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:
Here is a collection of the 20-odd strips I am working on with Bassman:
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.
(I made this in Bitstrips with all of the student avatars, which is a neat feature of the site)
Yesterday was Day Three of our Webcomic Camp for middle school students and after letting them play around with our Bitstrips site, my colleague, Tom, guided our comic creators through a focused session around developing either a character they will use in a series of comics or a plot for a larger graphic story, and then, we had them fill out some brainstorming sheets around their choice of focus.
(This is how we continue to weave lessons around writing into the fun of comics, but don’t tell the kids!)
We will also be having each student do a short presentation today about the comics or graphic story they are working on. Tom and I hope this will give a good sense of focus to the group of students, who are wonderful and creative but can get off-track at times. Our aim is for them to “complete” something, even if it is part of a story or a few comics in a series of possible strips that they will continue after camp ends today (yikes!).
While we continue to show them a bunch of tools (ComicLife, Bitstrips, Make Beliefs Comics, traditional paper, and today, our ToonDoo space), they have complete freedom on their work, so we do have kids working on all sorts of different ideas in different formats. While this is billed as “webcomic camp,” there are at least three kids working with pencil and paper right now.
One more note: After every tool we use, we spend about ten minutes reflecting on what they liked about it and what they didn’t like about it, and how it might be improved. We’re trying to build in this reflective practice, particularly when it comes to online sites, so that they don’t feel “locked in” by what a site offers and conform to the site’s limitations only.
I’ve been taking pictures and grabbing comics as we go along through our Webcomic Camp for middle school students. It seemed logical to stuff all of those images into Animoto and see what came out (and I wanted to use their new Earth theme, too).
Here is a brief overview of what we did yesterday:
We started the day off with an idea from the Adventures in Cartooning activity book, in which the kids were given a comic that had all of the dialogue but was missing the artwork (a reverse from the first day of camp). It was pretty interesting to see how engaged some of them became when they were just being the artists.
I then showed them how to use ComicLife software. We have the 30 day trial on the computers we are using, and after a quick tutorial about using MS Paint for creating images and the basics of the software, we set them loose for about an hour or so. I was surprised at how quickly they got it and understood the platform. Not that it’s all that tricky, but it is a bit complex.
We transitioned into using one of our Webcomic sites — Bitstrips for Schools — and they worked on creating avatars of themselves in the site. It’s neat that once they have created their comic representation of themselves (which is a huge hit as an activity), Bitstrips populates the “classroom” on our homepage with their avatars. We all got a kick out of seeing what each other made.
We took a break when visitor Bryant Paul Johnson arrived and Bryant, who has published his own webcomics and is working on a graphic novel, did a fantastic job of working on the concept of comics as a combination of words, images and time. The concept of “time” is tricky because it involves the sequence of the story as it unfolds outside of the field of vision (what happened before this frame, what happened after this frame). Bryant then worked on a few comics on the whiteboard, with ideas from the students.
They then had some time to choose what they wanted to work on — ComicLife, Bitstrips, Make Beliefs Comix, or just regular paper and pencils. A little of everything was underway when the day came to a close.
(Hilary Price of Rhymes with Orange works with the camp on a brainstorming activity)
Yesterday was our first day of Webcomics Camp, where we have 13 middle school students with a passion for comics learning about the world of art and writing and sequential art. The four hours flew by, but here is a taste of what they did yesterday:
They started off with a comic I provided them from Bill Zimmerman’s site in which they had to fill in some dialogue. We talked about the nature of a one-frame comic, and how you use humor and punch lines to make a joke.
I had them take a survey about their interest in reading and writing comics. I’ll share the results tomorrow. It’s a small sample, obviously, but still, interesting results.
They spent some time on Make Beliefs Comics and had to create a comic, which they could email to me, if they wanted it published at our Webcomic Camp website, where each camper has their own page that will become populated with comics and art as the week progresses.
We started a discussion around character development and the use of a “defining feature” that sets the character apart and allows the writer to use that feature for humor. Then, they began creating some characters for a “character” wall in our classroom. There are some amazing artists in this group!
We had a special guest — Hilary Price, of Rhymes with Orange comic (syndicated in about 150 newspapers — came in to work with the kids on how to brainstorm creative ideas and develop a comic out of those ideas. Together, the class created a comic about Carmen Miranda as a thief who nails people in the head with a pineapple from her hat. Don’t ask. You had to be there.
They spent much of the last part of class working on their characters or beginning to work on a comic. (One example: the tale of a battered stuffed animal that uses a time machine that always goes wrong and he ends up in places like the belly of a dinosaur, etc.)
We ended the day by watching the first part of The Cartoonist documentary, about Jeff Smith and the Bone series of graphic novels, which most of the kids had read.
Just continuing my fun with a new webcomic idea — Bassman. I’m doing this as our Webcomic Camp for middle school students begins today so that I can be in tune with creating along with the kids.
A few years ago, when I was first thinking about making my own comic strip about kids and teachers and technology, I turned to a site called Stripgenerator to begin work on the comic. Stripgenerator has an odd feel to it, and the comic that began as something called Outerworld Web later emerged as Boolean Squared when I decided to shift over to using Comic Life for the layout. I wanted to own the content and the process from the start to finish, so Comic Life seemed better suited for my needs.
This morning, I got one of those “our sites have been updated” emails from Stripgenerator, so I wandered over there. It doesn’t seem all that different from when I was there last (more than a year ago) and it still has an odd feel to it, thanks to the strange characters.
But, I made a quick comic, poking fun at bass players. You can give Stripgenerator a try without an account, if you want. It’s easy enough to use. I would not bring students to the site, however, as some content is not quite suited for kids. Which is too bad. I bet that teenage boys, in particular, would have a lot of fun with the punk-rockish tone of the characters.
I am in the midst of planning out our Webcomic Camp for middle school students. The camp takes place next week at our local vocational school and there are about 15 young comic artist/writers signed up. My colleague, Tom, and I ran the camp for the first time last year and it was quite interesting.
Like last year, we will mix in the use of traditional paper and pen for making comics along with using a few webcomic sites: Make Beliefs Comix, Bitstrips for Schools and ToonDooSpaces. We also have invited a few visitors who are local folks who work in the field of comics and graphic novels, and I am hopeful they can come in to work with our students.
The camp runs for four days, for four hours each day, so there are some limits to what we can do. But I am going to use elements of Barbara Slate’s You Can Do a Graphic Novel as a place to develop some lessons for the camp kids. (Listen to the podcast interviews I did with Barbara earlier this year at The Graphic Classroom).
Essentially, I want the camp kids to create a character they believe in and can develop, and then use that character in a series of activities throughout the week as they work on traditional comics and then, a longer graphic story format. Last year, we did not have an end product in mind but this year, I am trying to come up with something they have to complete as a comic showcase. I am trying to envision the backwards design principle here.
Here is a glimpse of some of the comics from last year:
I’ve been slowly savoring Mo Willems’ You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons for a few months now. This book — with its subtitle: The World On One Cartoon A Day — is a collection of one-page comics and illustrations that Willems did when he went on a low-budget backpacking tour of the world, starting in the United States and then heading out to Europe, Asia and more. The tour began before Willems was a published author of crazy kids’ books (the Pigeon books and more) and before he was married, so he was a single man on an adventure with his pen and paper.
Unlike most tourist guides, Willems’ illustrated insights capture the daily color of life (shining through Willems’ own sense of humor) and what makes the book special is that Willems went back to his drawings and added short narratives of his memories of the scenes. Or his faulty memories. Or, in some cases, he admits he doesn’t even remember drawing the scene.
The use of comic illustrations is another lens into culture, I realized, and I think I learned as much about Nepal and Paris and China as I have from any other book that I have read.
Give Willems’ book a try. You won’t be disappointed.
