On Saturday, April 23rd, 2005, I remained home from work. I took a valued sick day from my limited cache and cast aside the cold, chafing shackles of the local library, leaving books unshelved and a disappointing number of patrons wondering why Minesweeper wasn't letting them check their 'eMails' on the 'internets'. Today was a day that I'd set aside to make a 24 page comic over 24 full, uninterrupted hours, and at other somewheres around the world, hundreds of other artists were doing the same. Our collective scrapings would rock the world, and we'd drive the nation's critical ink shortage into the red zone.

Such a project is the brainchild of Scott McCloud, noted comic theorist and scholar. Creating a 24 page comic in 24 hours is a task designed to force the artists and writers of the world to loosen the hell up, and to follow impulses, and see what they can do with a ridiculous deadline hanging over their heads. At the end of it all, you'll hopefully have something that you'd never have created otherwise. This is 24 Hour Comics Day.

I doubted that I could pursue any non-involuntary activity for 24 consecutive hours, lonely weeping notwithstanding. There's a lot of mental acuity and concentration that one must possess, and successfully utilize, to do anything for 24 hours, and accompanying that must be a good deal of physical stamina, as the mind is nothing without a strong body to keep the blood pumping into it. By all appearances, I have neither. I can't be near a computer without checking my eMail about every 125 seconds, or often typing the word 'batman' into eBay and just dreaming. My weak body requires naps, and pizza rolls, and then more time lying down so that it may process and regret said pizza rolls and promise itself that it'll do a few situps tomorrow, providing that eBay and napping doesn't hold some more immediate appeal. Of course, some of these positive human attributes, like concentration and stamina, can be artificially enhanced, and enhanced significantly by one thing : caffeine. Would I truly sell myself out like that? It remained to be seen.

At the point of midnight which rends Friday and Saturday in twain, I laid pen to paper. As per the rules, and following the honor system to the letter, I'd done no preliminary work whatsoever on the comic. I had an idea, firmly entrapped within my skull between something about the berserker warriors of old and which translucent action figures I was missing. I had a thick stack of 9" x 6" pieces of bristol board. I had a black ballpoint pen, and I had a few .005 pens, and 2 liters of root beer. I had an art desk which I'd cleared off some space on, and I'd made my intentions for this day very vocal to just about everyone I knew. I needed silence, and food, and prayers to whatever questionable gods that my acquaintances believe in. Many artists participating in this event find pre-determined locations to inhabit and work on their comics in mass unison, with the aid of free pizza and camaraderie. I've never been one for either. I become enraged when people order 'cheese pizza' at gatherings, as I hold religiously to the belief that pizza without toppings is a complete waste of food and that anyone who doesn't like pepperoni should be punched very hard in a very soft place.

With the power of A&W coursing through my veins, I managed to stay up until 4 AM, when I found myself a few pages ahead of schedule. I knew that sleep would set me back far under the goal of one page per hour, but the alternative was ending up with a severely underdeveloped comic, with little flipper arms and breathing problems, but with the creative seed planted, the rest would have to fall into place naturally, and with a lot of big one-panel splash pages, 'cause those took up a lot of space. Being my first venture into the world of crazy freaked out frantic creation, I thought it would be best to stick to the familiar - robots. Robots and octopi. And post-apocalyptic scenarios, and inept anthropology and euthanasia. True standards, if I know any at all.

I was eschewing the awkwardness of many of the 24 Hour Comics I'd seen in the past in which the authors say to themselves, 'I'll do an autobiographical comic because I'm so interesting!', or 'I'll do a comic ABOUT me doing a 24 Hour Comic! How ridiculously original!', because in both of these cases, there's an excruciating point when you can tell that the authors themselves realize that they're not as interesting on paper as they are in real life, or at all. A few pages after that, the author gets depressed and publicly admits this frailty and continues on a self-abasing rant until they reach 24 scrawled, tear-stained pages. No, I'd avoid that trap. I'd avoid losing track of my general idea by leaping ahead and illustrating the more interesting pages. If I wasted an unretrievable hour on a future page, there'd be no way around keeping on track without completely losing vast amounts of time with a rewrite.

After a short nap during the wee hours, I hopped right back into creating. As one might imagine, the rest of the day is a blur with occasional pauses to get the mail and get summoned to jury duty, to eat a large sandwich, and take a 10 minute nap. Befriending me along the way was the animated Superman DVD, a new Sharpie marker (to celebrate the art of negative space and the illusion of actual art that it creates) and a lot of Dismemberment Plan, David Byrne, Sixpence and Pixies.

By 10 PM on the following day, 22 hours later, I found myself at 23 pages with a fully complete story. There arrives a point in many creative processes where one can just take a step too far and ruin something. I found that I had a fairly simple and poignant conclusion to the story, and adding a page beyond the story would be like adding a satellite dish to the noble ass of the mighty lion. So, I followed a tried and true 24 Hour Comics Day tradition - the tremendously overblown title page. Slap that bitch onto the front of the beast and you have 24 pages and bragging rights. I titled the story at that moment. 'The Last Robot'.

I finished off the last drops of root beer, and turned over the bottle. 'No Caffeine!' it screamed. You mean... you mean this endurance was all in my mind? That I have the power to access such reserves of dedication and energy on a daily basis, without the aid of chemical stimulants? That I should have higher expectations for myself?

As if.

Presented here for the first time is the new work by illustrator Collin David. Look for other works of his published in Inaction Comics, all over ResonantFish.com, NFG Magazine, and various people's bodies. Please keep in mind that this was an effort limited to 24 hours.

[ VIEW 'THE LAST ROBOT' ]