24 Hour Comics Day 2005 press resources

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24 HOUR COMICS DAY logo (no date):

24 HOUR COMICS DAY 2005 logo:

Talking points:

• The first 24 Hour Comics Day was April 24th, 2004.
• Over 500 cartoonists were at work in 57 event locations for the 2004 festival, with an untold number more celebrating at home.
• For 2005, we already have more event locations signed up, with more signing on all the time.
• 2004 saw events in the US, Canada, and South Korea, with individual particpants in other countries and on other continents.
• For 2005 we have events already announced in the US, Canada, Thailand, France, Germany, and Serbia.
• The oldest participant last year was more than 40 years older than the youngest. The youngest, a seven year old boy, created a comic called "Godzilla Is My Worst Enemy" (which is actually a pretty upbeat title, if you think about it. I mean, life would be pretty bad if you had an enemy worse than Godzilla!)
• Most of the participants are in their late teens or twenties, with a real mix of male and female participants.
• Some of the 2004 were big name comics pros, like former X-Men artist Paul Smith, popular online cartoonist Scott Kurtz (pvponline.com), and Tone Rodriguez of Violent Messiahs and Snake Plissken fame. Some were folks who want to be professional cartoonists. And many were folks just having fun by trying it.
• For 2005, a number of comics pros have already signed aboard to participate at certain event sites.
• You don't have to be a good artist to participate. It's a lot of fun to do, even if you use stick figures to tell your story.
• People do different styles of comics. In addition to the most common black-ink-on-white-paper drawings, in 2004 we had full color painted comics, photo comics, ones made of pictures of posed action figures, and we even had one guy who made a Daredevil superhero comic by cutting pictures of Ben Affleck's head out of magazines and pasting them onto stick figure bodies. In terms of content, there's a lot of humor comics, some action, some superhero, some sci-fi, and a lot of autobiography.
• The 24 hour comics challenge was created in 1990 by Scott McCloud, leading comics theoretician and author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics.
• Between 1990 and 2004, people were doing 24 hour comics on their own or in small gatherings for more than a decade. However, we estimated that the number of people who have done them roughly doubled on 2004's inaugural 24 Hour Comics Day, and with early signs of a larger turn-out, may even double again this year.
• The 24 hour comics that were done before 24 Hour Comics Day was launched tend to be much more downbeat and depressed than the ones done at 24 Hour Comics Day events. This is probably because people at the events are working side by side and sharing the fun; working on a comic at 4:30 AM all alone can give one a lot of time to reflect on bleak thoughts.
• 2004's biggest single location was in Austin Books in Austin, Texas, with 40 cartoonists. We expect that the Dijon, France location will compete for that title this year, but Austin and various other US locations still have a good shot at the biggest gathering.
• Cartoonists who are falling behind the clock often do a full-page shot (instead of a bunch of panels) in order to try to catch up.
• Round about page 19, when cartoonists are worried if they'll finish at all, their characters often fall into a cavern, turn out the lights, or get lost in a snow storm, so that the cartoonist has a page or two that is all-white or all-black with dialog balloons, a cheap and obvious trick for catching up quickly.