I did this in 2010 as part of the official 24 Hour Comics Day, the last one we had at what is now the Root Cellar in Columbia. The idea was for each hourly page to reflect an hour in a day of Keeley’s life. Starting at the start time of the event, I was supposed to keep pace and draw in that hour the same hour as in the comic. I actually went ahead of schedule and got around six hours ahead so I could take a nap at around 5:00AM in my car. Still, I got a full day’s worth of comics drawn and I think it is a neat story revolving around Keeley’s dual lives. Enjoy!

If you want more, you can poke around the comics section and look for the other new(ish) stuff that is now there.

Looking first at the presentation aspect, let’s focus on the background section of my defense presentation, the parts that lead up to the results and conclusion. Given half and hour, my goal was to present a summary of my research journey. The audience was primarily my committee of five professors, all of whom familiar with my dissertation. The sequence is presented linearly from general to specific: I started at the anthropological question I had, then a description of the theories underlying research in this question, then my hypotheses given what previous research suggested, followed by the geographic region I studied, and lastly the indicators of health I used to to test the hypotheses.

{The first slides of my defense presentation. Click to enlarge.}

This presents one possible logical flow of information. However, I found that this sequence did not work for my next presentation. One of my advisors suggested that the MCAAAE attendees would better appreciate a talk that focused on the health indicators, since the audience was more familiar with the underlying archaeological theory but did not know as much as I did about the use of health indicators in bioarchaeology. Examining the defense presentation, it was clear to me that the old order of information would not work for such an audience. I would break their train of thought when I transitioned from bioarchaeology (something less familiar) to the Andean region (a much more familiar topic for this conference!) back to the health indicators (another less familiar topic). Also, the two less-familiar topics are related. I chose to reorder the slides so the health indicators are described after the general description of bioarchaeology, and before the section about the Andean region.

{First slides in my MCAAAE presentation. Click to enlarge.}

This sequence would put the less-familiar topics together so, combined, they help clarify each other, and then head into a less involved section so the audience can digest the new information. I also changed the background so people who saw the defense presentation would not be staring at the exact same slides.

Long story short, the presentation was a success and I received several comments that my talk was easy to follow and kept their interest. Success!

I encountered the same type of decision making as I was working on comic pages. In the pages I was working on at the time, Keeley is involved in a chase scene with a villain. Keeley’s car is sent careening down and offramp, where it rolls to a stop in a field in the middle of St. Louis (which totally exists in real life!). Keeley crawls out of her car and is confronted by the villain. In the section I’m focusing on in this post, Keeley gets the upper hand and runs across the field, with the villain restarting the pursuit. I knew this sequence of events of course, but looking at the actual page of drawings, the panels are not clear:

Original version of Keeley #4, page 10.

In the fourth panel (the wide one at mid-page), Keeley is hitting the villain with her backpack and by the next panel, Keeley is several yards away and the villain is on her motorcycle. So what happened in between? The most reasonable assumption, and the right one, is that Keeley took off running while the villain got back on her motorcycle. But, for the reader, there are many other possibilities. Did she walk, run, limp, or do a backflip to her bike? Also, what happened to the guns the villain was holding? Without limiting these subtle but meaningful possibilities, the reader has to stop to consider the sequence of events and leaves the story (Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Creating Comics have good sections about panel sequencing and reader interpretation).

On viewing the page as a whole, I decided it did not work. I had to change the page to make the sequence of events more explicit in showing what I had in mind. The following shows the final layout of page 10, in progress with flat colors but no shading or lettering:

{Final layout of page 10, with flat colors.}

At the bottom row of the page, I added two small panels to show what happens in between the two original panels. In one, there is a closeup of Keeley running, with her saying something about her plan to get back on the freeway. In the second panel, the villain is shown stumbling to her motorcycle (a side-detail for the observant is that she is opening one of her motorcycle’s storage boxes to put one of her guns away to explain her pose in the next panel). This version, to me as I consider the audience, is a lot more clear and keeps the reader in the flow of events in this fast paced scene.

I enjoyed how two aspects of my life had the same lesson to teach me. As I worked on both presentation-making and comic-making in the past weeks, they really helped each other develop into something better than if I had worked on one exclusively. Both activities are continuing: I have to make a presentation for the SAA meeting in a few weeks, tailoring my talk to another type of audience, and hopefully I’ll have several pages of Keeley comics to show here when I finish coloring page ten.

The one page introduction pairs two characters from different stories: Karie from Collegetown and The Epic of Karie, and Keeley from her own story. I thought it would be fun for them to introduce my section in character (those who have followed my blogs from 1999 may remember a similar format for my first website!).

I wanted to lower the bar by intentionally making the art bad so the reader would be blown away by the following pages. The editor of the book thought the page was too rough and asked me to at least ink it. By that time I had moved on to working on something else but I had no problem leaving the page out since it would make a fun blog post. And here it is! Click the thumbnail below for the larger version.

Fun fact: the photograph of me in panel two was taken from one of the reference images I took using Photobooth as I modeled a pose for Ray of Sunshine, featured in the Anthology!

My comic was a Keeley comic, appropriately called Keeley: 24 Hour Comic Character Extraordinaire. The gimmick was that each page reflected something that took place in an hour of Keeley’s day. Following the 24 Hour Comic event, the first page takes place at noon, and continues on to the end of the event the following noon (well technically 11:00-11:59AM). I actually kind of cheated and went ahead of schedule so I could save up a full hour or so to eat dinner or take a break. I also drew in a mini-comic format, each page of the comic was a quarter of a sheet of paper, to keep me from falling behind, especially in the ending hours.

You can read Keeley: 24 Hour Comic Character Extraordinaire on DeviantArt.

Here are some photos of the event, taken by JB Winter and myself.

These are videos that Winter took with my camera during the event!

Taken shamelessly from Midmococo.com

The book is a great sampler of local comic talent. There are a lot of genres represented, from comic strips to superheroes to indie makes-you-think style.

I have four short comics in the Anthology. Celestine is a space action “movie trailer.” Keeley’s Weakness is a short gag with the express purpose of introducing Keeley’s chipmunk hoodie. Ray of Sunshine is a story about Keeley’s other half (or other other half). Lastly, Joy was originally made for this book but made its first appearance in Vox Magazine online.

Many thanks go out to Josh Nichols for putting the book together and MU Bookstore’s Espresso Book Machine for printing it all nice and perfect-bound.

The book is $6 at Rock Bottom Comics. There are only five copies there so hop to it! (Ok, we can print more as demand dictates.)

Note: If I knew I was getting the cover I would’ve drawn a special something for them!

{My first presentable Wacom-drawn piece. Click to see the full image at DeviantART!}

The drawing is kind of inspired by the brushwork art style of Street Fighter IV, which is a fantastic fighting game.

Also this is the first time I’ve used Pixelmator. I’ve heard good things about this graphics program but didn’t want to spend money to buy it. It turns out I already bought it as part of a MacHeist bundle deal! It’s a very good program, and the website is also very informative.

I’m using the Wacom/Pixelmator combo again to work on a comic I wrote two years ago. It may show up in the upcoming Mid-Missouri Comics Anthology 2009!