So yeah. I got up way too early because...I don't really know why, actually. I got to bed at a reasonable hour, and I felt ashamed at my gawdawful comic again, and I got up and made toast and drank coffee and took the whole mess back to bed with me and read ebooks under my covers with my iPod until I realized I had to do laundry and pay my cable bill and mend my cord jacket because it suddenly got much cooler out as is proper for late October and I need to look presentable and be warm at the same time, and clean up the kitchen and tidy up my place a bit.

The toast and coffee made my kitchen smell like my mom's kitchen back home. My apartment is cool (it's 65 in here, just the way I like it) but I am cozy in jeans and a thermal and a hoodie and wool slippers.

So what now? Last year, Ru likened the morning-after-24-hour-comic-day to, well, the morning-after. You wake up next to something you got very well acquainted with, but in reality you're not all that well-acquainted with it. Hunh.

I don't know. I'm just rambling.

I haven't actually used my voice in a solid 48 hours. It's very weird. I'm going to walk into work on Monday and I know I'm just going to make croaking sounds.

Hey, Ru? 24-Hour Comic Day is just one of Scott McCloud's challenges-in-comicking. I have a copy of his excellent Making Comics, and it has a lot of great ideas for expanding the skill set of the comicker. I was thinking: maybe we could just take an hour sometime and hijack one of his shorter exercises for use here on arty_penguins.

Some of the shorter ones are just stuff like...drawing everyday objects from memory, drawing a number of facial expressions and seeing if an audience can accurately interpret them, or--my favorite--quanto comics.

It's a one-off, one-panel jobbie where one person makes a title logo of something generic (McCloud suggests "Is That Your Dad?", "Blind Date", "Ignore It And It Will Go Away", "Closed Mondays", etc.) Another artist does this too--without telling you what her title logo is. Then, you SWAP! You have to draw a one-off, one-panel comic about her title logo, and she has to draw one for yours. (Mr. McCloud advises against getting too specific with the titles--he advises not writing down "Pope Benedict and Jamiroquai go Skydiving over Pennsylvania", for instance.)

Anyway. It sounds a little silly, but a lot of these mind-stretching exercises are actually really useful. The last two 24-Hour Comic events have taught me and rucifer a LOT about ourselves, our endurance, and our ability to work through the dreaded Hand Cramp. Who knows? Maybe we'll do some more of these smaller-scale comicking stunts in preparation for next year.