Just finished laying out and scanning my >23 and <25 hour comic from this year's festivities... here it is for your reading pleasure (750k PDF)...
Monthly Archives: September 2006
1st ever Silicon Comic Jam – San Jose, CA – October 7
FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER Silicon in San Jose will be having it’s own Comic Book Jam. So anyone in the bay area who is not doing the 24 hour jam come is invited to help collaborate on a comic book story Saturday October 7th from 1pm to 12am. The guests will (hopefully) join in on the fun. The finished storie(s) will be auctioned off for chairty as well as posted on the web. Convention Membership is required.
Silicon is a small Sci-Fi/Fantasy convention that is a fundraising event for the Diabetes Society of Santa Clara Valley. Featured guest are Robert Meyer Burnett, Mark Bode, and Phil Yea as well as local cartoonist/creators/writers Joe Borelli of Golden Gate Universe, Alexis Fajardo of Lexpress, Mat Nastos of Nifty Comics, and Brian Kolm of Atomic Bear Press. There will be panels/workshops/discussions given by the guests as well as a dealers room featuring everything from sword replicas to authors like Peter S. Beagle (the last unicorn).
To find out more, visit: http://www.siliconventions.com/
Kevin McCarthy’s The Black Phantom
Conspiracy Feed Acting Screwy
Although our blog is set to syndicate the entire content of our posts, for some reason it is currently abbreviating them in the feeds. You may want to check the link to the original posts to make sure you are reading the entire posts, if you are interested in them. I’m assuming this is because google is making changes to the blogger system, and they probably have broken something in the process (since this worked fine last week), so hopefully this will fix itself.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*!
The Virginia Quarterly Review has been publishing some installments of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel in progress Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! They are pretty great… I’m definitely looking forward to the book. You can read two of them online here and here.
Please Hassle Cartoonist Kevin Cannon to do the World’s First 288 Hour Graphic Novel
The Mineapolis cell of the International Cartoonist Conspiracy had it’s third annual >23 and <25 Hour Comics event this weekend (we couldn’t do it on 24 Hour Comics day this year due to a conflict with the wonderful Twin Cities comics convention Fallcon).
I believe we had 34 cartoonists participating… I’m not sure how many completed 24 pages, but I’m pretty sure it was a majority. I can’t wait to read them.
What will certainly be one of the best, Kevin Cannon’s comic, is already online. Kevin has done it for the past two years as well, and now has produced three of the best 24 Hour comics I’ve ever read… they don’t read or look at all like they were produced in 24 hours. They are amazing, beautiful and unique comics in my view.
Kevin was born to do this stuff… I keep hassling him to do it once every month and he could have a 288 page best-selling graphic novel in a year.
Please, help me intimidate this poor bastard.
I’m starting an informal campaign to get him to do this, as I think he will cave in to a "friendly lynch mob" of people interested in reading whatever he would come up with in 288 hours. If you are a publisher smart enough to see how amazing such a project would be, you should really move fast to make him an offer now.
To hassle him post a comment on his blog post here.
Since it would be the only 288 hour graphic novel I propose throwing some 24 hour comics rules out the window.
1) I think the goal of the 288 hour graphic novel should be totally different than the 24 hour comic. The goal should be to make a quality read rather than a quick comic. Thus, I think the artist should be free to PLAN all they want to outside of the 288 hours. They just shouldn’t put any lines on the final pages outside of the 288 hours. Planning would include research, preparatory sketches, and all of the writing and plotting they want. Nobody would want to spend 288 hours on something that sucks, so they should have the leeway to make it as good as they possibly can.
2) The 288 hours must be done in 12 24 consecutive hour chunks of time, rather than 288 hours straight, since the goal is not to actually kill the cartoonist, but merely to exhaust them 12 times in the production of the book. These chunks of time should be no more than two months apart from each other, so the longest one of these projects could take would be two years.
>23 and <25 Hour Sequential Art Event Box Set
The Minneapolis >23 and <25 Hour Sequential Art Event this weekend was a blast... Thanks much to Minneapolis Conspiracy Events Monkey Danno for all his efforts in making this a huge success. Thanks also to our sponsors The Minnesota Center For Book Arts, Wet Paint Art, Big Time Attic, Pizza Luce, Grumpy’s, Sip Coffee Bar, Big Brain Comics.
I believe we had 34 cartoonists participating… not sure how many completed 24 pages, but I’m pretty sure it was a majority. I can’t wait to read them. What will certainly be one of the best, Kevin Cannon’s comic, is already online:
http://www.bigtimeattic.com/blog/2006/09/24-hour-comics-day.html
Kevin has done it for the past two years as well, and now has produced three of the best 24 Hour comics I’ve ever read… they don’t read or look at all like they were produced in 24 hours. Kevin was born to do this stuff… I keep hassling him to do it once every month and he could have a 288 page best-selling graphic novel in a year. If you agree with me, you should hassle him too… I desperately want to read “The Ballad of Armatage Shanks.”
Any of the rest of y’all who get your comics from the event online, send me the links and I’ll post the links to them in the blog and the gallery.
We will be collecting all of the >23 and <25 hour comics from folks who want to collect theirs in boxes at the October Jam meeting at Diamond's on October 5th. To do this, simply print 100 of them into mini-comics and we'll collate them into a box with a groovy Bob Lipski cover. Boxes will be for sale (in limited quantities) to the artists for 50 cents each, after which you can sell them for whatever you want (ten bucks will most likely be the suggested retail) and hopefully recoup the costs of printing your minis.
Journalista!
Dirk Deppey has started up his excellent Journalista! blog at the Comics Journal again, which I’m sure will rapidly become one of the best read blogs in comics, if it isn’t already. Deppey has a broader scope that anyone in his coverage… the only comics blogs that really compete are The Beat and The Comics Reporter (other comics blogs, including this one, tend to canibalize from these three sources probably more than any others). Of note in particular for cartoonists looking to promote their work or activities is this note in Journalista!:
Want to see your comics-related event listed here? Email me at dirk@tcj.com and let me know. No sales-only events, please — it’s nice that you’ve marked things down at your store or website, but I won’t be listing it here.
The entire Comics Journal website has been redone, including much more exclusive online content. They now have a PHPBB message board, where you can actually make edits to your posts, which is nice.
<25 But >23 Hour Sequential Art Event Tomorrow!
The Minneapolis Conspiracy’s 3rd Annual <25 But >23 Hour Sequential Art Event is tomorrow! We currently have 32 participants. Get some sleep tonight, fellas. Click on the below poster to read all about it.
Note that 24 Hour Comics Day is on October 7th… we’re doing this tomorrow because October 7th and 8th is the same time as the notoriously creator friendly Twin Cities comics convention Fallcon.
Old Paper
I just discovered Kevin Huizenga’s blog… Huizenga is a wonderful cartoonist and the proprietor of the very cool USS Catastrophe minicomics distributor.
He has an excellent post here on the destruction of old paper by libraries, including much (probably most) of comics early history… we almost lost the brilliant color Krazy Kat strips (currently getting beautifully reprinted by Fantagraphics). Here’s a quote he posted from Bill Blackbeard, to whom we all owe an huge debt for his enormous contributions to comics preservation (which he practically invented).
“There are just over four hundred and fifty of them, and each one a masterpiece of graphic comedy. The marvelous product of the last nine years of Garge’s richly fruitful life, these weekly color Krazy Kat pages, stunning as they are, almost failed to physically survive the editorial and institutional rigors of their time. We are, in fact, damned lucky to have them on hand at all as source material for this series. There were, you see, just two newspapers — six day a week sports and crime news afternoon newspapers, throwaway rubbish — that printed virtually all of the color Kat pages from start to finish. Neither the New York Journal nor the Chicago American, sensational Hearst papers, had any referential status at all, and most libraries in their sales areas shunned them — two papers that virtually no one of any artistic or literary taste and judgment ever saw fro mthe the strip’s 1935 start to its 1944 conclusion. Two tombs for the foremost comic strip of all time.
Luckily there was a single dedicated comic strip buff, August Derleth of Sauk City Wisconsin, founder of Arkham House in 1939, who clipped and saved every color Kat page, donating his run to the Wisconsin State Historical Society…”
Quote from Bill Blackbeard’s introduction to Krazy & Ignatz 1935-1936: “A Wild Warmth of Chromatic Gravy”