Does anybody remember Quick-Draw McGraw?
I've always liked the idea of trying a 24-Hour Comic, but I've never really imagined myself to have the staying power. I did try a 12-hour comic a few years back on a flight to the States (I finished in something like 8½ hours), but wasn't really happy with the results. I'm far too much of a perfectionist to be really happy with something produced on that kind of time scale, but I usually don't have the strength of will to stick out anything longer either (Robyn, I really do want to get back into that project, and I'm going to give it another shot once I'm in my new job).
But then I heard about 24-Minute Comics (mostly because of Isaac's Nonsense Robot), and figured that forcing myself to abandon concepts like quality of artwork, and instead focusing on getting things done might help in two ways: firstly, it would mean that I actually finished something, and secondly, it would help me with my narrative skills, which, while kind of OK, are still not as hot as I would like them to be. I seem to suffer from what is known in pseudo-technical circles as "fear of the future": essentially, an unwillingness to make anything big happen in my stories because it might turn out to be wrong.
To continue with my tangent (I promise I'll get back to a point eventually), once I know where a story is going, I'm quite happy to take the lead and mop up the details, but you'll very rarely see me on a Friday night making the first big advance in a scene, and if I'm starting something that's relatively open stylistically, my character will very rarely have any kind of distinguishing feature (I was going to say "my character will very rarely have a hook", but I'm kind of notorious (unjustly, I think) for playing pirates at the slightest provocation).
Aaaaaanyway, I figured, hey, I'm bored, I've spent far too much time on the computer this weekend, I'm all by myself: how about I put my pen where my mouth is? So here is the result:
Obviously, there are some shortcomings with the artwork (mostly because I spent almost two and a half minutes drawing the king on the second page, and had to really crank up the pace), but I reckon it came out OK. Surprisingly, I underestimated the amount of space I had left when I was getting towards the end, which is why it finishes so abruptly: I could have sworn I had another couple of panels to play that out. Ah well.
Anyway, it's a first attempt.