Comics-tober
Why not embrace fall by doubling down on making comics?
October has always been a great month for creatives. Halloween alone provides so many opportunities for making the weird and the wonderful—from carving jack-o’-lanterns, making decorations and spooky treats, to designing costumes. In Albuquerque, we’re having our annual Zine Fest, where Amaris is tabling alongside former students. She’ll have several new comics about travels in Glasgow, Scotland—but more on that and topophilia in a future post.
Worldwide, the first Saturday in October is 24-Hour Comics Day, which invites you to draw a 24-page comic over the course of one day—and sometimes you’ll see folks drawing a panel or scene for each hour. (Tell us if you plan to participate! We’d love to see what you are up to!) And then, of course, there’s Inktober.
Every October since 2009, Instagram is flooded with Inktober drawings. Given our enthusiasm for New Years Resolutions, it probably won’t come as a surprise that we love the idea of indulging a daily habit of drawing. There is, of course, an official list of prompts from https://inktober.com, but we also wanted to explore what this month has meant for comics creators.
Now there are so many spin-offs. Peachtober has a similar list of prompts, but insists the medium is open, and there’s no need to ink anything. There’s Birdtober, where you make a bird each day (again, in whichever medium you like—you could even sculpt a cedar waxwing!).
And one of our personal favorites, Elizabeth Haidle’s “Untober,” which encourages you to resist the pull of the productivity mindset otherwise fostered by daily drawing challenges.
We’ve been wondering what are comics-related lists people have done for Inktober?
If you wanted to make your month more comics-focused, you could:
Draw a different comics cover each day. This could be something you have been reading, a comic or graphic novel you want to read, or just covers that are interesting to you!
Draw a different emanata each day. Emanata are pictorial elements that convey emotion, and which you wouldn’t necessarily see in life, such as sweat droplets (to indicate nervousness), hearts (to show love), or a lightbulb (to describe having an incandescent idea). While there are several emanata that are predetermined and part of an established visual language, you could also invent your own! (And you can take some inspiration from “gourmanga” expressions as well.)
We’re pretty sure that a few years ago, there was a prompt to draw a different cartoonist or comics creator each day–but we couldn’t find it on the web! Maybe we dreamed this up? If we were creating such a list, we’d include Jackie Ormes, Fay King, Tove Jansson, George Herriman, Trina Robbins…. Who do you think should make the list?
One challenge lays out how to make a 12-page minicomic over the course of the month:
I always seem to fail at inktober, but the comic cover a day sounds fun!
i'm inspired by emanata, i've never heard that word before—seems like a lovely zine idea. thank you!