Spawns of Insomnia 2005 was an ink-stained, caffeine-gulping, test of endurance and skill that only complete maniacs would take part in. So, of course, we had to do it.

Twenty-five Spawnatics competed in this drawing marathon organized by Cartoonists Northwest and held Sept. 1-5, 2005 at Cascadia Con—a Seattle area science fiction convention. Each artist attempted to create an entire 24-page comic book in 24 hours or less. And the truly amazing thing is…most of them succeeded.

In addition to creating hundreds of pages of art, the artists raised $1,249 (mostly through sponsor donations) for The Friends of The Seattle Public Library. The money is being used to purchase graphic novels for Seattle libraries.

Although many other 24-hour comic marathons have been organized, we believe this is the first time such event that has been used to raise money for charity and possibly the first to have a unified theme. Because Spawns was held at a sci-fi convention, all artists were asked to created stories with science fiction or fantasy elements. In addition—as if creating a 24-page sci-fi comic book in public in only 24 hours wasn’t hard enough—the artists faced another challenge: The Space Elevator!

The LiftPort Group—a company that’s developing a space elevator—offered cash prizes to artists who included a space elevator somewhere in their stories and completed all 24 pages of their stories. Most—but not all artists—took on this added challenge.

To make the task a little more reasonable—and to hopefully increase the quality of the stories—we relaxed the “usual” 24-hour comic rules and allowed artists make notes before the 24 hours on a single sheet of 8.5 in. by 11 in. sheet of paper. We also didn’t insist that the stories had to be completely inked in order to be considered finished.
What kind of stories came out of this experiment? Great stories? Terrible stories? Silly stories? Sad stories? Stories too bizarre for words?

All of the above—and more! But don’t take our word for it. Read ‘em yourself.