At one table, two devils wandered through a postapocalyptic wasteland. At the other end of the room, a boy and girl passionately embraced, but tragically, she turned into a robotic killing machine and chased him all over the city. (Modern love is like that.) Across from them was another pair of lovers whose affair was much more traditionally romantic, if you overlooked the fact that he was a square and she was a triangle.
They were all stories drawn in ink, pencil, and marker by a collective of artists—eight bespectacled, nerdy guys mostly in their twenties. They call themselves the Cartoonists’ Conspiracy, and they were hunkered down at three tables at the downtown Grumpy’s. Each was focused intensely on a sheaf of thick, white Bristol one-hundred-pound paper. They were participating in the Twenty-Four Hour Comics Day, an endurance contest that took place a couple of weeks ago. Each artist had a single day to complete a twenty-four-page comic, with no advance planning or preparation.
The idea was proposed about ten years ago by author and cartoonist Scott McCloud. While our local crew was inking away, five hundred others in sixty similar groups were putting pen to paper as far away as South Korea.
Around eleven p.m., with an hour to go, the mood was calm but determined. It was surprising there weren’t more cups of coffee scattered around, but then, at this point caffeine might cause jitters and splotchy inking. Of the eleven cartoonists who started twenty-three hours ago, three have dropped out. The survivors are mostly making final revisions, cleaning up hastily inked lines, or brainstorming their final panels. Only one clearly was not going to make it: Damian Sheridan, whose double-sized drawings took up an entire table, was still on page eleven—less than half way.
Though his artwork was impressive, he’d had trouble finding a solid storyline to ride through two dozen pages. He inked a mermaid spearfisher and her encephalopod sidekick, but admitted, “before the spearfisher, it was about a kid who dies in a tragic kite accident, and before that two robots who fight each other with accounting jargon.” He was gamely plugging away anyhow, and vowed to finish after a good night’s sleep. According to the official rules, that’s a “noble failure” common enough to have its own name, the “Eastman Variation.”
If the intention of the event was to put on a big show for the public, it was not a great success. While The Rake was there, cartoonists outnumbered audience members two to one. And as a spectator sport, watching people draw is not too dissimilar from watching paint dry. But tonight was also about team-building—hanging out with buddies to lend moral support to each other’s creative drive. In the end, each cartoonist’s biggest battle is with the blank paper in front of him or her. And when midnight chimes, the finished stories are taken to the nearest all-night copy shop and turned into a two-hundred-page book, on sale thereafter at Dreamhaven and Big Brain comic-book stores.
“The goal was to push ourselves,” said Brian Roberts, who goes by the nickname “Doctor Popular.” One of the club’s organizers, Doc supplements cartooning with gigs as an ad salesman, writer, and professional yo-yo player. (Who knew there was money in that?) His twenty-four-hour story, about a Cro-Magnon man named Trog who becomes the world’s first celebrity cave painter, is one of the evening’s most inspired. But true to the spirit of the event, he thought it up on the spur of the moment. “I had an idea I wanted to use, and I can’t even remember what it was now. At midnight, I just started drawing this caveman.” He was only six panels away from finishing, and sketched quickly but confidently in rough pencil, playing with a way to condense that final bit of plot into those half-dozen boxes.—Christopher Bahn
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