One year and 24 hours later

The goal of the 24 Hour book is the complete creation of a 24 page book in one consecutive 24 hour period. Any book less than 24 pages is still considered a success I guess, because you took part in the challenge, but the year before I only finished 23 pages. So my goal for this most recent 24 Hour book was to spend less time perfecting the pages and get as much done as I could.

There where a few obstacles, including a raging cold and a yo-yo performance in San Francisco that took 6 of my 24 hours, but I completed my book with minutes to spare and I was very proud of it.

I never published my first 24 hour book, about a day in the life of the first caveman celebrity artist, for two reasons: 1. The combination of drinks, lack of sleep, and the choice to not use any text made the ending of my caveman story hard to follow (whose idea was it to have the last 12 hours of drawing in a bar anyways?). 2. I decided to use an extra color. My comic was a great looking black, white, and green book that still has some of my favorite illustrations I’ve ever done, however printing a 2 color comic is about the same price as printing a full color comic. I mean it costs like a billion dollars or something to print.

So, upon completion of my most recent 24 Hour book, “Ideas”, I decided nothing on this planet would stop me from printing this mini masterpiece within a year.

It turns out that I accidentally used some cursed size and format, making printing “Ideas” a bit of a nightmare. Add to the fact that kinkos in this city pretty much only takes digital scans now and not hard copies (unreal, right?). So when I saw that year deadline fast approaching I pulled out all the stops and found a printer to do this for me no matter the cost. Luckily I bumped into Stephen Gretsch at APE a few weeks ago. Stephen was one of the organizers of last years 24 hour event, and is now a manager of Fast Imaging in Oakland… Score!

So I spent an entire day (10 hours at least) scanning and printing this book and the most recent Cartoonist Conspiracy comic “The Hamster That Wasn’t There”. More work needed to be done on “Ideas”, but we got most of it done that day. About a week later (this Saturday evening), the books were dropped off at a wordless exchange in the lobby of a BART station at midnight. Thus, meeting my one year goal and making for quite a weird site for the BART police.

So now, thanks to Fast Imaging and Stephen, I have 500 copies of my 24 hour book, and 150 copies of the Hamster story. I dropped some off at some stores yesterday and they seemed quite happy to have them. Ideas retails for $2.50 and The Hamster That Wasn’t There sells for $3. I have plans to nicely print up other cartoonist conspiracy books, I mean we’ve made some nice comics, but have never properly printed any of them up before (at least not since You’re Name Here). It would be my goal to have an actual library of Conspiracy books, so we could have a little section in some of the local stores. I mean we do plenty of work, it just needs the proper follow through.

So anyways, I’m always looking to trade comics. I might try to put my 24 Hour Book on my website sometime in the next week or so too. I’ll have plenty at BAC.

Oh, and another thing… My good friend Josh is driving ALL of my stuff pre 2004 to my new home in San Francisco. It’s been almost two years since I’ve seen some of that stuff and I’m just dying to get it. This shipment should include the art for my first 24 Hour Book “Trog!” and the almost entirely complete “Super Top #2”!!!

Super Top #2!!! After 3 years of only having Super Top #1 to show, I will finally be moving up to issue #2.

So that stuff should be here in about a week, Josh be willing. Maybe at some point I’ll actually have a catalog of my own comics, as in more than two. That’d be dreamy!