24 Hour Comics Day 2018! #24HCD

This year I finally participated in my first 24 Hour Comics Day! It’s a yearly challenge that was started by Scott McCloud, the guy who literally wrote the comic book on comic books. For a while now I’ve been wanting to stream myself drawing on Twitch like I’ve seen so many artists do, so I used this as an opportunity to learn how to stream. I just spent 24 straight hours streaming on Twitch and drawing a 24 hour comic! Here’s the video if you’re interested in skipping around and seeing my process.

I’m quite proud of this. The official rules state that you must make a 24 page comic in 24 hours but I fell short by a few pages. I got to 20 and was burnt out. Then I did one more page. I was falling asleep at my computer! This experience taught me a lot about making comics and I already have some notes on how I could approach this differently next year. Next year I’ll definitely hit that 24 page mark!

Things I’ll do differently:

I was drawing the comic as if it was a thumbnail, with the expectation that I would go back and correct things. That never happened. I learned that when I draw thumbnails in the future, I can put a little effort into getting my lines right the first time around and not doing several passes over the same line. I was much happier with the panels where I did that and I don’t know if this makes sense but it felt more like drawing.

Another thing I’ll do is get a good night’s sleep and then start drawing right when I wake up. I feel I wasted a lot of vital energy hours because I woke up at 7 am but didn’t start the clock until 10:45 am. I was falling asleep during the last five hours.

And maybe I’ll drink coffee or something next year… I don’t have much of a taste for it, but I hear it does wonders for people.

I feel I should warn you, these pages are very rough around the edges. I thought I would get to go back for most of them! And some of the writing gets cliche, and the ending is embarrassingly sloppy, but that was part of the challenge too, no writing, plotting, or designing until the 24 hours began. I like this comic more each time I read it, I find there’s something really fun about the roughness.

Anyway, without further ado, here are the 21 pages from my 24 hour comic:

Oh, and I think I’ll call it Dinostopia…