Heat: The Space Age of Pro Wrestling

Last Saturday I participated in the 12 Hour Comic Challenge at Happy Harbor Comics. The goal is the same as the 24 Hour Comic Challenge, except you need to complete 12 pages in 12 hours instead of 24 in 24. We did it to raise money for Big Brothers & Sisters of Edmonton, and we kind of kicked ass at it, to the tune of roughly three thousand bucks.

I also kicked the ass of my story, in the sense that I finished all twelve pages in ten and a half hours. I also beat it hard with the ugly stick to get it done that fast. It was a Hell, Inc. story which was specifically designed so that I wouldn’t need to draw backgrounds, and could accomodate whatever random elements I drew at the beginning of the challenge (we had to include a randomly selected character, event, and theme in our story). There’s some decent jokes at the start, but as it progresses the art gets a lot more hurried and the plot stops making sense. The best part of the story is my friend Dan’s idea to do a Mexican bootleg version of my comic instead of coming up with his own story. He recreated my pages, but added moustaches, sombreros and ponchos to all of the characters. And “translated” the dialogue into “Spanish”. Which he recently dubbed “Danish” on Twitter. I’m not sure he’s aware that Danish is a language already.

When read together, I think our comics turned out to be hilarious. Apart… well, not so great. Dan’s looks better, because he’s all a pro and stuff, but makes absolutely no sense on its own, while mine doesn’t look as good, has some mediocre attempts at humour, and doesn’t look as good. So really it just comes down to Dan made a good comic that makes no sense and I made a mediocre one that makes slightly more sense.

Also, Twitter. Follow me on it. @HEATcomic. There’s a preview of Saturday’s strip up there already.