Gilligan’s Living Island of the Lost

A “24-hour comic” is a complete 24-page comics story, produced entirely in 24 consecutive hours. It’s an exercise in creativity and productivity, and has been attempted - successfully and not - by many professional and amateur cartoonists. 24-Hour Comics Day is an event designed to encourage more creators to undertake such a project.

I’m doing it this year.

I plan to begin at about 8am on Saturday, 23 April 2005, and finish by 8am on the 24th. I’ll be posting updates here as I work on it. (Note: unlike a “traditional” blog, new entries will be added at the bottom, for actual chronologicality.) I’ll be including scans of the finished pages, but this won’t be a good place to actually read the book. (It’ll be published later, at island.zeromassmedia.com.) The point of this site is to document my progress on it. A lot of cartoonists get together at comics shops or similar places to work on them in the company of fellow travellers for mutual support and for witnesses that you really did the whole thing in 24 hours. But for various reasons (there isn’t a place around here hosting an event, I’d really rather work in the solitude of my own home, etc.) I’ll be doing mine solo.

You’ve probably noticed that the blog already has a title: Gilligan’s Living Island of the Lost. That’s the story I’ll be doing. Again, this isn’t how some cartoonists approach 24-hour comics; they treat it as a kind of improvisation exercise to come up with even the subject of the comic within that 24-hour period. But there’s nothing in the rules that says you have to do that. It’s OK to think about it ahead of time, before you sit down to work on it. Heck, I consider that a key part of the creative process. The rules for this challenge simply state that you can’t put pencil/pen/stylus to paper/tablet until you start the clock. I generally don’t have difficulty coming up with ideas; I have a whole file full of them in my electronic organiser. What I have trouble with is getting them onto paper, so I picked one of them that would lend itself to a single 24-hour session: a wacky amalgamation of Gilligan’s Island, H.R. Pufnstuf, and Land of the Lost. They’re three shows I loved as a kid, each of them with the same basic premise, and I just figured it’d be fun to put the castaways, the Marshalls, and Jimmy on the same lost island, populated by dinosaurs, coconut trees, and Witchiepoo. It all starts with the combined theme song, which - I admit - I’ve started piecing together in my head… “Just sit right back… once upon a summertime… Marshall, Will, and Holly…”

Tomorrow’s the big day, so I’ve been doing what I’m allowed to do in preparation. This morning I checked to make sure I had enough paper to draw on. I’m planning to do two pages per sheet of 11″x14″ bristol (keeping the art small, so it’ll go faster), so I’ll be OK. I’m not quite as sure that my drawing pens will hold out, but I don’t have time to buy more, so I’m going to have to make do. If worse comes to worst, I have a jar of india ink and a crowquill pen to ink with.

This afternoon I’ve been doing what artist types call “research”: collecting reference material, from the Web. I don’t plan to work in my most realistic style, but I still have a cast of a dozen or so “major” characters, so it’ll help to have photos of them handy, to get their basic likenesses (or at least caricatures) down right.

And later tonight I’m going to run to the party store down the street to pick up another 2-liter of diet cola, a bottle of cheap white wine to celebrate with when I’m finished, and some snacks. I’m probably going to prepare a couple decent meals as well (e.g. my infamous boxed mac and cheese, can o’ chili, frozen corn, salsa from a jar, and a real live chopped onion dish), to help keep me going.

I’m about to get started. I’m rested, I’m showered, and I’m fed. I’m not fully dressed, because there’s no point in that really, now is there?

My strategy is as follows: Start with the theme song. Then put together an outline of the story. I have a bunch of ideas for that but I need to decide which scenes to include, in what order. Normally, I write full scripts for the comics I do, but I obviously don’t have time for that today. Instead I’m going to block out pages for each bit, and wing it.

Keeping pace is going to be a challenge, because I tend to be a perfectionist and spend too much time on each panel and each page. Fortunately, I’ve had some practice at producing stuff with a minimum of fussiness, from doing informal jams with my fellow Michigan Comics Network members, but that’s only doing a panel at a time. So I’m going to set milestones or goals for myself, such as having the outline done by 9:00 am, and the first four pages all done by noon.

So to work!

OK, here’s the theme song, merged from the opening songs from the three TV shows, along with panel descriptions for the pages it’s going to cover. It’s a little clumsy in places, but I think it works pretty well… as long as you don’t try to sing it, because the melody would have to skip back and forth too much.

PAGE 1
1 – Shot of the harbor in Hawaii, from Gilligan’s Island.
CAPTION: (Not to be sung to the tune of any song, because the meter just won’t work.)
MUSIC: Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, A tale of a fateful trip, That started from this tropic port, Aboard this tiny ship.

2 – The enchanted boat from Pufnstuf.
MUSIC: “Come and play with meâ€? it called, “Come and play with me. Take a 3-hour routine expedition far across the sea.”

3 – Gilligan and Skipper taking the freaky boat out to sea, fully loaded.
MUSIC: The mate was a mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure.

4 – Witchiepoo on her Vroom-Broom.
MUSIC: But the boat belonged to a kooky old witch who had in mind the group to snitch. From her Vroom-Broom in the sky she watched her plans materialize.

PAGE 2
1 – The boat turns into the Minnow. Everyone reacts with shock.
MUSIC: She waved her wand. The beautiful boat was gone!

2 – The Minnow bounces about on the waves.
MUSIC: The weather started getting rough, The tiny ship was tossed,

3 – The Minnow caught between tsunamis, like the Marshalls’ raft through the canyon.
MUSIC: In the greatest earthquake ever known. High on the seas it struck their tiny craft.

4 – Gilligan and Skipper and Jimmy fighting with the storm at the helm.
MUSIC: If not for the courage of the fearless crew, The Minnow would be lost, the Minnow would be lost.

5 – The Minnow falling off the crest of a wave, as in Land of the Lost.
MUSIC: But the boat sailed on and on and on and on and on, and plunged them down a thousand feet below

PAGE 3
1 - The Minnow on the beach of the lagoon. The characters appears in circles superimposed on the scene next to the lyrics introducing them.
MUSIC: The ship set ground on the shore on this uncharted desert isle.
MUSIC: With Gilligan, the Skipper too,
MUSIC: Jimmy and Freddy the magic flute,
MUSIC: The millionaire and his wife,
MUSIC: Marshall, Will, and Holly,
MUSIC: the movie star,
MUSIC: The professor, and Mary Ann…

PAGE 4
1 - A gigantic H.R. Pufnstuf/Grumpy turns back toward the camera to roar, as the castaways scurry into the Marshalls’ cave home, with the Minnow in the foreground.
MUSIC: Here on Gilligan’s Living Island of the Lost!
H.R. GRUMPY: Howdy!

I have four pages penciled so far. Very roughly, by my standards. Which means I have only an hour to letter and ink them if I want to meet my goal of 4 pages by noon. Could happen. Here are some quick and dirty scans of them as they look right now:

OK, so I have 4 pages completely finished, and it’s after 1:00pm. Definitely running behind schedule already. Not good. Especially since from here on out, I don’t have anything scripted (just general ideas of what bits I want to tell). But it’s not hopeless yet, so I’m going to persevere. I just need to draw more quickly. I think from here on out I’m going to ink each page right after I pencil it. That should help me keep better track of how far I am. Next goal: page 8 by 5pm.

Seven hours and only 5 pages done. Definitely not an improvement in my speed. Plus I’ve got a headache, probably from Sharpie fumes. But I’m still going to try. A new, more realistic goal: page 7 by 5pm.

Page six. More than 8 hours in. ‘Nuff said. Back to work.

This is definitely not an improving trend, with page 7 finished just before the 10-hour mark. But I’m not about to give up.

I’m taking a quick break to scarf down some supper, and doing a little math. Based on my current progress, the best I can hope for is that I’ll finish page 24 about 24 hours from now. Which means that at best I’m in the running for “noble failure” status. As much as I’d like to be able to brag someday about my 34-hour cartooning marathon, I have to face reality and accept that I’m not going to pull off the “Eastman variation” of continuing until all 24 pages are done. Instead I’m going for the “Gaiman variation” and finishing the book at 24 hours, regardless of page count. But I still want a goal, and it seems like 18 pages is still attainable for me. So that’s my target: finishing page 18 at 8am tomorrow. If I feel like it later, I can still go back and insert another 6 pages of “untold adventures” before the ending, so I’ll still get an actual 24-page book out of this.

This page means I’m technically 1/3 finished, and the time is nearly 1/2 gone. Unless I switch to Sharpie stick figures, there’s no bleedin’ way I could possibly finish the full 24 pages on time. But I’m having some fun with this, as you may be able to tell from this page. Nothing like a little naughtiness to keep things interesting, eh? Don’t worry, I won’t let it degenerate into X-rated territory, but I’ve definitely decided not to bother keeping it suitable for 1970s broadcast television.

Just as an aside, it’s snowing here (Grand Rapids, Michigan). And not just a few flakes that barely make it to the ground; the grass and leaves are starting to accumulate a damp white powder. So at least I’m not wasting a nice sunny and warm spring day indoors.

This is semi-officially the half-way point for me, since I revised my target page count downward. Meanwhile, I’ve spent 13 hours and have 11 left, in which to do 9 pages. Since I’m still taking a little more than an hour for each page, that means… I have a chance. The bad news is that this is where it starts getting more physically difficult, since my body’s instincts are to start shutting down soon. But I still have 4 liters of diet cola and a whole box of tea bags, so hopefully I’ll be able to coax it to keep going. At least I’m not suffering any major discomfort yet. The right hand is a little sore, but mostly in the pinky (which I didn’t realise I was doing anything with), so I don’t expect it to be a show-stopper.

You know, if feels like these pages are going more quickly. But the clock suggests otherwise. So, can I do another 8 pages in the next 9 hours or less? I’ll try.

I decided to skip ahead to the final scene, because I want to have an ending on this thing come tomorrow morning, regardless of how far behind I am. This page will eventually be page 23, and the next one will be page 24. Even though they’re really only the 11th and 12th pages. I’m going to try to keep working after page 24, and do the real page 11, the real page 12, etc.

Be warned: the next couple pages are a SPOILER, showing how the story will end. Sort of. Anything you see after that will be stuff that happens before that.

By the way, the snow has actually accumulated over half an inch in places. It’s not a solid cover, because any place the snow landed on the ground itself, it melted. But anywhere it landed on grass suspended in the cold air, or cold automobile metal, it stuck.

OK, so that’s the end. Ha ha, so bloody clever. They’re characters from the current TV show “Lost”, which is based on the same damn premise as the other shows. Which means they’re really on Gilligan’s Living Island of the Lost, and that Witchiepoo is the reason they crashed, and that the monster they’ve heard in the jungle is H.R. Pufnstuf. Now you know all the secrets behind the series.

OK, maybe not. But it seemed a clever idea a few weeks ago when I had it.

Although I could still soldier on and keep working until the 24-hour period is over, and possibly get a few more pages done, I’ve decided to call it a day (so to speak). I’m really tired, and - I admit it - I’m too hung up on producing Quality to want to continue, producing pages I’ll probably be unhappy with in the light of day.

Instead, I’m stopping, having completed half of a comic book, which is… fairly pathetic. But I did it in only about 18 hours, which means I was really only 1/3 too slow. Or to put it another way: I’d need to work 50% faster. I guess I can live with that.

Yes, I failed to produce a 24-hour comic. That’s one way to look at it. But I also produced half a comic book in a mere 18 hours, which is still a lot better than I’ve ever done (not counting the simplistic 4-pagers I used to do when I was 10).

And I do intend to finish this book. I have 12 pages left to do, and 12 full days between now and the next meeting of the Michigan Comics Network. I had originally hoped to bring along copies of my completed 24-hour comic book to show off, but if I average a modest one page per day between now and then (a piece of cake, compared to what I’ve been doing today), I can at least bring along copies of my (plain old) comic book. Which is a hell of lot more than I’ve brought along to a meeting so far. I’ll have a 24-pager, done in a couple weeks. That’s still something to be proud of, I think.

And maybe next year I’ll pull off this 24-hour thang.

For now… to bed.

Well, it’s official now: I’ve failed. Up until now, my going to sleep for the past six hours has just been a strategic disadvantage, and theoretically - with the benefit of super speed powers - I could still finish the assignment on time. But not anymore.

The reasons for my failure are several.

One is just that I draw too damn slow. That’s been my problem since I was about 13. When I was younger, I used to crank out a comic book in an afternoon. OK, “book” is really stretching it, because they were usually only four pages and roughly minicomic size, but the point is that they were a kind of near-instant gratification. Until I started getting good. Then it became important to me that each hand had five fingers, that each character was in a realistic pose, that the hero looked like the same person in each panel, that there was a background, etc. Suddenly it took a lot longer to draw even just a page, and my attention was drawn to other hobbies. One partial solution is to use a less “realistic” style, and I tried to do some of that with this project. But my instincts routinely kicked back in and I wasted precious minutes double-checking continuity or trying to make Lovey Howell look like Natalie Schafer.

That points to a specific failure of this particular story. It’s a “what was I thinking?” factor. I drew something that required likenesses. Of a dozen different characters. Plus cameos. Now, I’m a pretty good portrait artist. Give me a photo or a cooperative model, and drawing tools I’m comfortable with, and I can produce a good likeness.
See? But I spent days on this painting of Andy. Copying a face like that is pains-taking, time-sapping work. Distilling the key features of a face to make a caricature or a cartoon version (as I tried to do here with “Island”) is equally difficult. Frankly, “what I was thinking” was that doing a page an hour wasn’t going to be that great a challenge, so doing some likenesses in the process was something I could handle. It wasn’t.

Another problem is that I’m not a very fast writer. Actually that’s not true. I’m fast, but I’m not decisive. I write something, then I think about it, I tinker with it, and so on. (A bit like my drawing, come to think of it.) If I weren’t writing this as a stream-of-consciousness blog, I would have gone back and changed that first sentence of this paragraph, because on second thought it wasn’t correct. See what I mean? I figured I was OK because I had a bunch of ideas for the story already in my head, but I spent a fair amount of time yesterday trying to figure out the best way to tell them. Thanks to the theme songs, which I rewove together, I had a natural “script” for the first four pages, which helped those go as quickly as they did. If the rules of the game allowed for writing a script ahead of time, I would’ve done a lot better.

Ultimately, I think the greatest secret to my failure is that I’m in lousy shape. Not aerobically, or even in the sense of being over the hill, but in that I don’t draw enough. For me to draw 24 pages in 24 hours is a bit like an occasional mile jogger to run a marathon. My drawing hand held up well enough (the end of my thumb is a bit numb this morning, the middle joint on my index finger aches, and the tendons in my hand are slightly sore) but that’s a bit like noting that I could walk for half a marathon without being sore the next day. No kidding: walking’s less strenuous than running. I’m talking about the ability to move confidently and efficiently through the drawing process. That’s what I need practise for.

Another factor is that, working alone, it was fairly easy for me to fail. With no one watching (and not even that many people checking this blog, certainly not many - if any - checking back), and with no one here to encourage me to keep up or to double-dog-dare me to keep going, the consequences of failure weren’t all that great. I’ve had enough failures in my life (my own fault and not) that I’ve developed some immunity to them; I can give up without it crushing me. I’m not sure if that’s good, bad, or indifferent. Probably some of all three. But it’s in my nature to work alone, so I don’t see that changing for next year.

Yes, that’s right: I said “next year”. I’m not going to let this ignoble failure stop me from trying again. I’ve learned some things from this attempt, and I think I can overcome them. I’m going to work on my drawing speed. (I need to do that in any case, if I’m ever going to produce the graphic novel I’m planning.) I’m going to pick an easier story to draw. Easier to write, if I can. I’m going to train, getting some real drawing practise. And maybe I’ll tell more people I know about what I’m doing, so they can keep a virtual eye on me through it, to keep me going.