What did we try the first time around?

The first graphic novel weekend was held in Utrecht in May of 2019 – here’s a nice video of the event.

We held this event over 3 days: a short period on Friday evening, all day Saturday, and Sunday Morning and afternoon.

Our goal was to give as much flexibility to everyone, while also providing limitations that help focus the amount of work that needed to be done. We stated the rules as being:
– Work together
– Go with the flow, and keep moving
– Produce black and white comic pages in a single standard format that you have agreed as a team. For us, it was in 11x17in proportions, specifically because we were providing US comic standard artboards, but the only thing that’s important here is that there is a standard. It also important that everything be at a high enough resolution for digital printing (The industry standard is is 600dpi tiffs whether the art is scanned, or if it is made digitally, but I believe we went with 300dpi).

We gave a lot of other advice, but each team decided together how to achieve what they wanted to achieve in those parameters. They picked the tools they wanted to use – we provided a number of supplies, but anyone could bring their own tools and many did.

So, naturally, in the end everyone decided together what their final product would look like. And this was important, because the goal was to use the best skills of the people involved. Interestingly, because everything is in black and white, it does kind of all work together, even with the wildly different styles.

We also started with some specific ground rules for this story as a test:
– The story will be set primarily at night, so we can use darkness to limit how much needs to be drawn
– The story will be set at a specific location (the city which we are in)
– The story will have a specific start, provided by the organisers

Starting image:
The starting image was one that I came up with, and I gave it a lot of thought, though it was somewhat contentious amongst the organizers. The image was that the city of Utrecht was empty except for people in astronaut suits.

The reasons for this were:
– It’s weird – Even if all of the writers are focused on telling grounded, down to earth stories, it’s important to give the artists ability to draw something weird.
– It’s an easy metaphor – Maybe this is a story about people who feel isolated. Maybe this is a story about people just moving to a new city. This is of course in addition to the possibility of something science fiction related. (In the end, the writers decided that it would just be astronauts, and went for a surreal feel to the entire story, which featured people in astronaut suits smoking and drinking).
– It allowed the artists to start before the writers knew who or what the characters were to that everyone could start at the same time – It’s impossible to tell the race, gender, sexual orientation, height, weight, species, planet, etc. of anyone in an astronaut suit. It obscures everything.

In the end, the reason it was contentious was because some of us felt like the beginning should be determined during the event, or that there should be a meeting before hand among the writers. I’ll create a separate entry on this blog to discuss this topic, but there are many ways to go about beginning. In my view it was important to have everyone working together from the beginning, but you may feel differently and you might have a better idea.

It is definitely true that giving an opening image like this did end up pushing everyone to stick with that opening image, which was not a goal we had initially. So, definitely consider the pluses and minuses to this approach.

Location and Food
We got a location in a space that was specifically for artists, and that was very lucky. We also had an amazing caterer, and that was great, because it meant no one had to go and figure out food.

Having a space to get together is definitely necessary (whether physical or virtual) – this is about working together, but whether you do your own with catering (which can be quite costly) or in a bring your own food sort of situation is definitely worth considering and discussing with the participants.

“Do I need to be there the whole weekend?”
This was a big question for everyone coming to join the event, and initially we said “yes, absolutely.”

But because of how the funding and planning came together, we had 6 weeks to make this event happen, and we needed to find people to join us.

So we ended up letting people come for just one or two days of the event. There were drawbacks for this, but also benefits. It meant new blood came in throughout the event, but it also meant that we had fewer writers at the end than at the beginning.

Balancing these benefits and drawbacks is worth considering.

Did it work?
We ended up with a 79 page story. There was a lot of post production work involved, some of it quite challenging, but we ended up with a beautiful product that managed to meet the goals laid out. And the people involved made connections, and had this book to show off. So, yes, I think it did – but I also think there’s a lot more that can be done with the concept.