NaCoDraMo

I recently purchased No Plot, No Problem by the creator of the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo and thought, "I'd enjoy this a bunch more if it had more to do with drawing rather than with writing". Now, don't get me wrong, I love to write and I really have a few dead horses I've been beating ideas I've been tweaking for the last ten+ years, but drawing is my first love. So the idea of creating a graphic novel, instead, came to mind. I googled "NaCoDraMo" and had no returns. Then I thought maybe people would be confused and think I was talking about the strips you read daily, rather than a book or collection. So I tried googling "NaGraNoMo" and... got a hit? Unbelievable. One hit. One person had the same idea I had and called for submissions... back in 2004. The blogger got one person to sign on, too, but that's no matter. Simultaneous idea generation (well, not so simultaneous, but still independent) wrecked my idea. I still wanted to go forward with the drawing portion of my idea, so I went back to NaCoDraMo and decided that the "wrong idea" people might get about it was actually a great idea. One comic per day, every day, for a month. Imagine the possibilities; journals, short dramas, serial adventures, political cartoons, it's nearly endless!

So this is my big idea: National Comic Drawing Month. I'm impatient when it comes to this "hits me in a flash" ideas, so we'll start in June. The rules are very loose to some degree. The hard and fast rule is this: One comic per day, every day. Maybe you won't post your comic every day, but stick with the timing or else you will bog yourself down in no time. Also, there's no rule against generating ideas ahead of time, but put out a finished comic (one panel, three panels, full page, you choose) once a day. I suggest posting your work to Flickr, Blogger, MySpace, or any other spot that lets you put up images on a regular basis and that has an RSS feed. If you wish for others to see how you're doing, send me the link to your work and I'll add it here in my Bloglines sidebar. The RSS part is important, so please make sure you're posting to a site that can be tracked in that way.

So here's the recap:
-June is NaCoDraMo, from the 1st through the 30th.
-Create a comic each day
-Post to an rss-enabled site
-send me (and your friends & neighbors) the link to your site.

Good luck and much enjoyment!