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The first week of August White River Junction was flooded by cartoonists, much like this current week. Wait, don’t close the browser window! The town is already overrun with cartoonists but these kids came into town with starry-eyes and non-arthritic hands for the Create Comics Workshop. Ages 16 and up (and up) pushed pencil to paper, inked and erased. With instructors like Alec Longstreth, Jon Chad, Tim Stout, Denis St. John, Beth Hetland and Dakota McFazdean, the students were bound to create some amazing work like this anthology, N. Cognito and the Duplication Dilemma.
Utilizing CLASSIC comedy tropes like different-sized pupils, phone cord panel borders and technology that will serve your every purpose, each student created one page of this story after learning about different inking techniques and storytelling devices.
Ally has only been creating comics for a few months but is a literacy teacher in Somerset, New Jersey. “The ink demos were the best, I had never done that before.” Meanwhile, Ian Richardson moved into White River Junction few months ago and is ready to make comics. The “unbridled enthusiasm” and the amount of valuable information made the comics workshop worth it. He plans on making lots of mini-comics.
One of the highlights of the week was Alec Longstreth and Jon Chad teaching in tandem, Old School vs. New School Publishing. Back in the days before InDesign, Quark and other imposition programs, you used a copier and built your books so they would print correctly. Longtreth emphasized that the cartoon students “now have the skills to make their own zines at any copy shop, local library or even on a home printer.” He also used these same methods for the first five issues of his zine known as Phase 7, only going ‘digital’ with issue six and beyond. Then the gregarious Jon Chad came in to show that with a few clicks of the mouse, some adjustments for size, and ho-hum maybe add some page numbers then, BLAMMO you’ve got a comic book saved to your hard drive ready to print.
CCS-Approved BLAMMO technique demonstrated by Jon Chad.
Also, giving the students a run for their ink money was the One-Sheet Workshop taught by Beth Hetland. One again, the teaching stressed that cartooning is for everyone and you can make comics easily and on a modest budget.
The One-Sheet template can be downloaded at our website maintained by Nomi Kane, which will soon be bursting with some new triumphant student work!
