Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Twenty Four

It is DONE!

The story if you want to hear it. If you do, you might want to read the comic first as Here Be Spoylers:

With the bitter taste of an unfinished story lingering in my mind and a year of experience under my belt, I figured that the best bet was to come up with a story first. I thought and thought and then sketched a quick robot:

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Then I was suddenly, for some odd reason, reminded of a drawing by the inestimable Jake Parker. When I first saw this rabbit farmer and the very forbidding robot, I thought of a story I heard of farmers using military kettenkraftrads for farm tractors after the war. How cool would it be if a military robot was re-purposed as a farm implement?

I wanted to do something with it but didn't because it's Jake's baby. But, given that it was now a half-hour into the challenge and I had no idea (and that there was no money involved in this), I went ahead and got started. I spent the next half-hour thumbnailng all twenty-four pages, then got started. I thought about choosing the most difficult looking pages to do first, but ended up just doing them numerically. It ended up not mattering; ALL pages became difficult pages in the end.

The hardest part was not being able to do production design. I was making up clothing, vehicles and accessories on the fly. Some things worked, some things not so much. The other hard part was not being able to really take time with difficult poses, and it shows.

The story has some holes, and the dialog is a bit hokey, but what do you want for a half-hour's writing. The art degenerates as the story goes due to my body and mind degenerating as the night/day wore on.
Did I have fun? Well, maybe. Like a race, it's hard to tell. Will I do it next year? Definitely. Next year I'll put a timestamp on each page. Just for curiosity's sake.

So, here's "Redemption".

listening to while posting: "Secret Agent Man" by Johnny Rivers

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really enjoyed that! I especially liked the panels at the start where you focused on his eyes.

Really effective, good work!

Andre Messier said...

So I'm a bit confused by the twist ending... did the rabbits win and re-purpose the enemy hardware, or is the whole attack a fantasy of #7 and he secretly wants to destroy his masters for enslaving him?

Congrats on finishing what is essentially a comic book creating marathon!

Thomas Fummo said...

ditto what andrezero said.
My first reaction was... 'cool, it's a dream'.

I enjoyed the use of 'droppings' as well.
Truly great stuff.

Don Snabulus said...

That is a lot of ink for 24 hours. Stellar job. I am also a fan of the alternate lingo (i.e. droppings). I'd always wondered what the Watership Down world would be like a few centuries later.

Dean Wormer said...

Nicely done, arkonbey.

Reminded me of some of the artwork in the old Bunnies and Burrows RPG.

Arkonbey said...

Lee: Thanks. Not bad for a quickie

AZ: I'd hoped I'd conveyed the re-purposed hardware thing, but I guess not. In my moving fast state, I thought that the unused hardpoints on his shoulders would suggest his past was as a soldier.

Plus, if Seven were having a revenge fantasy, why would it end with it getting incapacitated?

TF: See above.

TF/Snab: I thought my use of 'droppings' was pretty clever until Sweet Enemy told me it should have been 'pellets'. That just flows off of the tongue better.

Dean: Bunnies & Burrows? For real?

Anonymous said...

That's great!

When you're looking at a 24 hr time frame, do you find yourself changing things to make it easier? You mentioned difficult poses. How much did you find yourself changing them vs. struggling through despite the time limit vs. just letting it not live up to your own standards?

I briefly considered the 'dream' ending but the robot looked (based on fantasy robots and actual farm equipment) of military creation. Plus the rabbit farmer made for a good conclusion.

Arkonbey said...

KEM:

Because I thumbnailed all 24 pages right off, I couldn't, in good conscience, change to make things easier (I get into the spirit of the thing). Since I didn't change them, I did just relax my standards a bit. So much so that it hurt a bit to post the finished product...

Swinebread said...

Fantastic! I used to love drawing rabbits in all kinds of situations but of course nowhere near as good as you.

I Love this, there’s all kind of stuff in there: Albedo Anthropomorphics, Battletech, Wabbit Wampage, and Hayao Miyazaki to name a few. My hats off to you sir

Oh Droppings!