More Kids

Some comics by my favorite little friends from last week....

Brian drew comics about a cute little ducky who electrocuted things


And he drew this one.  How amazing are those two middle panels??


Coleman knows his slapstick


Helen drew a "rocketship with babies attached to it"


Ella decided to draw Frank.  He looks great in a bow tie!


Frank does Jersey Shore


I love this one


But this one, is my all time favorite.


Chuck invented this exercise, where I draw the first and last panels of a 6 panel comic page, and then photocopy it, and the students fill in the blank panels.  The first time I did it, I didn't have that many expectations, but it's AMAZING.  Everybody usually comes up with something completely different!  And it's incredible how clear the stories come out, and how imaginative they are.  I love it.  I haven't tried it with kids younger than 8, but I'd like to someday.  I bet even 5 year olds could do it.

The Kids!

Oh, the kids.

The one on the top right is Freddy in Space, in case you were wondering.

I'm taking a break from doing my daily strip this week because I am substitute teaching! I'm an art teacher for the week at the K-8 school that my mom teaches at. It's awesome so far. And it's only been one day and I'm exhausted. I have no idea if I'd be able to do this all the time...I've kind of been trying to figure that out. But really I should just enjoy it, and not make it into a existential crisis.

Today I taught kids how to draw Freddy and Frank, and then they came up with some of their own characters. I was feeling weird about just having kids copy my work, but then I realized how essential copying is to cartooning, and that you can learn so much from it. Just seeing that I make Frank the dog from just a bunch of scribbles, and that they can do it too, is empowering to them, I think. It makes having a real book seem not so far away. One kid even made a whole scribble world after I showed him how to draw Frank.

AND speaking of copying, Chuck and I started a tumblr on Saturday night called Redrawn. In my previous post I showed that Amanda Vahamaki page that I redrew, which was inspired by Chuck's James Sturm page, which was inspired by Michael Litvin's Tatsumi page, etc. etc. Also, Tom Hart had been doing this project for a while; picking a random page from a comic and redrawing it. So we decided to collect them all on this blog, to encourage more people to do the same. Anyone can submit. DO IT. I think I'm going to do another one soon.