24 hour comic weekend 2011 Perth WA

I made an effort to join the official WA 24 hour comic weekend, held at FTI Fremantle again this year. Tim came down with a crook neck, and was pretty much a turtle on his back in pain on the floor at home, so unfortunately he couldn't make it. Which made it all the harder to make myself stay there.

But I did stay, later than I had planned. It started at 10am, and I planned to write and draw as fast possible and do two pages an hour, so I could go home at 11pm, sleep 5 hours and come back at 6am to rejoin everyone 'til the end and finish off my comic. I ended up staying until 4am, and then had to bail, because my mind in it's fatigued state was starting to hinder me instead of help. My mind spent the last hour trying to find ways to cut pages out of the comic and ways I could make it shorter so I could be done with it already.

I am happy that I got it off to a good start though. Chris Markle the organiser tried a theme this year, based on a guy's successful 'death machine' comic theme. A machine that takes a person's blood sample, then processes a card that tells the person how they are going to die. All the comickers had to write a story based on the machine, but could create it any way they liked.

Chris came up with a bunch of cards with made up deaths on them, which we 24 hour comic participants randomly chose one to write our comic about.

My card was "Sudden Unexplained Explosion". I didn't want to kill any of my characters ever, that's how attached I get to my creations. But after an initial hour of brainstorming I locked down a good story and thumbed it all out by the second hour in. So then it was just straight drawing late into the night with everyone else.

The company was great, Michael Lombardi, Linda Foote and Chris, who are all old hands at the comic thing by now. And Jane who I know from life drawing was there, and we both staked out the couch (by default, because we came late and all the tables were taken) where I stayed the whole time, resulting in a very kicked back, leisurely comic drawing experience for me. It was great drawing on the couch by a coffee table. I had my shoes off, warm socks, feet up on the couch the whole time.

I will write more later about some of the other comickers and their fantastic comic work that I spied later. I'm going to try to finish the rest of this comic today.