But, truth be told, their troubles had just begun.

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My dad was visiting this weekend, and Saturday morning, we picked up Angelo and Nikki from her house and went to his, where we took over a longue/kitchen and made it the base of our 24 HOUR COMIC PROJECT.


My dad gave us caffeine and ephedrine pills, and then left for SLO.

At 1:30, we began.

About an hour later, Angelo gave up, because he realized he was hating it.
Nikki and I trodged on.

We all watched Return of the King and Equilibrium while we drew away. Nikki put iPodded it up, much to my chagrin.

I realized suddenly that I had no usable pens, so Nikki and I went to the art store, and also Trader Joe's for snacks. Angelo bought millions of bean burritos at Taco Bell.

Then this other dude came in. His name was Muhammed (or possibly "Mohamet" or some variation), who is an exchange student from Chad which he immediately followed with "a country northwestern Africa" apparently not having too much faither in our geography skills. He was pretty interesting to talk to, and was very nice.

He ate some of my guacamole, then asked if it had pork in it. I assured him it didn't. He said, "Good. I...don't like pork." I asked if he was a Muslim (like Jews, they don't eat pig). He said yes. Was he afraid of admitting to being Muslim to a white American? I guess I couldn't blame him.

It was pretty cool until he took control of the remote and refused to watch anything other than BET, anime, and some halfassed special on UFOs. He really liked the UFOs for some reason.

BET is really painfully bad. They had ads for quality things (like an examination of the various uses of "the N-word" and what that says about race relations in America, but all they were showing was this sub-MTV quality spring break-type show, with the two male hosts creepily hitting on the female one in between terrible terrible rap segments.

One presumes that an African stuck in the US would, in my mom's words, "want to see people who look like him," and I can understand that. But fuck, I'd much rather watch "Barbershop" than "The OC".

I also thought it weird that he and this Austrian guy whose name escapes me spent their whole Saturday night watching TV. They live in the middle of downtown, I'm sure they could find something better to do. Ah well.

Eventually, both those dudes and Angelo went to bed, and it was just Nikki and I, drawing away. This Austrian guy came in and watched some more crap TV, but once it got late enough, everyone wandered off and we had quiet. It was going pretty well. We had to awkwardly sneak into Angelo's room without waking him every time we wanted to pee, and the massive amounts of caffiene (from pills, soda, mints, and coffee) made that a regular occurence.

The CSO* came by, and having established that we didn't live there, established that he also didn't care. He asked for some coffee (though he forgot to actually take any), and then shot the shit with us for awhile before going back to work.

We comicked along, and had a nice free-associated conversation and talked in some capacity about every single person we both know, and several we don't.
The sun came up, and we had rasberry sorbet.

Nikki had some layout problems, but for the most part everything was going well artistically. I did a kick-ass splash page.

Then, around 8 am we both had to pee again, and rather than bothering Angelo, we went to the bus station across the street.
It was very bright out and there were hardly any people. Nikki likened it to "28 Days Later".

We peed and came back without incident, but then things started to go downhill.

I almost fell over in the hallway and had to hold onto a railing to get back to the room. My hand was shaking liek hell, but I forced myself to keep drawing.

Nikki gave up on drawing entirely and started cleaning up.
At 9:30, I realized I was becoming useless, so I took a nap, and told Nikki to wake me up in an hour (or two, don't remember). At 11:30, I got back up, and we found a now-awake Angelo.

At this point, Nikki was totally delirious. I told her to sleep now that I was done, and she said she couldn't because "Every time I close my eyes I see alligators". She was also having visions about an evil rat who knew everything. Angelo tried to decrazitize her, while I struggled to finish my comic.

I finally did, pretty much exactly on time. ">Hooray.
It's only 16 pages, not 24, but I've seen them like that before, and fuck you, that shit can't be possible.

Nikki went home, and Angelo came back to campus with me. It was at this point that I realized I was incredibly sick, probably from all the pills we'd been taking, and the fact that I hadn't eaten in 15 hours, and the food I'd eaten before that was almost entirely Taco Bell. Two days later, the thought of Taco Bell still makes me want to vomit, and at the time it was uncontrollable.
I had to get off the bus, where I coughed up bile onto the ground at Stevenson, but didn't have anything in my stomach to come up. Angelo had to get to a recital and was already late, so he left, and I was stuck lying in the dirt waiting for another bus to come.

Eventually one did, and I stumbled back to Porter where I celebrated my acheivement by failing to take a nap and muttering incoherently to Jake and Stephanie, who were doing more sensible things.

All in all, I'm more or less happy with the results, though I don't plan to do this again any time remotely soon. Maybe in a year I'll forget how painful it was and be persuaded to try again.
Maybe.

--
*"Community Safety Officer". Their job is to tell people not to smoke outside my window and tell me not to play Warcraft in the dining hall at 2 am. Unlike most authority figures, they're generally good folks.