From David Chelsea:
My 24 -hour Comic experience went better than I had any right to expect. I wrapped mine up at 6 am, three hours short of deadline- I then went back and added some blacks and extra details, but I was basically done by 7. I’m not quite sure what I did right, but working over perspective grids did give me something of a head start, the ghostly suggestion of a scene rather than a terrifying blank page. I was also the only one in the room to follow McCloud’s recommendation of taking it one page at a time- two other artists tried tackling all their pencils first and ran out of time.
The square columns of my perspective grids suggested the girders of a building, and Harold Lloyd has always been a favorite of mine (hence the glasses), so I decided to basically remake ”Safety Last”, stealing all the gags I could half-remember. Random pieces of reference pulled from a sack hourly helped keep the story from being too slavishly derivative (I did reject three pieces outright- an explicit cunnilingus scene which would have thrown off my resolve to not work blue for once, a Ground Zero image I considered too loaded, and a John Byrne drawing of Wonder Woman, since I couldn’t think of a way to use it that wouldn’t look like either sucking up to or gratuitously twitting the mainstream).
The end result is goofy and insubstantial but not more so than “Welcome To The Zone”. I would definitely do it again – after having been mired for years in perfectionist constipation over the Storefront project I found this a welcome way to rack up pages without thinking too hard about it.
http://www.pdxcomic.com/
Comic about 24 hours @ Chez Chelsea:
http://homepage.mac.com/merussell/iblog/B835531044/C1162162177/index.html
