Hourly Comics 2024

International cartoonist workload audit day!

It’s been eleven years since my first hourly comics back in 2013. How time files. I was taking a look back through the archives, and I think that the only year I haven’t done hourly comics was 2022. I don’t remember why that was, but looking back through my photos, I think I was getting ready for some travel? Who knows. There’s no rewards for doing hourly comics aside from the work itself so I don’t feel at all bad about missing anything.

In case you don’t know what an hourly comic is, it’s where cartoonists all over the place document their day, a page of comics per hour that they are awake. For me, I find them harder to do than a 24 hour comic, where you are tasked with drawing 24 pages in 24 hours. I find them harder because for a 24h comic, you are kind of excused from daily life while you pretzel yourself over a desk for an entire day. I don’t think I’ve ever felt excused from daily life while doing hourlies though, so the challenge is to document your day AND also have a day.

Anyway, here’s the pages I drew. Afterwards, I’ll talk a little about the process and particular challenges that yesterday posed.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that I like to make vigorous use of the footnotes for a little extra detail, context or commentary. If you’ve read those footnotes, you’ll probably already know about my wife Kathy’s cancer diagnosis and treatment to some extent. It’s not something I’ve spoken about much, if at all elsewhere online. Social media, and the way discussion there descends into a weird kind of either-or really doesn’t feel like a good place to open up about real life stuff¹.

A couple of people asked how I managed to draw seventeen pages alongside all the other things I was up to that day. There’s a couple of answers to that, one that’s more satisfying, and one that’s less so. The less satisfying answer is that I’ve had a lot of practice, and that my style is very forgiving. It’s not ‘easy’ to do, but it’s not complex and doesn’t require a massive amount of brain bandwidth either.

The more satisfying answer is all about process. Before I started, I made sure I had a grid that I could slip under the page in my sketchbook to ensure that each page was nice and consistent. I like using a really boring grid for stuff like this because it removes options. Each page has to be four panels, and each panel has to be the same size. I know from experience that when presented with the sea of infinite possibility in front of me, I’m likely to drown in it. The process I go through with something like this is all about removing possibilities until it is done.

The order of operations is;

1. Ink in the panel borders.²

2. Put in text and dialogue for each panel.³

3. Briefly consider what I might draw based on what I already know how to draw.⁴

4. Draw it.⁵

5. Add a splash of watercolour.⁶

6. Scan, tidy, post.⁷

And that’s about it really.

I’ll probably post about the boat I’m refurbishing in another newsletter at some point. Unless it dunks me into freezing water and this, distressingly, is my final missive. WHO KNOWS? Me, I know. I’m pretty risk-adverse, especially when the risk is to my precious earthly corporeals.

1. But great for this kind of demonstrably good but massively under appreciated Billy Corgan joke I posted to Threads. Only SEVEN likes? Jeez, fine I guess.

2. Once those panels are there, I find it difficult to fuss over details. I don’t use a ruler, I go freehand on those suckers. Organic lines all the way.

3. Text first, always. The drawings are malleable and I can contort them around corners if I need to that the text simply isn’t capable of while simultaneously looking good and being readable.

4. You know, a brief flight of fancy where you consider all of the things that could be drawn in the space that you have left after getting the text in, then remembering that it’d be easier to draw something you’ve drawn a thousand times before.

5. I jump in with ink, no pencils. I try to draw faces first, to nail the expression and placement. Then I draw extremities like hands and feet. It is so much easier to get an elbow in kinda the right place based on the position of the hand than to get a hand in the right place if an elbow is situated inelegantly. Then I draw details and environments.

6. I try to use colour and tone in my drawing to indicate depth and volume more than to indicate what colour something is. This might sound a bit ‘artist statement’, but I try to paint the light and the shadows more than the colour of a thing. I want to try to make my scrappy drawings feel like they have some kind of solidity to them that I think I achieve 4 times out of 10.

7. Fairly boring stuff - I have an action set up in photoshop that quickly repeats a few steps to tidy up and get the images ready for posting. If you don’t use actions, you GOTTA.