Comics Jam War

A little trip down Memory Lane for me, to the most FUN experience i've had in my comic-makin' career.

On April Fool's Day 2006 the Megazeen crew participated in a contest called the Comics Jam War. We were sponsored by New Moon Comics in Little Falls NJ, where we set up camp for the day. On hand were Tom Hall (writer), Jesus Marquez (penciler), Keith Betancourt (Inkboy) and me (co-writer, letterer and thumbnails/layouts).

The contest went like this: at noontime the theme of a comic story would be revealed by the contest director. Each team then had twelve hours to produce eight fully rendered black-and-white comic pages.

At noontime sharp, the image of the above comic appeared on the website. That's all we had to go on.

It took about five minutes to agree on what could be happeneing on the splash page, so we could get Jesus penciling away while we banged out the rest of the story. I remember it took him two and a half hours to pencil the first page, leaving Inkboy to do nothing but shop the store during that time, and then another two hours for page two. This is still a pretty respectable pace for anyone to keep - but it left us with a mere 8 hours to do the remaining 6 pages, which had to include all inks and lettering. Yikes.

By the time he finished the remaining page we had literally fifteen minutes to finish it - I grabbed an exacto knife, sliced it in half, and let Inkboy lay inks on the top panel while I fairly mangld the bottom. Then we quickly scanned the last composite page, and I lettered it while the other pages were being emailed one by one at the stroke of midnight.

Out of over 100 contestants, we came in Third and made the collected book. Happily, another Megazeen guy, Ben Avery, took First place, so we represented well.

If you're interested in seeing a VERY funny comic that still cracks me up to this day (if I DO say so myself), I managed to scoop up a small supply of the books and I've got 'em on sale here.