Some of the best Hourly Comic Days, and my thoughts

Bwahhaha, I’ll lure you in with the thought of reading some excellent COMICS, but then I’ll make you wade through my THOUGHTS before you get there.

What do you mean you can just scroll down? Oh well, whatever you want.

What did we learn?

So, yesterday I posted my stab at Hourly Comic Day, the fun (fun! It’s fun! Not just hard work) exercise where you’re supposed to draw a comic (or a frame) every hour that you are awake.

Them’s the rules, and I broke them, by drawing the final three pages a day later because, as always, it was a balance between actually doing stuff to draw, and drawing the stuff.

And since comics about drawing comics are the worst, it’s important to at least do a bit of stuff. Unless you’re willing to take that pronouncement and prove it completely wrong, of course.

Next year, Hourly Comic Day will fall on a Monday, which will make it a very different beast for me. It’s a work day, so there is no way that I can take time out to draw every single hour. Plus, a lot of what I do at work can’t be shared, due to our privacy policies, and quite right too.

It might be a blessing in disguise though: I can imagine a M.O. where I set my alarm to ping and jot down one idea every hour, then draw just one frame (just one, you hear that, me?) for each. Could work.

This year, I definitely over-stretched myself. And even the amount of work that I put in didn’t make me immune to the insecure feeling of putting out imperfect, unfinished work. Just like last year, though, I was touched by the way that people respond far more to the content than the quality of the artwork, so long as they can tell what you’re trying to depict.

Towards the end, my line became looser and I depended less on having done a pencil sketch. A day of enforced drawing is like a whole month of drawing lessons – and you see the results much more quickly, too. That’s why, despite the effort, the tiredness, the frames that I wish I could redraw, I’m glad I did it.

Read more comics

And now, here’s your reward for wading through all that prose: here are the hourly comics that I liked the best.

Let’s start with the obvious contenders. These are the same as the people I picked out last year. They were good then and.. well, they haven’t stopped being good!

Dan Berry teaches comics, and he puts out a great podcast about making comics, and he organised the 24 hour comic event at the Lakes annual comics festival… so Hourly Comic Day is all par for the course, no doubt.

Joe Decie is a fellow Brightonian and I still love his pencilled style.

Boum is good at depicting life with a toddler.

Sarah McIntyre decided to depict the day of a dinosaur policeman rather than her own… well, why not?

And now here are some people that were either new to me, or were doing HCD for the first time:

Kristyna Baczynski – aw love and stuff.

Boulet made a 24-hour comic while he was at the French comics festival Angouleme. It is *so* accomplished that it makes one wonder why any of the rest of us bother!

Eleanor Davis on life with a cat on anti-depressants.

Lizz Lunney briefly wondered whether to draw herself as a human instead of a cat, but naaah.

Danny Noble has put all her entries together in one Facebook post.

If that’s not enough for you, it’s easy to find loads and loads more, of many different styles and degrees of accomplishment. Look for #hourlycomicsday or #hourlycomicday (there’s some confusion every year).

• Hashtagged tweets are here
• And Facebook has hashtags too
• Instagram got in on the action, of course
• The mystery that is Tumblr
• Oop, don’t forget Flickr
• There’s even stuff on Pinterest

That’s enough to be going along with: but please comment below if you a) made an Hourly Comic yourself or b) found a good one that I haven’t mentioned!