24HCD – A bit of chance
Yeah, I bounced it off the edge of the comic panel.
At the very beginning of the comic, I threw some simple ideas onto paper. Originally, I’d planned to introduce Oliver and Tessa over about four strips, and then spend the rest of the comic just doing one-off gag strips about their day-to-day activities. The element jokes (such as this one) came to me first, and were the only items I wrote down on that list.
Having gotten a few ideas down, and an understanding of the vague character personalities, I started drawing. It surprised me that it stretched out so far, and only by now had I wrapped up all the events that I’d established in the first few strips. Basically, I’d run out of plot.
This caused some issues:
1) Moving to a set of individual random unconnected jokes at this point kinda breaks the flow of the comic.
2) The first plot was pretty simple, and stretched out over 14 pages. It’d be difficult to run a new plot that only filled 10 pages.
3) In the moment, I couldn’t think of anything sensible to run that’d be the appropriate length and tone.
4) I still didn’t have an ending in mind.
5) I’d now been awake for about 16 hours, with a bad cold, on a very hot day. The combined mix of heat, illness and time working were starting to take its toll on me and I had a massive headache.
Having only limited time available, I realised that I couldn’t break for long enough to write a whole new plot, so I plucked the first idea off the list of unused ideas and drew it.
This is page 15 in the 24HCD challenge – If you would like to read the whole story, then you can start here
In panel 3, the coin isn’t bouncing off thin air, it’s actually bouncing off the panel border. Of course, I stupidly drew the speech bubble right over the action lines, so it’s not as obvious as I’d have liked.
About 50% of people seem to notice that it’s bouncing off the panel box, and the other 50% don’t.