How To Make (Basically Legible) Comics

As I occasionally bang on about here on the blog, I firmly believe that kids are great at making comics that other children will enjoy reading. However, when you're working with young creators there are occasionally some Basic Legibility Issues that can get in the way. So I put together the following Top Tips for Basic Legibility: 

Those are the biggies! Here are a few supplemental ones to do with words and balloons and such:

(I think this one makes the point it's making too well, in that it is confusing.)

And finally:

Please feel free to share with any young cartoonists of your acquaintance! And also please feel free to totally ignore and/or break all these rules because RULES ARE TOTALLY BORING, RIGHT?

Comics and Literacy, part 5: Where Do We Go From Here?

Fig 1: The COMPLETE HISTORY OF BRITISH COMICS (abridged)

Welcome to the fifth and final part of my weeklong series of posts on comics and literacy. To sum up what we've covered so far: I believe that comics offer incredible opportunities for engaging children with reading and for developing their literacy skills, and I believe that we in this country have neglected and undervalued those opportunities to our mutual massive cost. We've covered:

1. Why reading comics matters
2. Why MAKING comics matters, too
3. Things that educators and parents can do, right now, to encourage this
4. Some excellent comics for children, to get you started.

I wanted to wrap things up by talking a bit about what I think we can do next. I think there's a growing awareness in this country of the important role comics have to play, and definitely a lot of progress is being made. But I still see there being a few puzzle-pieces missing; ideas and institutions that, if we could figure out a way to put into place, could bring about hugely positive changes.

So. Where do we go from here?

Here are a few ideas.

1) A NATIONAL NETWORK of COMICS CLUBS! 

I talked a bit in Wednesday's post about how teachers and librarians might consider starting up a comics club, to give a space and a time in the week for interested kids to simply read comics, and talk about comics, and maybe have a go at making some comics. I think a really cool thing would be to then try and take this further and give people a means of linking up and sharing their work and ideas. FOR EXAMPLE, for the sake of argument: you could make it a national club, free to sign up for, and every week there'd be some set challenge or activity on the theme of writing or creating characters or drawing samurai alligators or whatever it may be, that all the geographically diverse members could have a go at and then share and display their work; people's entries could then be displayed on the club's website, with maybe some Professional Comics Types offering some feedback and helpful criticism. A Comics Club, along the lines of something like the Young Poets Network* or Code Club, but for comics. Wouldn't that be cool? 

*huge thanks to Kate Sayer of the Story Museum for cluing me in about the YPN, it sounds fantastic and I think offers a really useful example here.

The other nice benefit of having the website / mailing list aspect of it, apart from providing a point of connection between lots of individual school and library clubs, is that it would allow kids to join up and be a part of it who... maybe aren't natural club-joiners? Bedroom comics geniuses across the land would have a way to be a part of something and to share their work and discover like-minded creators, without necessarily having to dive straight in with the whole potentially terrifying "talking to humans in real life about something you're passionate about" thing. Giving people that chance to dip their toes into a wider world, and allowing them to ease in and discover it on their own terms.

I may just be thinking of Young Me here. I digress.

Artwork from The Awesomest Comic, (c) 2014 by Eliza Day

2) A CENTRAL RESOURCE of child-friendly comics

I talked about this a bit in yesterday's post, the difficulty facing parents and educators in knowing where to start with children's comics, of finding good and suitable material. My ceaselessly amazing colleague Sarah McIntyre has talked about this before, about how great it would be to have a central resource - a database / website full of information about child-friendly comics - ideally, with the ability for users to write and share their own reviews of books. 

Basically, we just want to make it as easy as possible for parents and teachers and librarians and all those people who are not fortunate enough to already be Giant Comics Nerds to discover the good stuff, and to feel confident to start sharing it with their kids. And, even better, for kids to find it for themselves.

Good things are happening on this front already - a comment on Wednesday's post from Zoe Toft of Playing By The Book brings the following news:

Just to let you know that Melanie (Library Mice) and I are compiling a new booklist for the Federation of Children's Book Groups focusing on comics and graphic novels- it will be ready April 2015, and then free to any one who wants it eg schools, clubs, individuals.

...which sounds fantastic, and is a really positive development. Let's do more!

Artwork from The Awesomest Comic, (c) 2014 by Erin Snape

3) A similar CENTRAL RESOURCE of comics creators who do workshops!

Again, something that both Sarah and I have talked about before. It would be brilliant to tie this into the aforementioned website / database of kid-friendly comics, to also provide information on creators who visit schools and libraries to do workshops. (While we're on the subject, please refer to this excellent post of Sarah's that gives tons of invaluable advice to schools and libraries about how to host a successful author visit, and includes a huge list of creators who offer workshops.)

Essentially, I’d like a lot of the kind of things I’ve been trying to talk about in this week's posts to be maintained and updated as a central resource, easily accessible to educators and parents – lists of great, age-appropriate comics, lists of comics practitioners who do workshops, details of upcoming courses and events across the country. I think A Website could very handily contain all this, but whose website? The website of a body that does not quite exist yet, and which I shall for the purposes of this flight of fantasy refer to as The Comics Agency.

The Comics Agency. The Comics Advisory Board. The Awesome Ninja Comics Squad. Call it what you like, the basic idea is just of having a dedicated body - a dedicated place on the internet, and ideally a dedicated place in the actual real world, too - devoted solely to sharing information and ideas and resources and best practice and constantly spreading the message that, basically, everybody should be reading comics, because they are NIFTY. There are non-profit organisations in the US doing excellent work in this kind of area - Reading With Pictures and Comic Book Classroom - and I'd love to see something similar happen over here.

Artwork from The Awesomest Comic, (c) 2014 by Hector Day

4) WORLD DOMINATION

Once you've got those pieces of the puzzle in place, once you've built that framework: then, I think you could start to really have some fun. Have some fun and also, potentially, do some amazing things. How about setting up a scheme where people are easily able to chip in to donate graphic novels or comic subscriptions to under-resourced schools, for starters? Or how about this: we figure out how much it would cost to buy one awesome comic for EVERY SINGLE CHILD IN THIS COUNTRY. And then we run a kickstarter for exactly that much money.

Let's go back for a second to where this series of posts started, thinking about the Read On, Get On campaign. We began with the demonstrable fact that learning to read changes children's lives for the better, and the firm conviction that comics can, have been and should be a huge part of how children learn to read. If we're not making use of this amazing asset, this incredibly cool and powerful tool in the literacy toolbox, then frankly we're failing generations of children. And we've been doing that for a while now. And I think it's time we started doing better.

---

POSTSCRIPT: I'm pretty much reaching 'put up or shut up' point here. I think secretly my motivation in writing this monstrous weeklong series of posts was to basically talk myself into stopping talking, and actually starting to do something about all this stuff. THINGS are underway, and PLANS are being formed. If you would like to hear more about THINGS and PLANS, or get involved in the discussion, or sign up to join the Awesome Ninja Comics Squad, then in the first instance please either leave a message here or give me a shout on twitter - you can find me at @neillcameron, or throw in ideas using the #ComicsAndLiteracy hashtag. Let's see what we can do.

Comics and Literacy, part 2: The (New) Golden Age of Children's Comics

Fig 1: "Those Days Are Passed Now, And In The Past They Must Remain..."

In yesterday’s post I talked about about how important a role comics can play in developing children’s literacy skills and engagement with reading, and how this is absolutely as true today as it was in the oft-mentioned-by-old-people Lost Golden Age of Comics, when it was all fields around here and you couldn’t swing a cat for hitting Tammys and Whizzers and Valiants left right and centre.

I also outlined how there are certain problems stopping comics today from connecting with the widest possible audience of children; problems of ACCESSIBILITY and AFFORDABILITY.

Anyway, today, I’m going to begin proposing some solutions to those problems. Some answers to the central, crucial, all-important question:

How Do We Get More Comics To More Children?

There are several strands to this, several avenues - the newsstands and the supermarkets, digital distribution and the huge, centrally important role I think can be played by Good Old-Fashioned Actual Bookshops. I'm going to try and address all those things, possibly in a Supplemental to this series of posts. But for reasons of space and clarity, right now I'm going to focus on one particular solution, because it's the one I'm currently most excited about and it's one you possibly may not have previously thought of. How do we get more comics to more children?

Child Labour.

Wait, hear me out.

We get children making comics for each other! I’ve said this before and no doubt will again, but I genuinely believe that if there’s one thing that’s even better for developing children’s literacy than reading comics, it’s making comics. Engaging with stories, thinking up characters and jokes, learning to draw while you’re learning to write while you’re learning to read and none of it even seeming like learning because you're too busy having fun.

Comics is a uniquely engageable medium at this age range - for all the reasons of ease of imitability and low barriers to entry that I've talked about before, it truly is the Have-A-Go Artform. I'm sure there are 9-year-olds out there who've composed their own sonatas and written their own novels and coded their own epic shoot-'em-ups, but for a lot of kids such prospects are going to seem hopelessly daunting. But they can have a go at drawing comics, right now. It's just DRAWING.

And the best part is – you get a bunch of kids making comics, you then have a bunch of new comics for other kids to read! This was one of the big take-aways for me from the comics-making course I taught at the Story Museum this summer. I worked with an amazing bunch of kids and helped them to make and publish an issue of their own brand-new comic, The Awesomest Comic.

I hoped it would be a fun and rewarding experience for them, and something nice for them and their parents to take home. What I was perhaps not expecting was that the end result would hang together and stand alone so well just as a comic for kids; and for kids who weren't in any way involved in the making of it. It turns out that children are TOTALLY INTO reading comics made by other children. They’re not getting hung up on a lack of anatomical drawing skill or hankering after some high-end colouring techniques and complex gradients. They’re too busy laughing their heads off because someone drew a cheese-obsessed clam giving himself a head injury. (For example.)

Charlie the Cheese-Hunting Clam, (c)2014 by Alister Marsden

If you’re encouraging children to make and share their own comics, there are some very basic things that are desirable to achieve a Basic Degree of Legibility, but they’re pretty straightforward and can be taught in 5 minutes. In fact, let’s do so right now:

And, honestly, that's about it. Obviously there's a huge amount to share and learn about the art of making comics, and I'll be coming back to that later in the week, but in terms of hitting that Basic Degree of Legibility to let kids get off and running sharing their work with others, that's enough to get on with.

Because that's the thing -  it's now possible for kids to share their own creations much more easily than it was Back In The Mesozoic Era When We Were Young; digital printing and school reprographics departments and, y’know, THE INTERNET make such things eminently achievable, and lots of enterprising young persons are already doing so. I’ve mentioned Zoom Rockman and Jordan Vigay and their amazing comics before on the blog. Here’s another:

Pink Fluffy Ketchup Covered Flower Ponies #1! A brand new comics, to be released at Thought Bubble this November, by 15 young creators who're part of Team Ketchup - a "Children's comic review group, aged 10-15, about to embark on creating our own comics & helping people to comic jam".

Isn’t that cool? Imagine if there was a club doing something like that in every school. Imagine if in every school across the country, kids were being encouraged to make their own comics and then share them with their friends and with the rest of the school; to collaborate and compete and let their imaginations generally run riot. Imagine if libraries and after-school clubs and youth groups got in on the act, and imagine if there were some easy ways for all those kids making all those comics to share those comics with readers and with each other.

There's your Golden Age of Children's Comics, right there.

(Clockwise from top left: The Awesomest Comic by Various Artists, The Green Egg by Oscar Wooley, The Red Crow by Jordan Vigay, Pink Fluffy Ketchup Powered Flower Ponies by Team Ketchup, The Zoom by Zoom Rockman, The Twang by... umm, this fantastic kid who was at a school workshop I did the other day but whose name I totally failed to get a note of. I'M SORRY! Your comics were awesome!)

Because look. Here’s the thing. In the 1950s, the Eagle was doing 2 million copies a week. 2 million comics readers. And that - and the decades of abundance that followed, are still held up as the ideal, what we should be aiming to get back to. And I don't think we can, not in that top-down one-publisher-many-readers way, not with the newsstands the way they are now and with pricing and distribution models and all that other slightly dull stuff I talked about yesterday. So maybe we stop judging ourselves against that. Maybe we find some new and more exciting goals for ourselves, for where we are NOW.

2 million comics readers? Pfff. Whatever. You can keep it, 1950s.

Let's make 2 million comics creators.

TOMORROW: How We Do That, Exactly

Big Library Comics

I recently spent a week at Church Cowley St James school, just up the road here in Oxford, working on a project with all the kids in Years 4 and 5 to create a giant mural comic to adorn the wall of their library building. And look, we did it! 

We started out with a couple of days of workshops; getting the kids to come up with ideas for the story and create their own characters, and then we dived in with some giant comics-making! First, I pulled together a load of the ideas and themes into a script. A really, really detailed script:

And then we got the kids to work in groups, taking turns painting a character each on the boards we were using for the comic. For some, I'd sketched in some vague outlines for figure placement and layout, and then let the kids work on top of that:

And then for others I left it much more free form, letting the kids go nuts drawing their own characters, whatever size shape or craziness took their fancy:

And then it was my job to draw the framing sequence and characters, and generally attempt to tie it together into something resembling a story. Here's the finished thing, in place:

And here's the whole story, panel by panel!

I'm insanely delighted with how it all worked out. I had a lot of slightly worryingly unanswered questions in my mind going in, wasn't quite sure how some of it would work / if it would work at all. I had thought about maybe trying a less free form approach - kind of me drawing a strip and then getting the kids to colour it in with a kind of 'paint-by-numbers' approach. But, honestly, that just seemed way less fun. In the end I think the process worked really well; the way the story starts off as any old comic, and then gets weird and colourful, and then gets REALLY REALLY weird and colourful, before snapping back to relative sanity at the end.

Anyway, it was enormously fun to do. I was really impressed with the kids' imaginations and creativity - I mean, that's not really a surprise - but also with the sheer fearlessness of the way they dived straight in, working with these huge acrylic marker pens directly onto this giant canvas. 

Here are headmaster Steve Dew and school librarian Anita Bruce standing next to their new, 1000% MORE AWESOME library wall! Huge thanks to them both, and to all my co-creators, and indeed to everyone at Church Cowley St James who helped make it such a hugely fun thing to do for a week.

Thought Bubble Week, Day 5: Comics Creators... FROM THE FUTURE

Okay, one last post about Thought Bubble, I promise. This one's a bit special.

So. We had a bit of extra space going spare between the Playful Leeds and the Phoenix areas at Thought Bubble last weekend, so we gave it to a couple of Comics Superstars of Tomorrow who'd been hanging out at the table - Jordan Vigay and Ace Rockman! Ace proceeded to produce about 1 billion genuinely amazing pictures of robots, as previously noted, and Jordan used the space to sell copies of his own comic, The Red Crow. (Which is awesome, and which you can buy from his website at www.redcrowcomic.com)

Jordan Vigay (12) and his brilliant comic The Red Crow! Did you know Jordan has HIS OWN PAGE in Issue 100 of the Phoenix? Which is out today? Because he does!

The aptly-named Ace Rockman! Photo via The Zoom Comic

 Anyway. It was a lot of fun to hang out with both Jordan and Ace as they are both very smart, funny, and incredibly talented kids. At one point I got back to the table from wandering around the convention and Jordan came over, seeming slightly confused, and said to me, "a kid just came up to my table and said he'd heard about The Red Crow already, that someone went to their school and told them about it last week."

"...Was that you?"

Yep, that was probably me.

Some more of Jordan's comics, photographed at the Oxford Children's Comics Festival

I've been doing a lot of workshops in schools lately, and an increasing number of talks to grown-ups, too; to other writers, to teachers and librarians and parents. I talk about how I think one of the most powerful things about comics for children is how much they encourage engagement and participation; about how unlike other media like video games and animation and even prose books, even the youngest kids are able to finish reading a comic and IMMEDIATELY have a go at making their own. About how brilliant it is that this doesn't require any special training or equipment or even, necessarily, the ability to read or write yet. How anyone, from even the youngest age, can start making their own comics, and all the benefits this confers in terms of literacy, creativity and sheer fun.

So that's one of the things I talk about when I visit schools. And to further make the point, these days I often show kids some examples of comics made by children, to show some of the amazing things being made by people their own age or slightly older. I talk about Jordan's comic, The Red Crow. I talk about the phenomenon that is Zoom Rockman and his comic The Zoom, and about this kid Lewis I met at a festival once who, at the age of 12, has already created OVER 150 ISSUES OF HIS OWN WEEKLY COMIC. I try to get across this incredibly exciting thing about comics; that you don't need to wait for permission or to be a grown-up before you can dive in and start creating your own stuff. That you can just GO.

The B-Weekly, by Lewis. (Wilkinson? I think? Sorry if I got that wrong, Lewis!) But the main point is: 150 ISSUES!?!

So it was great to see Jordan and Ace diving right in and having their own tables at Thought Bubble. And to see Jack Land again - the very same young man who won our Phoenix design-a-character strip at last year's event, and this year has his very own page in the Thought Bubble anthology! Published by Image Comics! I'VE never been published by Image Comics! Dammit, Jack!

'Darren's Dentist' by Jack Land, in the Thought bubble anthology 2013!

And to see Holly the robot-drawing prodigy again, and the kid whose name I'm terribly sorry to have forgotten who brought over a copy of his own comic 'PUPKINS!', and all the other kids who hung out and created characters with Art Heroes UK, or who spun the Phoenix's Wheel of Awesomeness, or who designed Robots with Playful Leeds. Getting to see that level of enthusiasm and engagement is the kind of thing that really does make me remember why comics are so very, very cool, and so important, and makes me incredibly optimistic about their future.

COMICS, EVERYBODY.