My people have just declared a new holiday.

This makes three new holidays I’ve learned about in the last decade. We’re a festive bunch, though most of us are shy and retiring in real space. We’re cartoonists.

From Rambo 3.5.

First, I learned about 24 Hour Comics Day: the mad endurance test where cartoonists must complete a 24-page comic in 24 hours. Then, I learned about Free Comic Book Day: the relaxed party at your local comic book shop where there are many free giveaways (and, in the case of Local Heroes, free soda and pizza).

April 9th’s Mini-Comics Day is somewhere in the middle. The air will be more festive than workaholic, but work will still be done. The assignment: to complete a single eight-page mini-comic in nine hours. And there’s probably a lunch break in there somewhere.

Mini-comics reached their commercial zenith in the pre-Internet days of the 1980s and 1990s. Lots of artists didn’t have as many opportunities to fit their story ideas around the edges of Archie, Superman and Spider-Man. Not that mini-comics were ever cash cows, but they were relatively cheap to publish, and they served as a short-form alternative to the more completed stories to be found in comic books.

Today’s superhero comic books have a lower panel-count and greater interdependence: it can take 5 of them, or even 40 of them, to make a single story. To me, this makes them feel more like mini-comics used to, and I find it more useful to compare the mini-comic to a form that’s even more mini: the comic strip.

Lemon Styles.

If the comic strip is a cartoonist’s haiku, the mini-comic is our sonnet. Comic strips are quick, punchy and Twitter-linkable; mini-comics have a way of taking what seems to be a strip-size idea and extending it, slowing down the hectic pace of our lives for just one second. It is the longest form that someone can reasonably construct in a single sitting. They often bear the stamp of their original concept more clearly than something composed and developed over days, weeks or months.

(And yes, the 24-hour comic is sometimes composed in a single sitting. But not reasonably. It’s not that the results aren’t still interesting: quite the opposite, usually. But you don’t need to take drugs to compose a rock ballad, and it’s sometimes nice to produce a single-sitting story without gibbering from sleep deprivation.)

My cartoonists club, 757 Comic & Cartoon Creators (a.k.a., 757ccc), will be gathering at 10 am April 9, at 757 Labs (no relation), 237 Bute Street, downtown Norfolk. This is a hub for creativity that has served us well for various meetings and 24 Hour Comics Day before this. And we’ll be working until 7 pm.

So stop on by: art is happening near you. How many chances do you get to watch someone create an entire fiction story from beginning to end?

To learn more about this event, click here.

For more about mini comics day, check out the website. To learn about the 757 Comic and Cartoon Creators, check out what they do.