MAMATH

FIN was my first (but not last!) go at the 24 Hour Comic – a challenge to complete a 24 page comic in 24 hours. I participated via the Pulp Faction forum’s annual Comikaze challenge. Participants were given words to include in the pages we posted online as the challenge progressed, to prove we were making our comics in real time. There was prizes up for grabs, so anti-cheating measures were important!

Comikaze 2012’s random words were: Tender, Wading, Miracle, Worker, Vibration, and Box. I ended up drawing a very silly comedy thing about a mermaid kidnapping a young boy from the beach. I did not find much time to sleep over the 24 hours (as is typical for this challenge) so maybe slapstick mermaid kidnappings says something about who I am deep down inside? Who knows!

Though the 24 Hour challenge doesn’t allow artists to put pen to paper before the challenge starts, they can’t really stop you thinking about it, so I knew in advance that I would probably be drawing something about mermaids (because mermaids have a tail instead of legs, thus less limbs to draw) and set in the ocean (because you can handwave a lot of backgrounds with wavy lines and textures). I also drew my pages very small -only a few inches wide – to stop myself from adding details that weren’t absolutely necessary. I really went in with a plan on this one, haha.

I did finish on time, and I still think the end product is pretty fun, so I guess my plan worked! You can read it and judge for yourself. I digitally cleaned up this posted version for the comic zine I printed in 2013, so keep in mind that the text was even messier in the original version and it was riddled with awful ink smudges etc. Still, you get the gist:

…and there you go.

It’s riddled with kinda not quite good enough drawings but I still like it.