Alex Heberling

My third 24 Hour Comic is finished! This time, I tried to tackled the webcomic variation of the 24HC, which is mentioned on Scott’s website as 100 panels in 24 hours, since many webcomics don’t follow traditional full-page format or sizes. I didn’t achieve this, but got 24 total strips out of it, and my panel count was 61, so I at least got over halfway there!

Each strip illustrates a “life lesson” or thought I’ve had, many of the humorous, and at the end I decided to title it “Alex’s Guide to a Life Well Lived”.  Each comic was drawn directly in Sharpie and colored with Photoshop.  I learned that if I ever wanted to do a side comic, this would be a good style to use.  I really like the look of the marker drawings colored, and these comics remind me a great deal of my Jigworthy days.  Some of these comics are actually based on scripts I had tucked away in case we did ever start doing Jigworthy again!

I quite enjoyed doing this comic, and especially liked that I didn’t go with a plot so much as a premise.  My first two 24HCs had plots, and it was frustrating near the end of both of them when I had already drawn everything I had in mind for the stories, but I still needed to pad parts of it with pages to reach the 24 page goal.  That wasn’t an issue at all with this comic;  the worst was when I was up to 22 strips, and was trying to think of more ideas for the last two, but it’s an entirely different kind of frustration.

I finished this comic with only five minutes left, so I was literally working up right up to the buzzer with this one.

October 18th was 2008’s official 24 Hour Comics Day, and I was among the innumerable participants. I did it from midnight to midnight, so that my comic would be completely done within a single calendar day.

I ended up doing a sequel to The Shepherd!  I’d never really intended to do one, since The Shepherd is a pretty standalone story, but since the goddess of Summer was the only goddess I didn’t portray in the original, I thought it would be fun to make a story just about her.

Summer’s Year adds to the concept that The Shepherd is the actual mythology of a fictional world.  When I thought about it, I imagined that the mother and little girl (who are in the frame story of the original) live in a subarctic environment that has very long winters and short summers.  The Shepherd explains, in that world’s mythology, that the winters are long because of the Shepherd’s love for the Winter goddess, and Summer’s Year answers the counterpart question of why the summers are pleasant, but short.  The Summer goddess is childlike and exuberant, and therefore runs out of energy quickly and cannot make the summer last very long.

I did Summer’s Year all in colored pencil, which took me back to the days when I used to color almost exclusively with colored pencils and markers, before I got into computer coloring.  I inked the comic a lot more than I thought I would, considering how much pain I was in after Pariah, possibly due to the fact that graphite and yellow colored pencil does not mix very nicely.

I took a nap on Friday evening to prepare for the marathon.  Around 4 to 6 AM, I was starting to regret that I hadn’t gotten a full night’s sleep, since I was dragging quite a bit at that point, but once the sun came up I started feeling pretty normal.  Now that’s it over, I’m definitely glad I chose to do it midnight-to-midnight, since having the daylight for a good part of the marathon helped me deceive my internal clock.

There were several points where I was scared I wouldn’t make it in time, but I actually managed to finish the comic completely and got it online at 11 PM, a whole hour early.  I did all the dialogue and word bubbles in Photoshop this time around, which definitely helped speed up the process.  (And saved my hands from some wear and tear.  I’m quite heavyhanded when I write.)  Unfortunately, I need to fiddle with my scanner’s settings because the first scans I got (the ones online now) are not very good quality.  It’s picking up oranges and reds very badly.  So keep that in mind when reading; the originals look MUCH better.

Summer’s Year

Teenage Superhero Full Map

Teenage Superhero is my most recent website artwork.  It’s a single-page website invoking the capabilities of Infinite Canvas, and tells the short story of a very self-centered, presumably female, teenage superhero.

For those unfamiliar with the term, Infinite Canvas is a webcomics concept.  Unlike the constraints of print dimensions, comics on the web (or in this case, a website) can extend infinitely in any direction.  This concept was introduced by Scott McCloud in Reinventing Comics.

I’ve been using Twitter since the beginning of September, and the inspiration for this project came from wondering what the Twitter feed of a superhero or other fictional character would be like.  I’m a big fan of the stream-of-consciousness capabilities Twitter has, so I wanted to arrange each thought into a large map that wanders around the canvas like the mind wanders from thought to thought.

To look at this site, the browser window is used as a viewfinder to observe a small part of the map at a time.  There are handy arrows that point you in the direction you need to scroll next.  (I reccommend using the mouse scroll button to scroll up and down, and using the mouse pointer to scroll from left to right, OR press down on the mouse scroll button to get the icon with four directional arrows, and just drag the mouse around as you read.)

Excel Map

To build this website, I first made the images that represent the character’s individual thoughts.  When I had quite a few of them, I then made a map in pencil on graph paper, and marked the in-between blocks with the squares I knew would be images of arrows.  I converted this to a digital version using Microsoft Excel, then used that as a visual guide to setting up the actual HTML code.  The map is structured using a table.

Like, OMG!  It’s Teenage Superhero!

My video log from last weekend.

I put together the seperate website for my 24 Hour Comics, and made Pariah much prettier!

My first 24 Hour Comic, Pariah, was finished this morning with 15 minutes to spare.

I’ve got many many ideas on how to make my next attempt more successful.  Mainly, my right hand and my back and neck got very VERY sore from being slumped over the tabletop, so I’ll probably get a hand brace before the 18th.  Chris was very very helpful and supportive, and stayed up with me through the entire 24 hours making me food and helping me wake up from the naps I took throughout the day.  The naps at regular intervals, in retrospect, were extremely helpful, and I’m glad I thought to do so.  I took a 30 minute nap every three hours or so, though one nap turned into an hour, and another into 45 minutes, but they did help me get refreshed, and gave my hands and back some much-needed rest.

I literally made up the story as I drew it, which I think you can tell if you pay close attention to the unfolding of the plot.  The beginning has a much different feel than the ending.  Scott McCloud recommends improvising for the 24HC, but I think this particular story would’ve benefited from a little more planning before I put pencil to paper.  Specifically, there were several points near the end of the 24 pages that would’ve been good places to end, but since I needed more pages… I just had to figure out ways to add to it.  It was painfully frustrating around 4 AM this morning when I was up to 22 pages and had no idea how to expand the ending to fill two additional pages.

The concept of the Marked is something I may build upon for another comic idea I’ve had in the back of my mind.

I logged my progress with a video camera throughout the endeavor, so next week at school I’ll be capturing the video and putting together a short little movie about this project!  I got some nice shots of my actual drawing work, too, so it wont just be me talking into the camera about how tired I was.

I slept most of the day away, but I’m definitely still feeling some fatigue.  I probably wont have any trouble getting to sleep tonight.

Phew.  I’ve been working on this comic for 12 hours now, which is the halfway point.  I’m making surprisingly good progress, with 18 pages drawn and 15 inked.  And when I say inked, I mean the basic lines of everything.  Later, I’m going back to black in things that need to be black, add weight to some lines here and there, and perhaps add some interesting shading with colored pencil.

I had lots of ideas going into this thing, but lo and behold, at 11 this morning when I saw down to start, I could remember none of them.  So I hopped online and used an idea generator until I got an idea I liked.

So far, the comic is set in this cyberpunk-y distopian future.  I have no idea whether it’s Earth or not.  I’m literally making this up as I go along.  (Wheeheee!)  Anyways, there’s this caste of people called the Marked, and they are like… basically the slave caste.  Someone is marked when they’re born (by a biotech protein enzyme thing… biotech, yeah) and from there they are farmed until adulthood and then sorted into various jobs.

Mariah is a Marked woman who is an assassin.  She is assigned to kill another woman named Jana, who has been working and working to open a women’s bar in this city, and some crime people syndicate things have employed the assassin’s guild to remove her.  Trouble is–oh no!– Mariah and Jana are actually good friends.  So Mariah, knowing that she will be killed herself if she refuses the job, ‘takes’ the job in order to go warn Jana that she’s in danger.

Wackyness ensues!  I don’t want to give away the rest, since that would defeat the purpose of making it a comic, and plus it’s not all done yet.  I’m surprised that I came up with a story like this, over some of the other ideas I’ve been mulling over the past few weeks, but I’m really interested in where it’s going to go.

Also, I remember the real reason I don’t ink anymore: after 12 hours of alternating inking and drawing, MY HANDS REALLY HURT.  Oh god, my tendons.

I’ve been documenting this process with a video camera, so I’m vlogging this event, too.  Sometime next week I should actually be able to edit the video and throw it up on YouTube for the viewing.

I’m either going to call this comic Mariah, after the main character, or Pariah, since Mariah sounds like it, and it’s appropriate.  Though a bit pretentious.  Back to work!

This Saturday, around 10 in the morning, I intend to do a 24 Hour Comic.  This is kind of a big thing for me, since I’ve never exactly tried to push myself at time deadlines with a large number of pages.  Jigworthy strips usually took me around 3 hours to do apiece, and Garanos took 3 to 4.  It adds up quite a bit when you update three days a week, though I always thought the quality of the artwork was worth it.

I’ll probably be taking a different approach to these comics than my usual style, mainly the fact that I’ll probably be inking again.  GASP!  I know.  I haven’t inked anything, digital or otherwise, on a regular basis since 2004, other than a few individual pieces, and of course, Corner on Main.  Hell, I haven’t even colored with traditional media in even longer.

It will be an interesting exercise in going back to my roots.  Once upon a time, I hoarded skin-tone colored pencils and inking pens.  Now I… don’t.  Though the colored pencils have been rattling around in the bottom of my tacklebox for quite awhile.

In preparation for this weekend, I’ve been trying to clean up my apartment and get it looking very very tidy, so I’m not distracted by clutter.  When I’m faced with a looming, important deadline, it’s not uncommon for me to suddenly become very productive at cleaning and generally doing anything but what I should be doing.  This behavior works on many levels for me, since I’ve been easily distracted from getting this important cleaning done in the past few days, in favor of reading webcomics that I’ve been meaning to read.  (Though I did get my bedroom vacuumed!)  I’m frustratingly predictable sometimes, heh.

There’s also the matter of the website for these comics to be collected in.  I’ll probably have to hold off on actually building it until next week.

Time to retrieve the laundry.  I’ll probably post again tomorrow!  Good night.

Corner on Main is a non-linear interactive webcomic. I wanted to take a single block of about 15 minutes, and tell many different stories that all happen in that same short period of time. The comic’s title is that of the convenience store around which all the stories take place; one vignette is from the perspective of the shop clerk, another is from some of the customers in the store, and so forth. On each page in any given character’s story track, background characters are clickable, and doing so will take the reader to that person’s story track, picking up at the exact point in time that they left the first person’s story.

The experience of reading Corner on Main utilizes some of the unique capabilities of webcomics, and cannot be reproduced in print form. By interlinking all the stories on the web, it creates thousands of potential ways to read Corner on Main, none of which need to be remotely linear.