Last Friday, James Kochalka lead a band of eight cartoonists (students or staff of CCS) into the Integrated Arts school in Burlington, Vermont. We had four hours to teach comics to a class of 4th and 5th graders. First we had a reading of some Johnny Boo magic, Kochalka’s kids books printed by Top Shelf.
James reads Johnny Boo and the Happy Apple
Then we split the classes up and got them to draw some Johnny Boo strips and exercises on creating their own characters. Kids I have taught in the past zoom through their comics (the older you go the longer they seem to think it out) but the 4th grade progressed a good clip. Sure enough, on average the 5th graders took much longer and we barely had time to use all of our story-telling exercises.
Monty and Beth Swardlick help the kids move their stories along
Some of us were extremely excited about school lunch but IA ended up catering fancy sandwiches for lunch. The stories the students came up with ran the gamut of poignant to silly. My favorite was of the mute fourth grader whose character wanted to act out a lot. At the end we collected copies of each six panel strip and are assembling the comics into a book so each student will have their own Comix Day anthology!
Cartoonists Away!
Clockwise from the left are Bill Volk, Jon Chad, Kevin Uehlein, GP Bonesteel, Monty, me, Betsey Swardlick and Melissa Mendes. More excellent pictures on my flickr stream including some HOT video of James Kochalka and his many, many voices reading Johnny Boo.
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