24 Hour Creative Challenge, part two: BRIDGE
How my second attempt at a 24-hour comic resulted in one of my best comics ever
Again, small news item to start: Another new interview dropped yesterday, this one’s a video recorded with Jason DeHart for his podcast Words, Images, and Worlds.
I talk—per usual—about constraints and my new book, but also about the creative process and how I deal with getting stuck:
"The way I feel like I've gotten better is having an intuition and a bit of a determination to keep going and just to understand that, like, OK, I know this sucks right now but I can just keep working at it I know that if I keep at it that eventually I'll find the solution and take me to the next level—until the next point where I get frustrated and then the whole thing starts over again."
24 Pages in 24 Hours: How Can We Make It Harder?
In my previous post I described the 24 Hour Comic and my first attempt to make one, back in 1996. As difficult a challenge as that was, my next encounter with the 24 Hour Comic was even harder! But as I always argue, the more fiendish, the more demanding the constraint, the more mind-blowing are the potential results.
The first chapter of this story begins in Angoulême, France. In 2007, when Lewis Trondheim had been named the president of the Angoulême Comics Festival, he established a 24 hour comics day (called Les 24 heures de la BD) which continued to be hosted at la maison des auteurs until 2018 or so. Lewis is a popular cartoonist, known for his autobiographical Lapinot books and for his humorous fantasy comics like the Donjon series. However, he is also a highly inquisitive and experimental cartoonist and one of the founding members of Oubapo, so it’s not surprising that he would introduce this “proto-oubapian” activity to the European comics scene.
Lewis came up with an important addition to the usual rules: he declared that an extra constraint should be proposed each time, right at the beginning of the 24 hour session. He had two reasons for this: one, it gives everyone a story starter, something to get their juices flowing; and two, it prevents cheaters from showing up with a fully formed story already laid out in their minds!
I was in my first year of residency in France and I was doing a lot of public events and workshops around my work with Oubapo and constraints, so MdA director Pili Muñoz asked me to be the MC of the 2013 edition. This involved not simply firing the starting gun but coming up with that “starter” constraint to announce at the beginning of the 24 hour session.
So one February day, I stood before the gathered artists and a camera crew to welcome everyone and announce the constraint (You can watch the full video on youtube, English begins around 1:30, español around 2:00).
And here is the constraint that I came up with: every page needs to represent the same unit of time. So, if one page equals one minute of time passing, your story will have to last exactly 24 minutes of “story time,” one minute per page.
I decided to participate myself and I didn’t want to violate Trondheim’s Second Law of Constraints by preemptively deciding what time unit I would use. So I opened up to the room and asked someone to give me a suggestion… and it was none other than Lewis himself who impishly threw out: “decades!”
I was pretty flummoxed at first: how could I have a scene last more than one page?? What kind of story could cover 240 years in 24 pages?? (And keep in mind that I’m also supposed to write and draw this in 24 hours!)
I drew different scales of calendars and timelines on scraps of paper. I thought about vampires and other immortal beings… Eventually, I started thinking about generations of people instead of a individual characters. Once I realized that I could fit three whole lifetimes into that 240 year framework I started thinking about ways to link them together and I hit upon a story that I was happy with, especially since it led to a Twilight Zone-like twist ending.
Here I am in another video shot the night of, showing my first page as I lament how I’m already making bad decisions about the page layout (I had already start redrawing that page, switching to the simpler 4-panel grid I used in the final version):
As with First Warning, my first attempt at a 24 Hour Comic, I did not entirely finish inking “Bridge” during the allotted time. I had some justification this time: as MC, I was interviewed several times by the French media and at one pointed a few older manga-ka were escorted into my studio—I never did figure out who they were! Plus, I wanted to circulate early on to make sure everyone understood the constraint and wasn’t overwhelmed or annoyed by it. I was gratified to find that most of the participants I spoke really appreciated the extra “time unit” constraint and said it helped to fire their imaginations.
A week or so later, after the Angoulême Comics Festival was over, I went to a café and finished the remaining inking within a few hours. Even with the extra time and rest, the art was pretty rushed and not something I was eager to share. However, I was really happy with the story and how neatly it all fit together. I noticed leitmotifs that I had barely registered in the mad flurry of activity that was my initial sketching and thumbnailing of the story: repeat, “rhyming” images like a swing hanging from a tree or the same university campus shown 100 years apart…
I still can’t get over how fully-formed a fable I was able to create under those conditions and how I was able to produce a totally novel comic through this unlikely combination of formal and time constraints bearing productive pressure on my own intuitions and creative resources—this is why I gave my new book the subtitle “Comics Formed Under Pressure,” to give a sense of what the process feels like.
Redrawn version, 2016
One reason I have rarely taken on the 24 hour comic challenge is that it plays to all my weaknesses: I’m a slow, even plodding worker in general and in particular I struggle to find a way to draw that looks good when I work quickly. I pretty much failed on that account—the first iteration of “Bridge” was not something I felt I could publish.
Yet a couple of years passed and “Bridge” still stuck with me.
So in 2016, my last half-year in France, I decided to redraw the book and try to get it published. I basically copied the original pages and refined the drawings and the inking style. I often made only slight changes to framing or composition, as you can see in this comparison:
Kuš! Edition, 2021
After letting this story sit around for too long, I thought to send it to David Schilter at Kuš!. He and his partner Sanita Muižniece publish fantastic art comics in small formats out of their home base of Latvia.
They liked it, so we got straight to work at laying out the book and coming up with the cover art. One issue that came up right away is that my pages are boxier (3:4 ratio) than their taller books with more of a 2:3 ratio derived from the DIN 476 standard used in Europe and much of the rest of the world.
One solution David suggested was to add a decorative border on the top and bottom and in playing around with some sketches I realized I could use the “sparkle” associated with the bridge as a decorative element, and that made me further realize that it would have to be a white-on-black background. Once I did some tests changing the gutters to black instead of white, it was like I was seeing the comic truly finished for the first time:
I mention this detail of the black background because it underscores how formal and technical constraints are always present, whether you choose to be an Oubapian like me or not. An unexpected format change presents an obstacle, but sometimes a creative solution leads you to an unexpected breakthrough, as it did here.
A small booklet like this doesn’t tend to get much media attention but I got some good reviews when it came out in English and in a later French edition from L’Association: Frédéric Hojlo of ActuaBD.com called it “brillamment classique” on Facebook, while Ryan C.’s Four Color Apocalypse blog posted a thoughtful review concluding that “Bridge” is
a human story humanely told, and packs a pretty solid emotional wallop — however, it’s also effectively constructed, structured and, most crucially, drawn.
Six Treasures Collection, 2024
When it came time to plan a new book after Ex Libris came out in 2021, I knew it was time to collect the best of the short, constrained comics I’d been doing almost since the beginning of my career. And I knew that “Bridge” was going to be a centerpiece of the book. In fact, I initially wanted to call the book Bridge and Other Comics but I eventually realized that I would be foolish to take a pass on as catchy and appropriate a title as Six Treasures of the Spiral.
The novelist Ed Park is a particular fan of “Bridge.” He mentioned it in his New York Times Book Review piece on Ex Libris and again gave it special attention when I asked him to write an introduction to Six Treasures of the Spiral:
As much as I loved [99 Ways and Ex Libris], I don’t think they equal the power of “Bridge.” […] Madden took the Oulipian constraint and stretched it into a perfectly circular fable, a profound palm-in-the-hand story that was both pressured by time and about time. Which is to say, it’s about life.
My publisher Tom Kaczynski was also taken by the bold, graphic nature of the drawing in “Bridge” and ended up using images from the comic to make up the cover, which you can see at the end of this post, as well as in the interior pages.
The Future of 24 Hour Comics
I actually did a third 24 Hour Comic session in 2014 but that one didn’t really gel for me so I ended up throwing in the towel and going to bed early. I do have a bunch of drawings that came out of that session so I may yet make some kind of comic out of them—even when it goes sideways, the 24 Hour Comic is still a valuable experience and I highly recommend it to any of you reading this (or else whatever the version would look like in your medium of choice).
The official 24 Hour Comics Day movement seems to have died down a bit in recent years, possibly outflanked by more solitary and less grueling challenges like Inktober. I see two websites devoted to it, one announcing an event this past October, the other one appearing to have fallen victim to spambots—I don’t recall “real money online casinos” ever being an aspect of the 24 Hour Comic experience! I’m sure people are still out there organizing events here and there, from time to time. You should feel free to organize one yourself with your friends.
As for me, I think I might be done with the 24 hour comic—even in my youth it was taxing for a sleep-loving guy like me and now that I’m over 50 it feels even less appealing!
And there are so many other constraints out there to explore…
Read “Bridge” in its entirety, along with a lot of other comics I talk about in this Substack, in my collection of constrained comics, Six Treasures of the Spiral: Comics Formed Under Pressure, now in stores.
“An instant classic.”—Publishers Weekly
Thanks for reading. If you’re not already using the Substack site or app, I recommend it:
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This is a really great story! Thanks for sharing.