This week on Patreon, I wind up the serialization of my most recent 24 Hour Comic, ROUND BACK GLASSES, with the 17th and final page. In it, I come face to face with a neighbor whose glasses are even cooler than mine:
David Chelsea is reading: Who Is Rich?: A Novel
by Matthew Klam
This was my first ever digital 24 Hour Comic, drawn and colored in Photoshop and laid out and lettered in Adobe Indesign. This comic tells the story of my history with eyeglasses, from my earliest nondescript pair of squarish wireframes that I got at age 13, through the not quite circular enough pairs of roundish frames I wore in my 20s and 30s, to the perfect pair of round black Polos by Ralph Lauren that I found at a Lloyd Center optometrist in the mid-1990s:
I had meant to draw 24 pages, but as I fell farther and farther behind in the wee small hours, I determined to go for a “Gaiman variation”, named for author Neil Gaiman, whose first and only 24 Hour Comic clocked in at fourteen pages. What tripped me up was adding the gray tones, which dependably put me ten or fifteen minutes over time. I could have chosen to drop them, and draw the last batch of pages purely in line, but I was too invested in having the story look consistent, so I went for fewer pages instead. After I finished this story, I decided that I had more to say on the topic, so I made a plan to go back to my computer and draw seven more pages to make it a full 24. This week I drew those pages in a straight seven hour session (well, seven and a half- I had to break for lunch). The first of those pages went up this week as well.
I invited fellow cartoonist John Weeks to explain why he draws his cartoon self in round black glasses, even though in the real world he wears contacts:
ROUND BLACK GLASSES, ROUND II will run for the next four weeks on my Patreon page. Patreon is a reader-supported site, but all comics content is free. If you like what you see, tell your friends, and $how Your $upport!