Visions of The B-Team

You may recall that back during our 24 Hour Comics Day event at the library, I did an awesome little comic called The B-Team Returns.

In the wee hours of the morning, the talented Adam Buttrick took time out from drawing his own comic to draw a few scenes from mine! Here then are a few images from my comic drawn by Adam:

(Some of the scenes seems a bit more violent when not drawn as stick figures...)

Finally, here's a group shot of some of the characters the comic that Adam drew:

Go visit Adam's blog, where you can see more of his drawings, including his own 24 Hour Comics Day comic: Tim Tadabrucki and the Stealing Trick.

24 Pages of Awesome

As promised, here is the comic that I created for 24 Hour Comics Day at the Dude this past weekend. But first, a word or two of explanation:

Back in junior high, I used to create one-page comics based on The A-Team and show them to friends. The rub was that I had never seen an episode of The A-Team. Not a one. So everything I knew was based on second-hand knowledge; or I would just make things up! I pretty sure that the comics I did exhibited very little relation to the actual show.

I haven't really drawn anything resembling a comic since junior high, which was over twenty-five years ago. So when I decided to do a comic for 24 Hour Comics Day, I decided to go back to those comics I did in my youth for inspiration. Sadly the copies of those comics are long gone, so this new comic is based on the no doubt mis-remembered comics that were based on a TV show I had never seen. Which is to say that any resemblance to any actual A-Team is purely coincidental.

It should go without saying that this comic is a parody, and in that spirit I've renamed them to be The B-Team. Hopefully anyone who appears in the comic will take it in the spirit in which it is intended.

Sadly, Stephen J. Cannell, the creator of The A-Team, passed away on September 30, right before 24 Hour Comics Day. This comic is dedicated to his memory; I'm sure that he would have put a dinosaur in his version had only the budget allowed.

And please recall that as with all 24 Hour Comics Day comics, this was created in under 24 hours. Not that having any longer would have improved it much... I did the scans on my el-cheapo home scanner, so please excuse the quality.

Here then is the link to the first full-length comic I've ever created: The B-Team Returns.

Edit: Here's a picture of me (taken by Phoebe Gloeckner), hard at work staring at a blank page:

Edit 2: The Web interface to DropBox has inconveniently gone down. I've moved the file over to my personal Webspace, so hopefully the link should work again...

24 Hour Comics Day at the Dude was Awesome!

This past weekend we had our 24 Hour Comics Day event at the library in the Duderstadt Center. We began at Noon on Saturday and finished at Noon on Sunday. Thirty people participated, although not everybody stayed for the entire time. A majority of the participants were students in Phoebe Gloeckner's comics class at the Art School, and we had other students and people from the area as well. The youngest was 11-years-old. The oldest, well, at least as old as me. For almost everyone this was their first attempt to do something like this. And while not everyone completed twenty-four pages, or had the stamina to stick out the entire 24 hours, everyone had a great time and got an intense experience in comics creation.

Most awesomely for me, I was able to complete my 24 page comic! This was the first time I had attempted to draw anything resembling a comic since I was in junior high (over twenty-five years ago!) So I consider this quite a personal accomplishment. I'll be posting a scan of my comic soon...

We're planning to put together an anthology of works created at the event, but it will be a while before that is ready.

A big thanks to everyone who participated in our very first 24 Hour Comics Day at the library!

24 Hour Comics Day

Our library, in association with the Eisner Spirit of Comics award-winning Vault of Midnight comic store, will be hosting a 24 Hour Comics day event from Noon on Saturday October 2 to Noon on Sunday October 3. More information at http://www.lib.umich.edu/24-hour-comics-day-duderstadt .

Details are still being ironed out, but we hope to have food & caffeine available in addition to a space for creating. We're also talking with our friends at MPublishing about putting together an anthology of 24-hour comics created at the event.