This last weekend was the Maker Faire in San Mateo, and the San Francisco Cartoonist Conspiracy was there running a jam comic.

Our table, which was located in the big expo room (close to Yahoo!’s booth), was filled with pencils, pens, and paper. Cartoonist Conspiracy members answered questions from some of the Faire’s 40,000 attendees and tried to encourage as many of them as possible to create a panel for the Maker Jam Comic. Jeff Plotkin and I started at 10 am on Saturday morning with 10 blank pages, and by 5pm on the following Sunday we had 9 and a half finished pages (not to mention the cover and autograph page).

I estimate that we had over 30 artists sit and draw with us, and I think the resulting jam is pretty good. In terms of promoting comics and our local Cartoonist Conspiracy cell [which has it’s next meeting on Thursday May 31st at Muddy Waters in the Castro], I’d say this is one of our most successful events yet.

You can find “Maker Jam Comic” in the gallery page or download the pdf here

The Goldberg-esque cover was worked on by several artists in pencil, inked by me, and colored by Brian Kolm (who also helped put together the pdf). To create the rest of the book, we numbered the blank pages (1 through 10) and started creating panels on the tops of random pages. After the first panel on a page had been drawn, a different artist would write and draw the consecutive panel before passing it off to another cartoonist. Once we got down to the last panel on a page, that artist would find the first panel on the following page and try to link their page to the next one in their panel.

Photos are from sbocaj’s Make Faire flickr set.