Comics on the clock Portland artists create for 24 hours straight BY ALEX IRVINE

At 10 in the morning on Saturday, April 24, Casablanca Comics is jammed. A camera crew from Channel 13 blocks the doorway to get a good shot of the scene: four tables taking up most of the store’s floor space, surrounded by chairs and littered with drafting boards, tackleboxes full of ink bottles and brush cases, rulers, erasers, and a single dark-gray sock of mysterious origin and inscrutable function.

Once they’ve got their shot, I get past the TV people and track down a chair. Casablanca’s owner, Rick Lowell, deals out a round of snacks and drinks, and the final round of preparations begins. Pencil sharpeners are emptied, headphones produced and mounted, bottles of water/sports drink/soda set on the floor where they can’t do any damage, and clean white pages laid out.

It’s 24-Hour Comics Day, and Portland’s cartooning and comics community has turned out in force to test themselves against the clock.

24-Hour Comics Day originated with comic-book theoretician and evangelist Scott McCloud, of Understanding Comics fame. He began encouraging people to try to complete from scratch — no pre-existing sketches or storyboards — a full-length 24-page book in 24 hours. Over the last 10 years or so, hundreds of people have taken the challenge, from rank amateurs to comic superstars like Neil Gaiman. This year, organizers of the event took it to another level, enlisting stores across the country to host local artists. Dozens of comic retailers (and a few art schools) from the US, Canada, and South Korea stepped up. A book is planned to highlight the best of what the marathon produced.

How good can a 24-hour comic be? You’d be surprised. The first thing that becomes apparent to even a casual observer of the busily-sketching crowd in Casablanca is that there’s a lot of talent in the room. A good number of the 22 people there at the 10 a.m. kickoff are doing solidly professional work. Not that polish is the objective; almost everyone there suggests that they’re using the event as a way to do something different than they usually do. Michael Geneseo is there looking to finish his first comic, Falling Fast. He has "tons" of half-formed ideas and isolated pages, and sees 24HCD as "a good exercise" in forcing him to finish something. When it’s all over, he says, "I’ll be able to say I’m a comic-book writer."

Other participants are more experienced, among them Joel Rivers, whose Along the Canadian graces Casablanca’s shelves; Michael Connor, of the bizarrely incredible zine Coelacanthus; Hoopleville creator David Kish; and Bob Ulrich, who works at the store and is taking 24HCD to create a full-length version of his ongoing Paper Bag Funnies. The youngest participant in the room, and according to Rick Lowell the youngest in the country, is Lowell’s seven-year-old son, Duncan. While everyone else is still lining up their materials, Duncan is 10 pages along.

Under the watchful poster eyes of the Green Arrow and a gallery of manga heroes, the adults begin. Some follow the traditional penciling/inking process; others start straight in with an arsenal of markers; still others (your correspondent included) sit in front of a pile of pencils, loose sheets of paper, and loose ideas. The prohibition on working from existing sketches is widely, if not universally, observed.

The first hour or so is pretty quiet as the writers work out what they’re going to do; then conversations start to erupt. Predictably these are initially centered on the state of comics: discussions of method, gripes about rejections, and so on. Then other topics start to creep in. A rant about Tarantino leads to a consideration of Werner Herzog. The old gay-subtext-in-the-Adam-West-Batman script unfolds, given new life when someone loudly claims that Scooby Doo is way more gay than Batman — and executes a flaming version of the famous Scooby laugh by way of proof.

Joel Rivers has begun a spontaneous piece called Full. He explains that he "opened the dictionary and that was the word I saw." (The tables at Casablanca are littered with dictionaries and other idea-generating gewgaws, including a set of playing cards featuring odd drawings and single concepts like "dill pickle" or "stuck in traffic.") In the world of Full, the oceans have risen to drown all land except for a single island. On this island is the world’s only fully functional desalination plant, and squads of undersea frogman critters are constantly trying to overrun the island and take control of the precious factory.

Rivers is one of Casablanca’s two 24HCD participants to have received a Xeric grant; the other, Bill DeBray, does a manga-style book called Untold Tales of Mystery Girl. Xeric grants, offered by a foundation begun by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Peter Laird, give comic artists up to $5000 for production expenses like printing and distribution. Rivers has put his into Along the Canadian, a sort of hard-boiled Western, now heading into its fourth issue from Obion Comics.

Overheard at 6 p.m.:

"Are you exceeding your expectations?"

"No, it’s equally as lame as I thought it would be."

The crowd is much smaller. Some have gone to work and will return later; some have just split for a while; some have just split. Among those who remain, two dynamics are evident. Some people, like Dave Kish, are "in the groove" and don’t want to talk. Others are seizing on any excuse to get away from their books for a while. One of this second category is the only woman present, who goes by Snow. At around 7 o’clock, she overhears a woman wondering which of Casablanca’s many manga books to buy for her daughter. Instantly Snow is there, introducing herself as a serious manga geek and offering this appreciative but slightly nonplussed customer an avalanche of advice about manga.

Rick comes back from a supply run at about 7:30, happy that the event was featured on the six o’clock news. Son Duncan returns as well, and sets to work on his second comic of the day. His older sister Caitlin carefully begins a project titled Bratty Sisters, Boys, and Fairies. Nobody in the room, it must be said, has a better title.

Duncan and Caitlin leave with Rick’s wife Laura O’Meara a little after eight, but not before Duncan runs around to various increasingly glazed artists to show off his most recent work. He tells a joke about some Egyptians in his comic going to Pizza Tut, and receives a warm response. Then the Lowells are off, leaving only Rick to ride herd over the 15 or so steady participants — including Snow, who has by this time given up on sales and returned to art.

Overheard at 8:30 p.m., immediately following an intense back-and-forth about the Smurfs: "Can you imagine what these conversations are going to sound like in about six hours?"

Rick is inking Jay Piscopo’s penciled pages of Captain X, a spinoff of The Undersea Adventures of Capt’n Eli, which is a comic produced by the Shipyard brewery to promote Capt’n Eli’s root beer, which has been copiously available all day, and free, and is pretty good. He’s mentioning that another local artist, Dave Peabody, can’t make it because of the parking situation caused by the Elton John concert at the Civic Center. This spurs a store-wide roast of Elton John. Me, I’m wondering how come Elton John doesn’t have a comic. If it’s good enough to sell root beer . . . you know?

Periodically, Rick hops on the Internet to check the message board at www.24hourcomics.com and find out how Casablanca is comparing with other stores. Every time he does this, he comes back beaming; they’re near the top in sustained participation, and it looks like a lot of people are going to finish. 24HCD isn’t technically a competition, but Rick Lowell is a tireless advocate not just for comics but for Portland artists, and the fact that Casablanca is keeping pace with (or outdoing) stores in New York and San Francisco repays his belief and hard work.

A consideration of the television show 24 ripples through the room, and immediately seems like it should have happened sooner. Once the topic of Kiefer Sutherland is broached, conversational standards begin to slacken. The movie Freeway, with Sutherland and Reese Witherspoon, comes up and receives mixed reviews (although Witherspoon herself does not).

Anthony’s was supposed to provide Rick and his rapidly degenerating band of artists with whatever pizza they had left over at the end of the night, but an emissary from the pizza place appears bearing grave tidings. There are no leftovers. Gloom settles over Casablanca — then Rick leaps to the rescue, ordering pizza from somewhere else and with enviable dexterity deflecting requests for anchovies.

Overheard sometime after 2 a.m., after one artist shows pages to another: "Do you think that chick is hot?"