COSMIC EPIC BUTTERCUP COMICS

I had an absolutely fantastic time the other week doing a Fun Comics Workshop Thing at Stanford-in-the-Vale primary school in Oxfordshire. We had all morning so I got to test out a few new ideas on the delightful and enthusiastic members of Year 2 (Buttercup) Class. We did a spot of live audience-participatory comics creation, and then to the main business of the day: getting all the kids to make their OWN characters and draw comics about them. Ninja schoolkids, stunt-riding dolphins and evil panda dentists abounded, and I think a lot of fun was had all round. (Well, a lot of fun was had by ME, certainly. And that's the main thing after all.) There are lots of pictures and stuff from the event - and some of my TOP SECRET COMICS CREATING TECHNIQUES* REVEALED - over on the school's website, so why not have a look?

It's so much fun doing these kinds of events with kids and seeing all the different personalities coming through in their comics and their approaches to it. There's always someone who's finished while everyone else is still on their first panels, and someone else who's still painstakingly and seriously working out their plot while the rest of the class have all finished drawing already, and there's always at least one kid who just seems to *get* it so effortlessly and comes up with something so brilliantly entertaining and original that they are clearly a future comics superstar in the making.

Once everyone was finished we thought it would be cool to collect everyone's strips into a Class Comic, with the suitably pulse-pounding title of Buttercup's EPIC COSMIC COMIC and I drew a cover for it featuring a bunch of the newly-minted characters. Or as many as I could fit on, anyway. That title was already about 70% of the cover, right there.

Huge thanks to Debbie Turner and the rest of the teachers and teaching assistants who made me so welcome at their school, and of course most of all to Buttercup Class themselves!

* not necessarily that Top Secret actually.