Sending in your comic

One of the rules of the 24 Hour Comics Challenge is that you have to send a copy of your completed work to Scott McCloud. This is true whenever and wherever you do your 24 hour comic.

We here at 24 Hour Comics Central will be collecting the copies on his behalf. Some things to consider when sending your work in:

• Include a filled-out copy of the cover sheet, which you can download here as a PDF file.
• You can send in a photocopy or a CD-ROM. Never send originals, we ain't gonna return 'em!
• The address to send it to is on the form: 24 Hour Comics Day, c/o About Comics, 217 Red Oak Lane, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320, USA.
• If you're doing the online variation at home and you don't want to submit for the book, you can simply send an email to online@24hourcomics.com with a link to your story, the information from the cover sheet, and let us know whether you're willing to have a link to your story on the blog. (We don't know how much traffic this will add to your site.)

Submitting for the book

Please don't focus on the book I'm very proud of the Highlights book. However, if I have one regret, it's that the existence of this book causes some people to view 24 Hour Comics Day as a big contest to get in the book. If you go into 24 Hour Comics Day with the goal of creating a really good comic, then you've got a reasonable chance of success. If you have the goal of completing a comic, good or not, then your odds of success are quite good.And if your goal is to have an interesting experience and learn something about what you're capable of, then success is practically assured. But if you're aiming at getting into the book, you've got a tough goal to start with. 2004's book had 24 stories and about 20 single panels from other work, and we only managed to squeeze that much in because the odd nature of a few stories made it possible to fit them in a few pages. This year, we may well have a few fewer stories, and it looks like we'll have far more cartoonists celebrating the day. Secondly, the goal is very fuzzy. While the quality of the work matters, part of the goal of the book is to create a sense of what the day was like. As such, stories are picked for their variety and the way they reflected different aspects of the day. If you take a look at 24 Hour Comics Day Highlights 2004 (and you should, it's good!), you'll see that it includes work by very young folks and fairly old ones, by amateur cartoonists and pros, by folks working in varying countries, styles, formats, and genres. It's not "the 24 best stories from the day", and you might create a wonderful comic and still not get in the book. And thirdly, the prize is not that great.Last year's book was a moderate seller, and with the royalties split between so many cartoonists, the money generated was very poor pay for 24 hours of effort. And even if you don't make the book, you are free to publish your work yourself. I understand that for some of you, it would be quite cool to be in the book, but believe me, the experience of taking the challenge is far more worthwhile. Nat Gertler founder, 24 Hour Comics Day editor, 24 Hour Comics Day Highlights

On the cover sheet, you'll see a section to fill out if you want your comic considered for an upcoming anthology of 24 hour comics. You do not have to fill this out to participate in a 24 hour comics day event; only fill this out if you're willing to have your work included in a book. Some things to consider:

• You should send in your work, even if you did not successfully complete the 24 hour comics challenge. Last year's book included not only a "Gaiman variation" (a story of less than 24 pages complete in 24 hours), but also a work that was not technically a 24 hour comic (it was a collaborative work rather than a solo work), and shots of individual panels and pages from works that were simply not completed. For the 24 Hour Comics Day Highlights book, we're interested in showing interesting things that were done on the day, whether they were legitimate 24 hour comics or not. (If it is some variation from a normal 24 hour comic, please note that on the form.)
• You can be considered for the Highlights book even if you did not participate at an "official event site". So long as you did the work on 24 Hour Comics Day, it counts.
• If you did a 24 hour comic on some other day besides 24 Hour Comics Day, submit it anyway but note it on the form. Your work won't qualify for the Highlights book, but it may qualify for one of our other books. Just be sure to note on the form that it was done on some other day.
• Please get your work in quickly. If your work is not in our hands within two weeks after 24 Hour Comics Day, we may not be able to consider it for inclusion in the Highlights book.
• If you're submitting a photocopy, please make sure it's a clean copy, and that you don't cut off the edges of your work.
• If you're submitting a CD-ROM, please scan your work at at least 400 dpi greyscale (or color, if your comic was done in color) - unless your work was digitally created, in which case send it in at whatever resolution you worked at. Scanned work should be saved using the TIFF format, not as a JPEG.
• Even if you're sending a CD-ROM, please consider including a printout as well. It is a lot easier to consider your piece through the editing process if we don't have to keep reloading up your CD, hunting down the files, and so forth.
• Do not submit files via email. We can't have our email flooded that way.