It’s been a busy month or so, and naturally when things start to pile up, its smart for creatives like myself to pace things out and not overload their schedules with too much work. Well…that’s the idea at least. Its also natural for creatives like myself to completely throw out caution when competitions come around, work schedules be damned.

Such was the case last week. Platform comics, which is both a website and podcast dedicated to celebrating comic book creators in the industry and enthusiasts, launched its 10k challenge. The challenge was to create a comic between 4-8 pages, minimum of inked and lettered sequential pages, using a thematic prompt issued by them and a line of dialogue somewhere in the story. 10,000 is the number of minutes (or about 7-days) to accomplish the task with. BIG WINNER gets $300 to split among the team members, $100 gift voucher at Scout Comics, and a review by Scout and AIPT comics. All finalists will be published in an E-reader omnibus soon.

I was tempted to go it alone on this one, as the time constraint would possibly make collaboration burdensome. However, I made the smart decision to tag in previous writing collaborator D.A. Hogg of Tinsuits to help tackle the challenge. Our thematic prompt was “Undercover Cop in the 1960s”, and honestly, once I read that, I knew this project was going to be a gas. I’m not sure any of the other registered teams had the same prompt, but we ALL had to use the same line of dialogue regardless: “Maybe they should self quarantine.”

Below is the result of those 10k minutes. I dare say we did a pretty great job, all things considered. For this project, I initially perceived time to be a constraint that would limit our creative output. Au contrair. I have now come to learn that constraining time actually amplified our creative process and results. Instead of nit picking every little detail and waaaaay overthinking the plot, we got right down to business introducing the characters, the setting, and the conflict. More so, we collectively work shopped the story itself in the “Marvel Style”, which is essentially developing the story, and then the artist just starts drawing out the pages! David handled most of the story development and writing of the script, but he also had to work off of what artwork I was laying out and where I indicated text should go, so he was also being forced to follow my lead instead of the other way around. I think for most writer/artists duo’s, this is a fairly precarious way of telling a story, but fortunately David and I have developed a good repertoire and played off each other quickly and well.

After David saw the laid out pages, he developed the script to accompany it, and as I filled out the line art, I added the text so we could edit along the way. By this time, it was about 2-3 days in, so time for editing wasn’t really an option unless it was minimal. Really, it was a matter of racing the clock, especially because we both envisioned a certain part of the story in COLOUR! Though it wasn’t necessary, we both thought the psychedelic part should be in colour, otherwise we would really be letting down the reader and the story. This is also the part where I thought “oh, I’ll just be sure to not over do it, and we should have plenty of time.”

Yeah, nah.

Of course I overdid it, and it still looks terrible. Well, objectively its “OK”, but I could have done a better job given some better time management. Nonetheless, we got the whole story drawn and wrapped up with a few hours to spare once submitted. Though I’ve posted it on social media, its really hard to read there, so this is a much better format to read it with. Enjoy!