Literary Colloquium Berlin, a 24 hrs Comic Marathon

Behind the Sound Barrier

Soundwaves was THE topic of Augusto Paim’s 24 h Comic Challenge at the beautiful Literary Colloquium Berlin – given by Auge of the Berlin Based comic library Renate.

A 24-hour comic is (at best) a 24-page comic book written, drawn, and completed in 24 hours. Cartoonist Scott McCloud came up with the challenge in 1990 as a creative exercise for himself.

It happened durning the weekend of October 7th - 8th, 2023 with about 50 other comic artists.

For fun I collaborated with the scenarist and friend Andreas Albes. We created a rough plot in 30 minutes.

I managed only 12 pages.
Next Time I will apply simpler coloring.

It was a great exercise and experience though.

Flip through the German version of this little adventure of Maja, a deaf young woman, stranding in a city that is ruled by very manipulative sound-waves.

The storyboards or scripts were quickly sketched down during the phone-calls with Andreas. After that he got them via mail to get an understanding of the rough imagery

They were very helpful in getting up to speed and get a good sense of the overall drama.

Generally working in these separate phases:
Scripting > Sketching > “Fine” Drawing > Colouring > Lettering
helped to get more speed towards the end.

It’s surely not a novel discovery, but it will encourage us to stick more to this process for – DEHCHO FIRE – a bigger graphic novel about an Indigenous research station in the Northwest Territories of what is called Canada I am working on currently.

Some pictures of the actual event. We started with heavy rain and went over to a wonderful sunny autumn day.