Comics on the clock (continued)   BY ALEX IRVINE

Hugh Tims is the guy with the gray sock. Like many of his fellow participants, he is now inking pages earlier penciled, and the sock is there to keep his hand from smudging ink that might not be quite dry. His project is Let’s Pretend, an affecting story about two kids pretending to be superheroes and the slings and arrows cast at them by unimaginative peers and teachers. You’ve got to love a comic in which little kids call their teacher "Oppressor."

Geneseo is about halfway through Falling Fast, in which a group of people get stuck in an elevator for just long enough to get annoyed — and then the cable snaps. I won’t give away the ending, but there is a little kid innocently saying "fuck" early on, which shouldn’t work but does.

Rick was right. The conversations are losing coherence. "It’s hard to draw with a straitjacket on," someone says. The ambient music has been the Ramones for a while, but now the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off soundtrack comes on, and at the right moment in the legendary Yello song "Oh Yeah," half of the room comes in together: chickachickahhhhhh.

Then things get kind of hazy. I’ve long since given up on finishing my own abortive attempt at a comic, but I draw some pictures and sketch some notes about what other people are doing. The incredible thing is that nobody gives up.

Overheard at 9:30 a.m.: "My college professor always told me I could do this, but I never believed him."

A fit of erasing breaks out between seven and eight in the morning. This is the last step in the completion of comic pages. After inking, all of the pencil lines are carefully rubbed out, and the artists have more kinds of erasers at their disposal than I would have ever thought existed. The typical pink cylinder on the top of a pencil leaves too many smears, so some participants are using erasers that look like hunks of Silly Putty. Others have what look like little canvas bags that might hold patchouli. The scrub of erasers, and the gathering funk of dazed and sleepless bodies, fills the store.

As people begin to finish, they get retrospective, musing quietly about whose work they admired and who drove them nuts by talking the whole time — this last only after the party in question has turned in his or her pages and left. A number of ragged artists begin to issue disclaimers about the quality of their product. A trend toward minimalism has become evident in these final hours; people who yesterday morning were penciling carefully are now going straight to inking, sometimes not even laying out the page first. There’s a partial consensus that the finished works will be progressively sloppier, with increasing white space in the later pages.

But done. Geneseo, Kish, Connor finish and stagger out. Connor leaves a teddy bear as "an artifact from his workspace"; everyone else just leaves eraser rubbings and empty bottles of Capt’n Eli’s. Actually, Connor doesn’t stagger. He leaves looking much as he did when he showed up the previous morning, and during the intervening 24 hours he can’t have gotten up from his chair more than three or four times. The results suggest that his commitment is amply rewarded. Coelacanth is an excellent if perplexing zine, and Connor’s untitled 24-hour opus is a real feast.

Hugh Tims is the last to finish, at 10:06, with only four minutes to spare before his 24 hours — counted from the first touch of pencil to paper — are up. He looks over Let’s Pretend for a minute before numbering the backs of the pages and giving them to Rick. Joel Rivers reappears. He has eight good pages of Full, and will be turning them in and finishing the project as he can. This is, according to Scott McCloud, "the Noble Failure Variant" of the 24-Hour Comic: a project conceived, begun, and struggled with during the 24 hours, but completed afterward. A 24-Hour Comic in spirit. There are several of these in the thick pile of pages Rick Lowell is collecting.

There are 14 completed 24-page books, out of maybe 25 people who participated for all or part of the time. This puts Casablanca near the top nationally, in head-to-head competition with the biggest comic stores in the country. A look through these pages gives testament to the concentration of talent in Portland (and if you’re interested, two complete comics and selections from a number of others are now hanging in the windows of Casco Bay Books, across the hall from Casablanca). It also becomes a kind of tour through the hive-mind of sleep-deprived comics artists stuck in a room together for 24 hours. Remember how Jay Piscopo couldn’t find a parking place because of Elton John? Well, there’s a facsimile Elton in Welcome to Hoopleville, waving an eggbeater in the general direction of a war memorial. Remember the conversation about Freeway, with Reese Witherspoon (general consensus: ooh, baby) and Kiefer Sutherland (general consensus: whatever)? Well, there’s a scene of pornographic cannibalism (and Capt’n Eli’s root beer!) involving Sutherland’s body in Gulk creator Tim Hofmann’s untitled opus.

Rick is busting his buttons with dazed pride. He couldn’t be happier. Casablanca has gone toe-to-toe with the biggest stores in the country, and Portland comic artists have proved that they can hang with the big boys. Still, nothing is perfect, and Rick wishes that some other people had shown up, particularly women. "We have some really talented female cartoonists in this area," he says. Nobody is sure where they were.

Nobody is sure where anything is at this point. Rick starts to clean up, turning down offers of help. This has been a huge night for him; a week later, he will still be glowing. Copies of most of the finished books, from Portland and everywhere else, are headed off for consideration by a cabal of comic editors who will select 20 for a 24-Hour Comics anthology. Rick is convinced that a couple of the Portland artists deserve to be in the book, and seeing the work, it’s a hard proposition to argue against.

"I’ve always recognized that we have a disproportionate amount of talent locally," Rick says. He hosted 24HCD at Casablanca to make people aware of this, and also "to build a sense of community, let local artists know they’re not alone. I think we were successful in doing that."

Alex Irvine can be reached at airvine@phx.com