24-Hour Comic

On Saturday, April 10th, I stayed up for 24 hours straight and drew a 24-page comic (that's one page an hour, for those of you keeping track at home)! It was an incredibly intense and exhausting, but also immensely rewarding, "experience," in the most hippie/psychedelic sense of the term. This was at Cosmic Monkey Comics in Portland. About 8-10 other people also participated, although I think only four of us reached the 24-page goal as laid out by Scott McCloud (whom we can credit/blame for devising this perverse past-time).

The art is definitely a little rough around the edges, but the artificial constraints on its production render me invulnerable to criticism! I can excuse bogus anatomy, warped perspective, and spelling errors with the catch-all rebuttal "I was sleep-deprived!" (Clever, huh?)

After catching up on sleep, I also made a fancy cover and back-page image for the printed mini-comic version. Comic below - you can read my irrelevant commentary at the bottom if you still want.




























To quote Wayne's World, "let's do the super-happy ending!" This story was based on a screenplay idea hatched years ago by me and roommate Turhan Sarwar. We wanted to pitch it to Disney and envisioned Cuba Gooding, Jr. in the lead role. (I still do.) But was the world ready for a Katrina Komedy?

In 2007, I think the answer was no. But now I'm not so sure. Melancholy is a totally valid reaction to catastrophe, especially in the immediate aftermath, but it is not the only reaction. Some of the sickest, blackest and most hilarious humor comes out of unthinkable tragedy during times of political turmoil etc. It's another way to cope!

Not that FotF is really black humor. If anything, I think it's pretty tame satire, and that approach is potentially even more tasteless. I preemptively apologize to any Gulf Coast readers offended by it. The hurricane let my family off so easy (comparatively) that I truly have no right to complain. I tried to work in an empowering message of triumph through adversity, recovery, etc. etc. that hopefully balances out the questionable humor. I also hope it counteracts what strikes me as a despairing attitude of victimhood in mainstream Katrina-coverage.

I guess I was a little tired of the morose treatment of the storm's legacy by well-intentioned outsider artists. As usual, the South serves as a vessel for the rest of the nation's angst - nothing new there. I have been away from the Crescent City for most of the rebuilding process, and so I don't exactly have my finger on the pulse, but something tells me that the city that invented jazz funerals has a more nuanced view of what it means to pull through a disaster.