Mongradaduu, Destroyer of Worlds.

One reason (among several) that I haven’t updated in a while is that I participated in the 24-Hour Comic Day challenge over the weekend. The result is here. The rest of this post will be spent dissecting its awfulness. If you want to keep up, read it first.

Okay, first and most obviously: I cheated. I only drew sixteen full pages, but knowing that I probably wouldn’t be able to finish on time, I formatted them so that I could easily break them apart and recombine them into twenty-four. (This is how my Ace Terrier strips are drawn too, which might explain some minor inconsistencies there. The big inconsistencies are due to my being a crappy artist.)

I began at 10:30 AM on Saturday, October 8th, and finished at 12:00 PM on Sunday, October 9th, going over by one and a half hours. I figured that discounting the time I spent eating, going to the bathroom and staring into space before I ever drew a line, it works out to less than 24 hours. The last two or three pages wouldn’t be inked if I had put down my pen at 10:30 on Sunday; if you’re a stickler, imagine that that’s the case. (Though my pencils might even have been tighter than the inks on those pages; I was pretty punch-drunk towards the end.)

All kinds of mistakes like ink droplets, smeared lines, and one badly-smeared figure were left in. The only touching-up I’ve done was to up the Brightness/Contrast by 40% in Photoshop after scanning the pages in. (That was done today, not within the 24-hour period, so that might not count if you consider the webcomic the completed version of the comic. Since it was only 24 pages once I broke it apart digitally, there’s a case to be made there.)

As to the content: I wrote it as I drew the pencils, generally slapping down some text first and then drawing around it. Everything was drawn in in the order it appears. I finished the sixteenth page sometime around 9:30 PM Saturday, and spent the rest of the time inking while I played DVDs of The Mary Tyler Moore Show on my laptop. It’s the first time my hand has ever cramped up due to drawing so much, and when I went to bed at 12:05, visions of white spaces that needed to be filled in with a brush danced in my head. For the first time, I think, I felt like a real honest-to-God cartoonist, not just some pisser who plays at his little picture-drawing hobby because he doesn’t have the skills to do anything else.

The several pastiches that form pieces of the comic are the most embarrassing part, of course, particularly the shoujo one. I’m an incorrigible Westerner, and a shitty artist to boot; the piece was meant to be a sincere emulation of what little shoujo I’ve read, but it comes across more like mean-spirited if incompetent parody by a fanzine artist of the 70s. The later quatrain of panels parodying Lady Death, Strangers in Paradise, Alias/Queen & Country, and nearly every DC longjohn comic I’ve seen over the past three or four years also points out the fact that I can’t even draw as well as, say, Terry Moore.

The drawn version of myself is actually pretty accurate, once allowances have been made for a style that makes James Thurber look like Charles Dana Gibson; I was dressed precisely like that at the time, too. The various “creepy!” meta-comments may seem like overkill to the reader, but it was seriously weird to draw a fictional female hanger-on interacting with a version of myself. I tried to lampoon the impulse to make her into some kind of romaticized fantasy object with the aforementioned quatrain of panels, but I’m still not totally comfortable with it.

Talking with my brother about it (he came in just now), I realized that there’s already plenty of metafictive commentary criticizing the comic within the comic itself; this blog post is probably overkill. So I’ll shut up now.