I’ve known about 24-hour comic day since the late 90’s, but I unfortunately just starting doing it last year. 2016 was such a good experience that I’ve been looking forward to this all year. Yeah it was that fun.

Last year I used Manga Studio with my 27QHD Cintiq which I had a great time using. One of the tools in Manga Studio I was exited to use was the zip-a-tone patterns. I think it worked out pretty well at the time. This year while I was working on my book, Pariah, Missouri I bought some Photoshop tools and brushes online that I wanted to play with. I found some brushes that mimicked the feel of traditional brushes and I was planning to use photoshop for the entire day. I even had a brief period of thinking about importing every page in Illustrator to clean and smooth things out, but I could never have finished all the pages in 24 hours. I got up and started at 8:00am Saturday and ended 8:00am Sunday. I finished at 6:00am, and spent 2 hours going back to color and fix a few things.

After the 24 hours I will say that I did like using Photoshop more than Manga Studio, but I still like the zip-a-tone of Manga Studio better and I had some technical problems with the day. One was that I had to switch out my brushes mid way. I used a Brush Pen tool and then a Belgium Comics pen, and neither worked really the way I wanted them too. My lines were okay, but I know on real paper and brushes I can get a line to look really good, so that was a hit on quality. Also the pressure sensitivity would go out every 5-6 touches/lines, so that was a major pain in the butt of constantly deleting/back action because you’d get this one errant fat line. Not a fan. That might just be me going too fast, or the Cintiq not processing it. It wouldn’t take me more than 5 minutes to find 20 mistakes and corrections that I would like to do, but the idea behind this is to make something quick and dirty and you just don’t have the time to correct, you have to run-and-gun through these pages.

Overall it was another great time working and being creative. There were a couple of rough moments like around 5pm and 11pm. It was funny that from 2am to 6 am breezed by. I listened to music all 24 hours, mostly my vinyl, everything from Michael Jackson, Jesus Christ Superstar complete musical, Nirvana unplugged, Pearl Jam, Parliament, Hamilton, 3 Girl Talk albums, Radiohead, the list goes on.

Next year I’m going to go all physical, no computer all paper and pens. Very excited about.

Okay, without further delay, enjoy the comic 5th Grade, made from start to finish in 24 hours in all its raw and unedited/corrected form!

CLICK to DOWNLOAD 5TH GRADE

CLICK to DOWNLOAD 2016’s Soy Chicano comic

Here are the pages if you don’t want to download it: