Here it is! My 2010 offering for the 24 Hour Comic Day Gods! As it was last year, there is a bit of required reading before diving head first into this.. If you hadn’t read my comic from the last two years read these first “Somewhere in Montana.” “Meanwhile in Wyoming.”

Then click on the graphic below to read “Elsewhere in Utah.”

Over the course of the year, I had been challenged by Danno Klonowski to do fifty 24 Hour Comic adventures including Bret Blackberg and crew for every state in the union. That sounds like a great idea! An idea I may just tackle! But not yet, I’d like to finish a couple of other projects first!

This year I did only a couple of things a bit differently and learned from a mistake early on that I intend to correct next year. I worked at the scale I intend to print these at, which is 5″ x 7″ and is similar to what I did last year. I worked on 11″ x 17″ graph paper, just like last year, but instead of having two 5″ x 7″ pages per each 11″ x 17″ piece of paper, I tried to be more efficient and divided the paper into fourths.

I paginated the comic before starting on the story. I believe this is a good idea, since it will save you time should you decide to scan and print these later. Next, I wrote and pencilled the story. Basically I created detailed thumbnails, which I inked over later.

Before inking the book, I lettered and inked the panel borders. When I began inking, I looked over my pencils and searched for items that required more detail, such as buildings and inked those first. I did this, so when fatigue set in, I was able to work on less detailed panels without fearing that I was going to create really sloppy art on, what I hoped would be, nicer looking pages.

The lesson I learned is that I should have had each paginated section flipped so I could work at the bottom of each page rather than reach across the paper. What I mean by this is that I would have pages 24 and 1 facing the bottom of one half of the 11″ x 17″ paper, lengthwise, and pages 2 and 23 facing the bottom of the other side. This caused smudging, which although wasn’t a big hassle, it did require more erasing than should have occurred.

Once again I took the “Pictionary approach” to my story. Since I didn’t have any Pictionary cards when I started, I just picked out five words at random in the dictionary. My words were knick-knack, senile, protractor, cranny, and isotope. I didn’t really use these words in a particularly clever fashion, as I had already had a vauge idea of what my story was going to be about before hand. Basically, I knew that I was going to use the same characters as the last two years.

Eventually, I finished at 4 AM, but finished inking at 3 AM. I spent the extra hour erasing and correcting my pages. This is even more impressive than last year, since I left last year at 5 AM, without having erased and corrected my pages. As usual, I ate bananas, got a good night’s sleep, and kept myself hydrated throughout the event.

Check out other Minneapolis 24 Hour Comic Day results at the Minneapolis 24-Hour Comic Day blog.