which gave me a great boost. Jo and the boys were there for me and supported me all the way, and I couldn't have done it without them. I even did a special 2 page story for six year old Alex to help with, he inked it and lettered it himself and it's brilliant! I'll be including it in the printed version, so I guess I kind of managed a 26 page comic...

As for my comic itself, I did cheat slightly by deciding beforehand to use an established character, crime fighting local news TV presenter Mike Neville, but beyond that I went completely unprepared and made it all up on the day. Unlike last time though I spent a lot of time working on the story early on, and this really helped later on in the day when I was drawing on autopilot, having lost the ability to think in any useful way :)

Dylan does have a habit of getting up at 5AM and thinking it's playtime, which no doubt contributed to me falling asleep after midnight, and waking up at about 7AM with a bit of a mountain to climb. So the last quarter of my comic existed in a pretty sketchy form when the deadline loomed, but exist it did. So I'm calling it a modest success!

Keep watching the pies,

Ben

Cheaters Sometimes Prosper

So... It's been just over a week since I started my 24 hour comic. What did I learn in those 24 hours? I already knew I was batshit crazy, so that doesn't count. I think I learned that it doesn't matter if you don't reach the 24 pages but more that you get something out of it, I got 16 pages, the story finished on page 16 and I was happy with it. I also learned that while bringing fruit is healthy you also need savoury foods to survive a full 24 hours.

I also learned that all video footage of the event is for some reason... corrupted. I took a few clips and was going to put them together into a montage of comic greatness (or madness) but technology has failed me. :|
Not impressed.

In compensation for the lack of video please enjoy this photo of Daniel telling us what he's thinking.

And a preview of my comic from the event. I plan to clean up and shade this and make it available for mass insanity by Thought Bubble!

I blame the low level anti-technology forcefield and the possible corrupting influences of us for the lack of video in this post. It's a shame, there are about 10 files and all of them are just strange beeping noises.

One more thing...

I decided to print up some copies of my 24 hour comic under the title 'Things'. They are now on sale at Travelling Man, Newcastle should anyone want one. It contains a tale of paranoia, some decidedly odd gag strips, and a steam of philosophical musings.

Thanks for the Support!

Well, nearly everyone has posted their stories and some pictures of the event and I believe that there are a few still to come.

On behalf of everyone who took part, I'd like to thank Martin for organising this. It was a great event, and everyone had a great time and the stressful parts are just another part of the story in the end.

Thanks to Judith and Sophie (author of Teddy Bear Holiday, co-author of Alan the Confused Tortoise from the Space Monkey anthology) for the provision of the finest cakes and surprisingly accurate and predictive signage, and moral support.

Thanks to Ian Mayor who provided a most excellent selection of fizzy drinks, story ideas and cheerleading during the day.

Also, thanks to everyone that called or texted or tweeted us during the 24 hours. Let's do this again :-)

But not too soon, y'know? ;-)

My name is Ingi and I survived the 24HCD.

So - I went to this wedding on Friday the 1st of October, stayed up late and got up early morning Saturday to drive up to Newcastle from the Boro - I looked something like this at the time.

A great way to start, what would become 27 hours of no sleep - when I desperately needed one to begin with. - Anyhooo...

The drive up was extremely uneventful and not really worthy of mention, but I just did, so here’s a picture to go with it:

- I then met up with Martin at the Church for some prayers and then we sacrificed a pigeon for good luck and being a no good Icelander I then commenced to steal his money - because, that’s what we do - it’s an old Viking trade, you know.

In-spite of gospel singing, verbal diarrhea and breezy flatulence the 24 hours flew by, thanks to barrels of Nestlé’s finest and delicious home-made cookies/muffins supplied by Martin and Brittany.

So! - to the actual comic making.

This being my first ever 24HCD, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself in to.
During the days leading up to the event I had had many ideas and my mind seamed to be overly active in coming up with stories ....however - when push came to shove, I went absolutely BLANK!

When I came back to reality, I went with one of the first images that came to my mind in the days before the event: - A 'picture' of when I saw my future wife to-be for the first time, back in 1997 in Arnhem (Holland) as we both started our ballet teachers education...

My idea was to bring in glimpses of my life while I was sitting at the bottom of those stairs, both past and future to 1997.

I don’t know if it was due to the fact that I was listening to melancholic Suede on iTunes or what, but I decided to pick out ‘sad-moment’ from my life and illustrate them accordingly.

How I’ve ordered the comic is not the chronological order in which it was made - and that was something I set out to do - Since I was fixing myself to one moment (the stairs) and wanting to bring memories to that moment.

The surprise was the appearance of King Flea - like something out of Naked Lunch - so I decided to see where that would take me. This happened at around 23:00 and I went on a roll and almost managed to make a page per hour, but due to my lack of direction before I was never going to make 24 in 24.

I came to Newcastle to have fun and spend quality time with fellow comic makers - and in that sense the 24hours were a great success - as to my 11pages, I can only say that NEXT TIME I’ll manage better :-)

I’ll finish with the words of Walt Disney, who said: