Slice of Life: The End of Bassman

Slice of Life 2011Last year, in a bit of a hiatus between the collapse of my longtime band (The Sofa Kings) and the start of a new band (no name yet), I started to tap into the world of rock and roll bands with a webcomic called Bassman. I have always wanted to play bass in a band (even though I am only so-so — my main instruments are the sax and rhythm guitar) and the comic allowed me to explore this interest.

I worked on about 20 comic strips and then lost interest. The other day, I stumbled on Bassman again (and sent the link off to our new bass player, who is so incredibly talented) and realized that I needed to bring the comic to an end, and what better way to end the story than with the band falling apart and the members wondering what is next.

Yesterday morning, with the gift of a two-hour delay in my school (but not in my sons’ schools), I wrote out and then created the final comic strips in the Bassman series. If you know any musicians in a rock band (or if you are one yourself), you may recognize something in the characters.
Bassman25
Bassman26
Bassman27
Bassman28

Peace (in the dissonance),
Kevin

Supporting the Funny Pages

Image: DailyINK app for the iPhone

from DailyINK

The other day, I received an email newsletter from a friend of mine, Hilary Price, who writes and draws the Rhymes with Orange syndicated comic strip that I just adore. (I think I can call her my friend, since she has visited my webcomic camp a few times, and I have loaned her a few graphic novels, and she returns my email and phone calls. We don’t hang out or anything. I guess in this day and age, friends are people with connections.)

Anyway, Hilary noted that, among other interesting endeavors, her comic strip is now part of the DailyINK site, a digital home for a slew of syndicated comics. She noted that there is now an App on iTunes for DailyINK and urged us to at least consider supporting comics by purchasing the DailyINK subscription (it’s $19.99 for the entire year or $1.99 a month).

I jumped right in, as much to support Hilary as to get access to some cool comics. While I wish there were even more choices for content than there is, I do like the span of offerings and how you can set up your own Daily Comic Feed for the web or for your mobile device (I use an iTouch but I bet the comics look so much better on an iPad).

Here are some things I like about DailyINK:

  • I am directly supporting comic artists like Hilary. More and more newspapers are cutting out comics, so it feels like a good gesture from a loyal reader;
  • I like that the comics are in full color, and not reduced to the black and white of the daily newspaper;
  • I like that I can scroll back through an entire year of archives of my comics, anytime I want;
  • I like that each morning, I have new comics sitting for me to read;
  • I found old favorites (Rhymes with Orange, Zits, Baby Blues) but also discovered some new comics that are not available in newspapers that I get (Arctic Circle, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, Ollie and Quentin);
  • I like that I can add an array of editorial comics, too, if I want. I haven’t wanted but it is an option;
  • I like that I can miss a few days and get back into the flow of story lines;
  • I can set up my own comics to “follow” but I still have access to everything else.

What I don’t quite like:

  • I wish there were more comics to add and I am hopeful in the future, there will be. There is a long list, but many of the comics on the list are not much interest to me;
  • I wish I had an iPad to read them on (that’s my problem, though, not DailyINK’s).

Peace (in the support),
Kevin

from Hilary Price’s Rhymes with Orange comic:

We asked, Bitstrips listened

We have been using the Bitstrips for Schools comic site this year, periodically, and last school year, when I joined the developers of the site on Teachers Teaching Teachers, we discussed some ideas that I (and others) thought would be helpful to teachers and students: the ability to embed the comics in a blog and the ability to directly download the comics as an image file.

I am sure I am not the only one to ask for these things, but Bitstrips listened to us and there is now the ability to do both of these kinds of sharing.

So, a big thank you to Bitstrips for listening to us users. I appreciate it.

Here, I want to give it a try with a student comic:

Peace (in the comics),
Kevin

From Bitstrips to Glogster: A Collection of Day on Writing Webcomics

Although the National Day on Writing was Wednesday, my students were still working on their webcomics at home, on their own time, in order to finish an assignment that we had to create a celebration of writing. I really loved what they were doing, so I decided to grab some of the comics and put them on a Glog Wall as a way to mark the 2010 Day on Writing.

In thinking of use of technology, here we used Bitstrips for Schools to make the comics, a Firefox screenshot add-on to download the comics as images (I use Fireshot), Flickr to gather the comics together, and then Glogster.edu to present the comics. That’s a lot of use of tools, but what it comes down to is that the students were the ones creating content. The tools were just helpful.

Head to the National Day on Writing Webcomic Glog

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Making Webcomics on the National Day on Writing

writingman sarah
Yesterday was the National Day on Writing (did you get my Hallmark greeting card? No? Must be in the mail) and I had imagined some school-wide event at my school, but that fell apart when I realized the scale of such an operation. I didn’t have the energy, I guess.

But we did celebrate the Day on Writing in sixth grade, as I had all of my students (about 80) head to our Bitstrips Webcomic site to create a webcomic that celebrates writing. I helped get them started by creating an activity template that they could follow with a character I invented called WritingMan.

Not everyone finished during the class (some continue to get wrapped up in the joy of creating characters — it’s time-sucking fun) but I was happy to see how engaged they were and how thoughtful they were about writing.

Here are a few of their comics:

Peace (on the funny pages of writing),
Kevin

PS – Yesterday I wrote a poem, and share the podcast, about the Day on Writing, so I was involved on a few levels with the event.

Bassman Webcomics: Inspired by John Cage

In college, where I was a music minor (and an English major and always wanted those two to flip), I had a professor who was deep into the New York avante garde scene of composition. John Cage was a god to these guys. The other day, I read an interesting profile of Cage in New Yorker and thought I might bring his ideas into my Bassman webcomic.
Here’s what I got so far:
Bassman22
Bassman23
Bassman24
You can peruse the entire Bassman collection (if you dare) here.

Peace (in the silence),
Kevin

Making Webcomics before the School Year Begins

Normally, as the start of school approaches, I include instructions in my summer letter home that asks my incoming students to write at our classroom blog a bit about what they did over the summer. This year, I am going to have us use Bitstrips for Schools webcomics, and so I changes my writing venue from the blog to our classroom webcomic space. It’s been pretty fun to see what they can do, particularly since they are on their own (for the most part — we don’t start school with kids until tomorrow).

Here is a snapshot of our “classroom” page. You can see that many of them are already creating avatars of themselves.
comic classroom 2010

I hope they view the activity as fun and engaging.

Peace (in the comic world),
Kevin

What I’ve been up to … Bassman Comics

While I was away on a blogging vacation in August, I also kept creating more Bassman webcomics, in which I am poking fun at my love of music and playing in rock and roll bands. My hope is to get my 12 year old son to take these basic comics and do the artwork. He started the project but then stopped.I think it was right around the time he finally earned an iPod touch. Hmmm.

This is what he drew up for me first:
Bassman drawn (1)
Here is a collection of the 20-odd strips I am working on with Bassman:

Peace (in the frame),
Kevin

Webcomic Camp Comes to a Close


And so, the final frame has been inked.

🙂

Yesterday, our four-day Webcomic Camp for middle school students came to an end and even though it is a lot of work to plan for the camp and sucks up half of a summer day, I was pretty sad to see our artists/writers walk out the door yesterday. They had accomplished a lot in four days.

One idea that my colleague Tom had was to have each student present to the rest of us some of their comics, even if the comics were still underway and uncompleted. They could use any platform they wanted — digital or not — and it was nice to see a whole mix of comics and graphic stories underway or completed. This idea of a presentation of some work really gave the kids focus during the last two days of camp, as did the use of some forms around character development and plot design. Tom also set up a table where he regularly checked in with kids (while I was doing tech work).

There was a whole range of talent, from just beginning to one kid who clearly has incredible talent as an artist and illustrator and was completely engaged when watching The Cartoonist documentary about Jeff Smith and his Bone series.

This eighth-grader has already created an entire world for a graphic novel, complete with characters with back stories, and although he did smaller pieces for camp, he “sees” a much larger story unfolding for a graphic novel in the future. This kid has talent, and luckily, he already knows Hilary Price (of Rhymes with Orange fame) and will work with her a bit.

Me? I was so wrapped up in helping kids and gathering their work for our camp website (which we used as our presentation platform) that I never got to even start a comic with them. Tom did, though, and I hope he keeps going with it. I did finally figure out how to use iPhoto this camp, however, and how to resize photos (How come I can’t do it directly in iPhoto?) that allowed me to work on our camp website right in class as they were completing their work. (The Mac is still my learning curve).

We had them leave camp with our style of exit slip: they had to draw us a final comic on paper, and when they handed that in, we gave them a camp t-shirt and another free graphic novel (from my pile). And since we have our Bitstrip site up for at least another month, they can continue to make comics on their own. I hope they do.

Peace (on the funny pages),
Kevin