I was really nervous doing my first 24 hour comic day challenge. The idea of trying to pump out 24 pages that made some amount of sense and that had art that didn’t look like it was drawn by a 4 year old had me wondering why I signed up.

I read all the preparation and guides I could, wrote a blog post about it and got a good nights sleep.

Drawing little cards out of a hat. I got “The Rich man and the poor man”. What? A Quick google search revealed this.. If you know the lowdown on the story or want to skip it continue on the following paragraph.

For anyone that doesn't want to read the original story it has a pretty basic premise, greed is bad.

The story in a nutshell is about a rich man that doesn’t let god lodge for the night in his house. He stays with a poor man and then grants the man 3 wishes. The poor man wishes for happiness, health a fancier house. Seeing this the rich man chases god begging for the same. God gives him the same. The rich man wastes a wish cursing at his horse who promptly drops dead. He then proceeds to waste his 2nd wish on putting a saddle on his wife's back. No idea if this story is meant to be kid friendly. Anyway then has to spend his last wish getting the saddle off his wife’s back. Nothing good came from his wishes because he was greedy and didn’t know how to use his wishes.

I knew I wanted mine to be a Sci fi that was clear. I figured I didn’t want to have god in my story so i replaced it with the next best thing, an all seeing all knowing Artificial Intelligence. For anyone that has read anything about the event that might come to pass known as the singularity, machines might become so intelligent they seem godlike to us. IT would be dishing out the desires; wishes seemed a bit too fairytale like.

Next was the vessel upon how the rich and poor man would interact with the A.I. and each other. A homeless kid in a futuristic megacity sounded pretty good. The name Emen comes from Emmanuel which is another name for Jesus. Seemed appropriate. He would have something inside him that he doesn’t understand, also a nod back to bible stories.

The main villain of the tale came from googling “greediest people in history” and what do you know Genghis Khan popped up. Khan is a rad word (go Star Trek) so that sounded pretty good.I gave him the job of a mining magnet because you get the impression they are only self interested as seen by their lobbying to shoot down the mining and carbon tax in Australia. Anyway that is another rant for another day.

Asteroid mining is a nod to my home state Western Australia, where one of our biggest exports is mining. Also mining an asteroid as has been proposed just sounds bonkers/amazing.

For the white A.I pages I tried to imagine what an A.I would look like. Then I realised it was 2am and I didn’t feel like drawing billions of wires, so I went with the easy idea that they could be whatever they chose to be in there virtual world. The ‘hello world’ is a homage to normally the first line of text you see when you start programming. It indicates that the code you wrote is working correctly. It is quite exciting seeing that for the first time.

Please excuse the bad art in places, the cutting off of the scan and most of all the spelling mistakes. I had to resist very strongly from modifying the comic after it had been created. I wanted it to stay as it was on the 24th hour of the challenge, warts and all.

Hope you enjoyed my little story. Feel free to contact me if you want to chat, got some tips for making my story/art better or want to share a link :).

If you feel so inclined check out my upcoming proper (and not as badly drawn) comic on facebook or signup to the mailing list at signup.deathofthecommons.com