This is part of Scott McCloud’s 24 hour comic challenge and so was produced in its entirety within the space of 24 hours.  This is not a lot of time to produce a complete comic, from pencils to printing, but has had no noticable effect on the quality of this piece of work.

I had heard of Crohn’s disease before and knew it involved bowels, was very unpleasant and was uncurable, but this little slice of life comic has filled in more gaps in my knowledge than I am comfortable with and I am now paranoid about every rumble or shift in my abdomen.  But that’s just me, however, for a comic this good I am prepared to suffer a little psychosomatic indigestion.

The artwork is bold and solid, but with a dynamism that draws you into the comic and the framing and layout is superb – he has a natural flare for visual storytelling and I would love to see a purely artwork comic by him as I have the feeling it could be brilliant.  Rather annoyingly, on top of this artistic talent he also has real talent as a writer.  The script sometimes flows with the ease of good conversation and with an ear for naturalistic dialogue, but can still jump into clever playfulness and back again with ease and throughout he displays an ability to fuse art and writing into a synergistic whole – pure comics.  The lettering and speech layout is near perfect as well.

That this is all done in the space of 24 hours is nothing short of amazing and if the only problem I spotted was a single missing ‘s’ then this just shows the extent of Tom Humberstone’s talents.  Without a doubt one of the best creators working in comics today.

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