My afterschool Cartoon Studio group completed its second anthology last month.  We  expanded from 28 to 40 pages this year, and from four students contributing to nine!  These highschoolers are really starting to do some nice work.

Just like last year, we continued the fantasy story that features all of us in a pretty goofy adventure as characters that each person designed for themselves.  Drawing this kept me pretty busy for a couple weeks there!  I had to figure out a way introduce eight new characters in five pages.  I’m sure we’ll continue this story next year…

I recently found this video of Doug TenNapel speaking at the Art Institute Inland Empire to a group of incoming freshmen art students. He covers a surprising amount of ground in this talk, including artists’ obligation to the truth, how to stay inspired, and his writing method. If you’re a fan of Doug’s (like me) or want to learn more about creating comics, you should definitely check it out!

One of the most exciting things that happened for me as a teacher this year was the cartoon studio I ran after school.  I had a club like this at the middle school I used to teach at, but this was my first year running one with high school kids.  It was great to see what they came up with all year as we completed various challenges and jam comics together.  The main project, though, was the first issue of our anthology that we just printed up.  We’re calling it Scribbled Stories, and the kids were pretty jazzed to see their short comics printed up in it.  The cover was a jam creature… I did the layout and one arm, and each student drew a head, leg, or whatever.  The background features one panel from each student’s story in the book.

Towards the end of the year, the students challenged me to make a comic for the book that featured all of us as characters in a fantasy story.  So here is what we came up with.  Each kid decided what their character would be like and what they would do in the story.  My coffee addiction became a big part of the story, as you’ll see.

This is just a beginning… I think every year the story will continue with returning characters and some new ones from that year’s cartoon studio.  I’m looking forward to getting even more kids in print next time.  It’s a great feeling to watch them flip through their first comic ever…