I know that today’s sketch and accompanying blog doesn’t have much to do with movies, but I’ve convinced myself that’s okay because there really aren’t any movies this week that I care to talk about. I mean, seriously – The Invisible? Next? Get back to me next week when Spider-Man 3 is about to drop. I’ll talk your ears off about movies.

To whit, seeing as the site has recently taken a new direction and I am still kind of feeling my way around between what I’ve done for the last four and half years and what I’m comfortable doing with sketches, blog posts and so on, I thought I would take the opportunity to talk to you about the 24 Hour Comic Challenge I participated in last weekend. A few of you had been asking about it and I interpreted my participation therein as being more substantial than Nicholas Cage’s latest career suicide.

For those of you who don’t know, the 24 Hour Comic Challenge is an informal competition or art experiment (depending on who is hosting the event) that poses to any artist bold enough to pick up the gauntlet “Are you able to create a 24 page comic in 24 hours? Drawn, inked and lettered. Are you man enough?”

I’ve read the exploits of nearly a dozen of my web comic contemporaries over the years that have answered that challenge. I saw it as a rite of passage that I should participate this year. It’s only been in recent months that I’ve been comfortable identifying myself as a cartoonist rather than a hobbyist. Let’s see if I’ve got the chops.

If you’ve been reading the blogs, you know that I was mulling around a few different story ideas to take to the challenge. My first thought was to do a Theater Hopper “origin” story as told through the eyes of Truman. This is a story I’ve wanted to tell probably for the last 3 years. For that reason, my good friend Joe Dunn warned me not to attempt it. “That’s a really important story,” he said. “You’ll want it to look right. You’re not going to get the results you want if you try to cram it into the challenge.”

I took his advice, but had no idea how right he was.

Instead of the Theater Hopper origin story, I decided instead to tell the real-life Tom and Cami origin story. My comic was going to be about our year together in 2006 – all of the ups and downs we experienced before we brought Henry into the world. I would talk for a while about how Cami and I met, fell in love and married. Then I would talk playfully about our selfishness as we put off having children for 6 years. After that, I would talk about the pregnancy experience. The fact that it was a personal story was something I figured would score points with Cami and permit me to scamper off on this folly.

Since I found out about the contest with only one week’s notice, I scrambled to write up a story treatment. But due to the fact that I have a 2 month-old baby at home, it was hard to find time and I was only able to draft 14 pages. I should have taken this for a clue, but I figured because it was my life and it wasn’t that long ago, I wouldn’t have that much trouble coming up with talking points that I wanted to illustrate.

Soon I would see how wrong I was.

The challenge was being hosted by Mayhem Comics in Ames, a college town that is home to Iowa State University and about a hour away from where I live in West Des Moines. The great distances between locations meant that if I was committed to doing this, I was in it for the long haul. The option for me to go home and catch a few Z’s in the middle of the competition was off the table because I would be wasting two hours commuting. It was do or die.

We were supposed to start the challenge at 2:00 PM on Saturday, but things got off to a bad start. Our $20 entry fee was supposed to cover supplies – twenty-five sheets of 11 x 17″ Bristol board on which to draw. The only problem was that the boards hadn’t been shipped to the store. So the event organizer ran off at the 11th hour to a nearby art store to buy supplies and we ended up starting at 2:30 instead.

In another example of an organizational snafu, guest judge and artist of DC’s Green Arrow and Marvel’s Ant Man, Phil Hestor was in the house a day before he was supposed to. So instead of judging all the entries, he hung around for about 15 minutes and offered feedback to anyone who thought to bring a portfolio. Phil was more than gracious, but that was kind of lame.

Fortunately, I had copies of my books for him to look at and he told me I had some funny stuff. He said he could tell that I was creating something very personal to me and doing a good job at it. “People can see through that right away if it’s done wrong,” he said. It was encouraging. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to give him copies of my books maybe to share with his industry buddies. It was probably because I had my head down in the middle of the challenge at the time. But both he and I are going to be at the Iowa I-Con Comic Book Convention on Saturday, May 19. So maybe I can give him some then.

I felt like I was off to a pretty good start in the first few hours of the challenge. But that may have been due to the deliberately sparse opening page I started with and the giant splash panel I did on the second page. By the time we got to the third and four page, I was feeling less optimistic.

Something I neglected to mention, but when the event organizer came back from the art store with our drawing supplies, he brought back gigantic 14 x 17″ sheets of Bristol board. Granted, it’s not much bigger than the 11 x 17″ were originally going to draw on, but I’m not used to drawing my characters at that size. I’m used to drawing them at about 5 x 5″. So I had no idea what to do with proportions, line weight, composition or any of that. Complicate things by having to draw my own panels and do my own lettering (I’ve been letting Photoshop handle those chores for the last four years) and I found myself in over my head.

By the fifth hour, I started falling behind and I could see the writing on the wall. There was no way I was going to get this done in 24 hours.

Over the course of the night, I would work in bursts. The first stretch I went a good four hours. Then I would get tired and take a break. The break would last 10 minutes and then I’d work for a few more hours. Eventually, the breaks started getting longer than the working hours and by the time the guys minding the store busted out a copy of Guitar Hero II to pass the time, I was all washed up. In the end, I only finished 12 pages and started lettering the 13th.

I think it was a self-fulfilling prophecy to have only worked out the first 14 pages. I thought for sure that I could make it up as I went, but I didn’t even have storyboards. So I was figuring out page layout on the fly. Eventually, it all became too exhausting. Never mind that I was competing against three high school kids who were used to keeping these hours.

The prize didn’t end up being all that great, either. $50 in store credit for first place, $25 in store credit for second place. Really only $30 and $5 if you consider our $20 entry fee. I suppose completing the challenge would have been it’s own reward, but who would want free comics?

Actually, I ended up even FURTHER in the hole than the $20 entry fee. The same weekend the challenge was going on was the same weekend Iowa State University was celebrating it’s VEISHA celebration. It’s basically like a big university sponsored Spring Break to keep kids on campus and there is no place to park. I was actually ticketed twice for $10 a pop, so I was out $40 all together.

Things kind of worked out. I managed to sell a couple of copies of my books to the stores for about that much. So it wasn’t a complete wash. Incidentally, an astute reader pointed out that I hadn’t included the Junkie t-shirt as part of the discounted bundle packages and I just corrected that recently. So if you were looking to pick up that shirt along with some other items on the cheap, now is a good time.

By the time I got home Sunday, I was exhausted. I only ended up sleeping for about a half hour during the competition. You’d think I would have been able to get more done for having been up that long. But my brain had essentially turned to mush.

I can’t tell you how many times during the course of the evening I thought to myself “This is a mistake. I should be home right now. Why am I keeping myself away from my family to do this.” When I got home, that examination dug deeper. It would be a lie to say that my participation in the event didn’t contribute in some way to my decision to scale back the comics to once a week.

Life is short, folks and you only get one crack at it. Did I want to be the guy that was there for his family and watched his young son grow up, or did I want to be the guy hanging around with a bunch of teenagers in a comic book shop over a weekend?

In my own defense, I had no expectations of what the event would be like. But knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have participated.

Then again, maybe it was worth it if it lead me to this kind of important realization about my life and about my hobbies. I think it’s important to stay true to yourself after you have kids. You can’t give up everything about yourself or else what else will you have left to teach them? I think it’s extremely important for creative people to have an outlet to express themselves. In that context, that’s what I thought I was doing. But the big lesson I’ve learned is that sometimes you have to take a step back and ask yourself what you’re sacrificing to do this kind of stuff and have the foresight to ask if it’s worth it.

It’s been a long week for me and everyone’s words of encouragement have been great. I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails and people have been leaving notes in the comments field telling me that I’m doing the right thing. I don’t doubt it. But you know how it is… you have a routine in your life for so long, it’s tough to shake. And me? Well, I’m pretty dense. It took me two months to come to that realization.

Things are good at home and can only get better. Even on your loneliest days, it’s amazing to know there are people out there who understand and support you, even if you’ve never met. What an awesome privilege.

So, to you, thanks. I’ll see you next week.