24HourComic

I attempted a 24 hour comic at the weekend. It was organised by the ever-admirable and fantastic Galway PubScrawl.

Art Everywhere! Yay!

Well, I got to the venue - 091labs in Galway city - about 6 hours late, so I attempted an 18 hour comic and fell pray to a very Gomez mistake -> coming up with a massive idea, tripping over myself to adequately brainstorm and physically create it, crashed onto the couch and slept for about 2 hours. All things considered however, I'm pretty proud of my idea and my execution was much better than expected. I think that this idea is worth a lot more care and detail. Here's 10 of the pages, including the original brainstorm. Most are not finished:

Brainstorming.

 The brainstorming process for me, from beginning a painting to formulating a blogpost, comprises of a big A4 sheet of paper from one of my many categorised notebooks (refuge of the obsessive and of the person-who-can-never-get-any-work-done) and a big circle in the middle with the theme written in it. For the 24 hour comic, I pulled out my phone and opened up my drafts folder. In there I have scribbled every random idea that is story or art related that came to me on the the go, whether I was cleaning the chandeliers (see giant chandelier monsters) or sitting on bus (which I'm at a lot).

Page 1. Cross-hatching is megahard.

 Two ideas have been knocking around my head these past few weeks - how I want to rewrite pretty much every film I watch these days and coming to terms with my aspergers syndrome traits. Oh, and of course, the early twenties, just out of college, mid-life crisis. So I managed to squeeze a comic idea out of that.

Page 2. The other 24comic people looked at this and saw a whale blowhole fetished. SIGH.

Page 3. It was around midnight and suddenly CYBORGS for 3 pages

I had a great few pages about cyborgs and I drew the most marvelous non-sexualised robot woman and it was great. You may have noticed that I dislike using panels - I read too many absolutely gorgeous, flowing, nubile manga art growing up and it stayed with me.

I really liked my cookie-cut outs in this.

I've been at this feminism-in-comics theme since I was thirteen I discovered recently whilst looking through my old sketchpads. That's right, before it was cool. Are you getting the cyborg-aspergers metaphor yet? Also I didn't want to imply that asexuality = respect for women. That would have been truly terrible.

Didn't touch up this one very much because it wasn't finished and I wanted the pencil lines and roughness to be clear.

This turned out too Ghost-in-the-Shell for me, even though I did try to normalise her as a woman by making one of her boobs a little bit wonkier than the other.

This is blue and relatively untouched up because I was playing with the Curve option and then suddenly BLUE so it stayed.

 Naturally I didn't finish this page either (I was skimming over pages and then coming back to them when I felt ready to) and those blank rectangles are DVD cases that I was going to fill in with many other films that..just could have gone a much better way.

You, Me and Dupree alternative plotline. How I really wished it went.

You, Me and Dupree was a fascinating film for it's lessons on Hollywood's How-To-Write-A-Popular-Comedy inventory sheets and the lowest current demoniator masculinity issues of the beginning of the 21st century. It will be studied in history and sociology classes in the future. Well, so I see it.

I also had ideas prepared for King Kong (shudder), Inglorious Basterds (at the request of another 24hour comic-er) and X-Men 3 (shudder again). This was the closest I came to finishing one.

Ed Wood as the Dickens-esque Ghost of Artist Integrity

I fucking love Ed Wood. He was the perfect character who could provide a breach from reality to the surreal and fantasy in this comic, as Jack Temple travels through time and space to make all the movies he hates not crap. Also yes I am implying that aspies have super powers, because they do :)

The Elemental Causes that kill Artist Integrity in the movies.

Seeing as the Phantom Tollbooth made me, I like to turn abstract concepts that effect personality and happiness into cartoony manifestations. Here are the 4 (I had yet to draw number three) causes of all films going to crap, in my opinion. The conflict here is that all of these causes are traits that aspergers as a syndrome fight against every day -> being aspergers means that you often don't understand a lot of jokes and sarcasm or take everything very literally, constant distraction and often ADD are part of everyday life, and aspies can be super naive and fall trap to manipulation easily (which they also often can't understand or fathom).


This idea definitely got a bit too heavy for the method I chose to deal with it. And too dense. But I would LOVE to make this idea my first definitive comic project. A comic dealing with aspergers primarily, and with surreal and fantasy elements, and the often sexist, racist, classist agenda in popular film culture.