Hey kids! Comics!

[Greg Hatcher]

Specifically, MY kids' comics. Several of you have asked about the books my 6th and 7th-grade cartooning class does and I have some scans up in this week's column. (http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2006/06/09/friday-with-the-cartooning-class/)

Enjoy.

[FunkyGreenJerusalem]

Good stuff, Greg.

But are you telling me, none of the kids, not even the boys, put superheroes in? Not one?

That said, my favourite of those shown is the girl who did the rebuttal to you.
Not only did she show she understood how to stop the sort of criticism that Liefield cops, but she also shows she does a faster page rate than him (and has a better grasp of page to page continuity).

How often do you publish their works?

[Greg Hatcher]

Good stuff, Greg.

But are you telling me, none of the kids, not even the boys, put superheroes in? Not one?


Not one. I only had four boys from the two schools this year (and around thirty girls, which is why I get a little annoyed when comics people bloviate about girls not liking comics.) Jordan did a ninja. Troy did a sort of tank-battle thing. Seyla did giant robots, then he did samurai warriors. And Sam does these hilarious sort of EC parody things, like "Aliens Took My Lollipop!" or "It Came From... the Fridge!" I'd have put one of them up but I was limited by Deb only being able to sneak ten scans or so past the boss. One of these days -- maybe for next year -- I'll get us an actual web site.

Anyway, no, no superheroes. In fact in the last twelve years of doing this I can only think of two superhero strips and they were both parodies. My students literally EXPERIENCE comics differently than we do. I say "comics" to them and their first thought is a Tokyopop digest. Superheroes for them are in the movies. When I bring in comics for them from DC or Marvel it's almost always a new thing for them.

Also, they're twelve. Standard superhero stories look WAY too hard to draw for them. They generally are going to try to draw the things that they CAN draw, and if you read McCloud's Understanding Comics and then looked at our 'zines you'd see that these kids are just about the perfect test case for McCloud's theories about WHY manga uses the simple faces and the doll eyes, and the power of identification going up when the cartoon figures become simple.

How often do you publish their works?

We try to get a book out every five or six weeks once we are on our actual schedule-- the first month of class is more of a training seminar where I show them how comics work and shading and inking and point of view and stuff. Once that practice is over, the class turns into a studio operation. We run from October to June every year and generally we get out about five books plus a convention ashcan. It's as close to a professional situation as I can take them -- by the end of the year they've got five publication credits and they've worked a show.

And we distribute the books outside of school too. Seattle residents can BUY our books for some nominal price at Zanadu Comics downtown (http://zanaducomics.com/z1.html) -- they have to charge something, I think it's like fifty or seventy-five cents, and the books are racked in New Releases, in the D's. And then twice a year, at Christmas and right before summer break, Howard and Emily make up grab bags of comics for the kids and those are their 'wages.' It's easier for me because on the barter system I don't have to deal with school paperwork, and honestly the kids make out like bandits compared to cash. Lately even the chain owner got in on it -- Perry gave me a huge box of Animerica and Super Manga Blast! back issues and told me that if I wanted to I should pass those on too, "but you better check 'em first, some of them are kind of R-rated." We ended up holding back maybe a third of them for nudity and profanity but the rest went through.

It's tremendous fun doing this. I have about the best job in the world, I think. Pity it's not full-time.