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?

Dinosaurs, Vampires and Robots at Oxford Central Library

Hands up if you want to make awesome comics.

Regular readers of this blog will know I do a lot of comics workshops at schools, libraries, literary festivals and such, all over the place really. However, I almost never manage to get any pictures from such events, due to the fact that I always have my hands full of Sharpies and anyway am generally a bit busy drawing giant mutant Cornish pasties, or whatever it may be that day. Anyway, I recently did a session at Oxford Central Library, to help launch the Summer Reading Challenge there, and to celebrate The Pirates of Pangaea's inclusion in said scheme. A great fun time was had, and some of the library's marvellous staff managed to snap a few pics, so I thought I'd share them here!

Who wants to learn to draw T-Rexes?

That is me demonstrating Tyrannosaur's underdeveloped arms? I think?

Teaching important lessons to the youth.

Dinosaurs were drawn, records broken, and a good time had by all. (I hope?) Many thanks to Joanna Morris and all at the library for having me, and for passing on these photos!

Lots more events upcoming! Next weekend I'll be at Camp Bestival for three solid days of comics workshops with Gary Northfield and the Phoenix comic gang. And tomorrow I'll be spending the day in the Illustrator Zoo at the Story Museum, drawing comics while members of the public come along and watch the process and ask questions and possibly join in? Come along, it should be fun! And keep an eye on my Upcoming Events page for more! 

InstaComics, everyone!

Summer holidays start today! For families across the land the appalling prospect looms of suddenly having a house filled with children alternately complaining that they don't know what to do, or making you feel guilty by staring at minecraft-filled screens for long, endless hours. What CAN they do? What is a fun, creative activity to keep them occupied, or at least when it's too rainy to go out and kick rocks up and down the street?

Why COMICS of course!

(You probably knew I was going to say that.)

Anyway, I've been meaning to blog these for a while - a fun comics-making activity that everyone can try! For one session of my Saturday Morning Comics Club at the Story Museum I thought we'd try mixing things up a bit and making some photo comics using whatever toys and props I had available. I've been alternately calling these 'InstaComics' or 'Semi-Fumetti', the latter being more fun to say. They're pretty simple to make, and are kind of a halfway house between comics and stop-motion animation, the process being:

It's that simple! And if you then quickly upload the pictures to twitter, or as a tumblr photoset or such, you get a really nice instant-completion sense, of making something and putting it out into the real world within minutes. Instant webcomics!

So simple that a child could do it, and indeed they have. Here are some results from my excellent and most talented pupils at comics club; first an amazing multidimensional experiment by Ruari...

No lego? No problem! Here's an excellent effort by Eliza, using a CORK instead.

And one by Hector which is possibly my favourite LUKE CAGE: POWER MAN comic of all time:

...and you can find lots more examples on the @ComicsClubSM twitter feed! I mean, seriously, lots.

I found it a really fascinating exercise, which both levelled the playing field in terms of drawing ability and also encouraged the kids to think about panel composition and storytelling in completely different ways. I would particularly recommend this as an exercise to anyone with kids who are determined Can't Draw Won't Draw-ers, as it kind of sucks you in to drawing a bit of background here, a few speed lines there, and before you know it, hey, you're making comics so I guess you can draw after all? Also particularly recommended to kids obsessed with Lego, or Minecraft, or Frozen, or Star Wars, because it's a way of playing with your favourite toys and making up stories in those worlds and with those characters even if you haven't quite got the hang of drawing all the webs on spider-man's costume or whatever.

Look, you can even have a go at the CLASSICS:

Anyway, have a go! See what you come up with over the summer, and please do feel free to tweet at me on @neillcameron or @ComicsClubSM with any results, I'd love to see them.

And if the kids need something else to do after that, move them onto the ADVANCED CLASS - make and publish their own comic by the time they go back to school! (With today's ease of access to reprographic technology this is, honestly, a way more achievable goal than it may possibly seem at first glance. Look, here are a few we made earlier!

For lots of further activities and ideas and pointers on how to make awesome comics, HEY! I actually made a whole book about this stuff?

Available from good bookshops and libraries nationwide! And do check out the How To Make Awesome Comics page on my website for more info and examples, and lots more activities and resources to use in making your own comics!

How To Make Awesome Comics - Previews and Reviews

I thought I'd post a few pages of How To Make Awesome Comics here, to give people a taste of the book, and talk a little bit about the thinking that went into it. It's broken into six chapters (plus appendices), the idea being to give a complete step-by-step introduction to all aspects of the comics-making process, in a way that is hopefully approachable, non-terrifying and entirely non-"THIS is how you have to do it!"

Chapter One contains some introductory lessons to warm up and, y'know, BREAK DOWN RESISTANCE. The general message being - have a go! Do it. The lesson I always try to get across in workshops is: don't worry if you think you can't draw, or if some unhelpful person's told you you're no good at it. If you can draw a stick figure, you can draw comics. FACT.

Chapter Two dives right into the fun part, the Coming-Up-With-Ideas part; again, this is all based on what I do in workshops, giving kids just some really easy starting points for stories, to rule out that initial "but I haven't got any ideaaas" reluctance you often find.

Chapter Three gets into a little bit of Comics Theory, covering how the basics of how comics work as well as the slightly wider question of What Is Funny, Anyway? It's kind of my abbreviated take on both Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Aristotle's Poetics - did that sound pompous enough, or should I go on? There are fart jokes.

Chapter Four then goes into the actual How To Draw stuff, using lessons on drawing Robots, Pirates, Dinosaurs and suchlike to (again, hopefully) communicate some of the fundamentals of figure construction and cartooning.

Chapter Five gets into the real nuts-and-bolts of storytelling, how stories work, all that jazz. I started doing this kind of stuff partly as a kind of parody of the absurd reductiveness of all those 'How Stories Work' manuals, from Robert McKee to Joseph Campbell to, I guess, Aristotle again. But I've genuinely found  - and again, it's all from doing workshops - that giving kids this tight basic framework of obviously-kind-of-ridiculous rules to push against is a great way of getting them over those initial hurdles and to the point of having created and finished something.

Chapter Six pulls it all together and is basically an attempt to convince readers how easy it is, nowadays, to actually put something out; to collate and print and publish your own comic. And how fun that can be.

And then you have a bunch of appendices that teach you the really important stuff like how to draw different moustaches, and missile launchers, and that.

Those are what the 'lessons' are concerned with - the other side of the book, and one of the things that was the most challenging in terms of putting it all together, was making sure that those fairly informationally dense strips were balanced out throughout with lots of space - space for the reader's own imagination to spark off, to go off on their own tangents, to put down the book and go off and draw their own comics instead. So we've got a lot of this sort of thing:

Just to reiterate - for parents / teachers / anyone who simply prefers not to scribble all over their nice new book (which apparently is some people) all the exercises / Art Monkey Challenges from the book are available to download and print off from the Phoenix website - along with a whole bunch more, besides.

I've seen some lovely reviews of the book here and there, but really the best part so far is hearing from parents who've got in touch and said that their kids have read it and just gone nuts for making their own comics. That's really the best review I could hope for, right there. 

How To Make Awesome Comics is OUT TODAY!

Available in all good bookstores as of today is my new book, HOW TO MAKE AWESOME COMICS! An educational and instructive manual for persons of all ages on every aspect of the comics-making process, with extended ruminations on the nature and origins of creativity plus NUMEROUS fart jokes and a WHOLE PAGE THAT TELLS YOU HOW TO DRAW PENGUINS. Buy it for every child you know, and also for any you don't, and also for yourself. THANK YOU.

Here are some places you can grab a copy:

• direct from the Phoenix website!
• From excellent comics shops such as Gosh Comics in London, Page 45 in Nottingham, OK Comics in Leeds, to name BUT A FEW!
• From major online retailers, or slightly less major but arguably morally sturdier ones!
• From, honestly, all good bookshops across the land.

And if they don't have it, ask them to order it! (ISBN: 978-1-910200-03-2)

And hey, parents, librarians, teachers and readers all: you can download printable versions of all the activities in the book, and many other worksheets and fun comics-based activities besides, from here:  http://www.thephoenixcomic.co.uk/awesome/

Let the drawing-filled summer holidays commence!

Seeing as I'm here, here are a few ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS! Look, it's my blog, I'm allowed to go on a bit. I'd like to thank the following people, without whom the book would NOT EXIST!

Sarah McIntyre! A tireless force for spreading the comics word, I'd particularly like to thank Sarah because it was she who dragged me along to do my first school visit - something that frankly terrified me, but I figured if things got hairy I could at least throw Sarah to the feral children and make my escape while she fought them off. ANYWAY, as it turned out, it was actually completely amazing, and kind of ended up changing my whole approach to comics and my career; a huge amount of this book comes out of ideas I've developed in my workshops, seeing first hand the excitement and creativity that comics generate with kids.

(Sarah McIntyre, seen here HATLESS AND IN FIGHTING MOOD.)

Ben Sharpe! Our original editor on the Phoenix, who commissioned Professor Panels and Art Monkey in the first place and was utterly invaluable in figuring out the tone and approach for the strip. I think without Ben's steady hand I'd have gone a lot more sarcastic and facetious and generally it wouldn't actually have worked nearly as well for the actual intended audience. 

Paul Duffield! who worked with me tirelessly on the design and layout of the book, putting in efforts above and beyond the call of duty when he really could have been off drawing mind-bogglingly amazing comics instead. (Paul's fingerprints are all over the finished book, and it looks *beautiful* as a result. He even drew the pencil shavings on the cover!)

And of course, all Ficklings everywhere but most particularly of all David Fickling, who I could thank here for a solid hour for all he's done for publishing in this country, for comics, and for me personally. And it would still not be enough.

(The man himself, photo courtesy Jo Cotterill)

Is that enough self-indulgent gushing now? I think it probably is. PLEASE BUY MY BOOK?

And hey look! Some OTHER awesome comics out today: Gary's Garden by Gary Northfield and Long Gone Don by the Etherington Brothers - spectacularly, embarassingly talented fellow all. That is quite the library of AMAZING COMICS FOR CHILDREN starting to build up, right?

Awesome Comics: MADE

I recently spent the week doing something new; teaching a weeklong course at the Story Museum in Oxford, that venerable institution (it's only been there a little while but it is PRETTY VENERABLE) where I am currently cartoonist-in-residence. The course was titled Make Awesome Comics; it was for kids aged 7-12, and the idea was to try and give them a bit of an introduction to all aspects of making comics; from coming up with ideas to writing stories to drawing and lettering - featuring lessons along the way from Guest Lecturers and International Comics Superstars Kate Brown and Gary Northfield - all the way through to printing and self-publishing their own comic by the end of the week. 

And we did! And I am now exhausted.

Our classroom! I had a CLASSROOM.

Some recommended reading materials.

Those kids like The Phoenix. Those kids liked the Phoenix A LOT.

It was hard work, but also a preposterous amount of fun, and I learned a lot from the whole experience. I'm still processing a lot of it, but I had to boil it down into a few key lessons - and I guess I knew these already, but this really hammered them home - it'd be:

• that the imagination and creativity of children is endlessly potent, amazing and hilarious
• that comics are an incredibly effective way of allowing kids to harness, express and develop that creativity, and finally
• that whatever we as a society are paying teachers to deal with those monsters  **charming little scamps** on a daily basis, it is NOT ENOUGH.

I jest! They were a lovely bunch. And they really did come out with some great stuff. TO  WIT:

One of the most amazing parts for me was how the entire class knuckled down when it was time to Actually Make The Thing, writing and drawing and entire 32-page comic in a single day. And here it is, their comic that they made... THE AWESOMEST COMIC!

I helped a bit, putting it all together and getting it print-ready, but it's 100% all their own work. 

There's some genuinely hilarious stuff in there; we're just looking into the logistics of it all and then we might put some of it up online, because frankly it DESERVES TO BE READ.

Anyway, yeah. Ludicrously hard work at times, but the moment we had at the end of the week when we held a little 'graduation ceremony' and they all got to come up and get a certficate and a copy of their comic that they made, handed to them by David Fickling... that was pretty great, and it felt like a great way to bring the book into the world.

Here are some photos from the party! (There's loads more, and an exclusive preview of the book, over on the David Fickling Books blog!)

 Addressing the troops! (Photo: Diane Cameron)

L-R: David Fickling, the incredible Kate Sayer from the Story Museum who was invaluable all week and without whose assistance I think I may have ACTUALLY DIED, The Awesomest Comic, me. (Photo by Diane Cameron)

Me, demonstrating my powers of EXTREME SHININESS to my class (photo by Susie Day)

The brilliant Susie Day and Sally Nicholls and OH WHAT'S THAT THEY'VE GOT THERE? (Photo by Jo Cotterill)

David Fickling, awesome book. (Photo by Jo Cotterill)

Oh, my new book? My new book, which comes out tomorrow? DID I NOT MENTION THAT I HAVE A BOOK COMING OUT TOMORROW?