-- Dan Yack
This was a 24-hour comic (24 pages conceived, written drawn, and otherwise completed within 24 hours - its a concept by Scott McCloud), something to get me into gear and productive. A number of other people did them too, and they're stored online. Drawn by me, to the best of my talking-head-stick-figure abilites, the thing took a total of about 15 hours.
Review by Dan Yack of Voiceworks Magazine below the comic.
The prospect of reviewing a 24 hour comic made me feel a bit squeamish. The same way that watching an exhausted, emaciated human stagger and repeatedly collapse along the final 400 metres of a marathon does. Or the way any kind of volume=victory eating or drinking competition does. These sorts of things aren't really undertaken for the purposes of public consumption, but more as personal tests of endurance. A proclamation of existence, a fist in the air and a big fuck you to the gods, if you like. This comic will not be exempt from the usual rigours of my critical evaluation *ahem*, but I will (and you should) keep in mind the circumstances and intentions involved in the creation of this work.
So I'll get this out of the way right now: Artis the Spoonman looks horrible. If I'd seen this on the shelf at Polyester my eyes would have skated right over it without even the slightest skerrick of interest. If, for whatever reason, I'd picked it up and looked inside, I probably would have snorted, perhaps even scoffed, and put it back down with all the other hastily drawn, badly photocopied little shitrags that seem to make up a depressingly large share of local underground comics on the shelves. Not that I'm a snob in this respect, mind you. I like shabby stuff. I haven't got much interest in banging on about the importance of Craft, or 'Professionalism' or whathaveyou, but for me, it kinda helps if a comic looks like its creator at least gives a shit.
I'm glad Brad mailed Spoonman to me, because he sent a nice letter with it and hence, I was obligated to read it. And Spoonman was worth the reading. As noted above, the shaky stick-figure art leaves a bit to be desired (and granted, Brad apologises for it and hopes he 'didn't hurt anyone with it'), but it's got charm and is adequate for the task at hand. The real strength of Spoonman lies in its smart structure and tight execution. Spoonman fucks with the conventions of comics and narrative in a way that I've seen before (characters escaping panel borders, self-conscious references to the author and reader, etc), but wraps the plot around these devices, rather than employing them as gratuitously clever add-ons. Brad displays a comfortable familiarity with what makes the medium tick, and is rarely heavy-handed. There's a mystical epiphany that leaves our protaganist with a heightened awareness of his panels 'n' pages reality. It's like Understanding Comics as written by Donnie Darko. Unusually for a 24 hour job, the story appears to have been figured out before it was drawn rather than improvised, and behaves in a snappy back and forth fashion, wrapping up cleanly at the end.
Brad only used 16 of his allocated 24 hours to make this comic. My hardcore comics friends told me that 'the last 5 hours is when you really strike gold'. And I tend to agree. Spoonman displays none of the giddy sleep-dep delirium that often colours the final 5 pages of many 'true' 24 hour comics. But Spoonman's lucidity is its best feature, so the trade-off works. I'd like to see something by Brad created without the time constraints, cos Spoonman is scrappy, but it's also smart.