Marina: A 24-hour comic

Marina: A 24-hour comic
By Emily Block
Fortune Cookie Comics
Half sized.

24 hour comics are pretty bad ass. I did a 24 hour art marathon once, though I just made artist trading cards, and even after 24 hours you can still probably cut out pictures from magazines and glue them to pieces of cardboard even if you can’t draw any more.

(I was actually supposed to do a second last year, but ended up too sick to do more than a few hours. Drat).

I’ve wanted to do a 24 hour zine for a while, but just haven’t had the opportunity. This year! I commit myself.

But back to the comic. This entirely silent comic (no lettering makes it easier to complete in 24 hours) is about a girl who can fly, for some reason. Or glide. Something like that. She falls off a cliff to imitate seagulls, much to her mother’s despair, but it works out okay, and later she has to go rescue her father.

Block’s art is pretty good, there are some pretty rad facial expressions here, and I like her seagulls. As with most 24 hour comics, the art does suffer a bit towards the end. A note by Block saying that she is “never drawing water again” at the bottom of the third last page is pretty telling of the insanity that sets in around that point. I also got the feeling that the main character changed clothes so that Block wouldn’t have to do any more cross hatching.

It’s cute throughout, and Marina seems like a pretty awesome little girl, sort of reminiscent of Ponyo.