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Can you remember the last time you were given a blank piece of paper and told to ‘write a story’ or ‘draw a picture’? It can be an unpleasant experience, especially when your brain refuses to cooperate, but it’s part of daily life for school children. Some decide this means they hate writing or loathe drawing. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Here's an introduction to a series of four Book Trust videos about making comics, which can be used as an school classroom lesson (ages 8+), or just for fun at home.

Article originally published in Teach Primary magazine, 2015


Children naturally connect with making comics. There’s something about the combination of drawing and writing that pulls them through the process of creating a story, and it’s more fun than trying to fill a page with writing alone.

In making a four-panel comic we can explore the basics of story structure, characterisation, plot, motivation and dialogue. And comics are a great medium for engaging kids who have a diverse range of skills and needs.

If a child’s drawing isn’t all that great, he or she can enhance basic stick figures with clever writing and it will still tell a story. If children can hardly write a word of English, they can tell a story in pictures, and get help when they decide they need a sound effect here or there.

Reluctant writers are likely to enjoy the energetic nature of comics and the freedom that speech and thought bubbles provide. In a workshop film I’ve produced for children’s reading charity, Book Trust (available free online here), I start with a little tutorial on how to draw a Sea Monkey, a funny, incidental character in Oliver and the Seawigs, my illustrated chapter book with Philip Reeve. If the children have read the book, they’ll enjoy seeing one of its characters going on to have further adventures. (And even if they haven’t read the book, it’s still fun to draw Sea Monkeys.) How often have you finished a great book and wished you could keep following the characters, even though the story has ended?



In the first of the four videos, I walk the class through the process of creating a character they feel is their own. The kids can decide its name, how it will look, which kind of cheese it prefers, how it brushes its hair / scales / fur. It’s like having a new friend, or a beloved pet. They warm to it, and it looks back at them from the page.


Give your creators the tools

I used to think that step-by-step drawing lessons would stunt creativity by making kids think it’s the only way to draw something, but I’ve been surprised to discover the reverse is true: when people learn how to put together simple shapes and come up with an engaging character, it gives them some basic building blocks and the confidence to tailor those shapes into countless other character drawings. Add a moustache, a hat, give it bushy eyebrows, a tutu… suddenly their little creature looks very different.

After the children have created their characters, in Video 2, I give them tips for making effective comics. In Video 3, we have a ‘Comic Jam’ session where the class participates in a story-making game. I lead the class through dividing their paper into four comic panels, and then start them off drawing the first of these. After five minutes, I’ll have the children swap papers and each child will begin working on someone else’s comic for another five minutes. Three swaps and 20 minutes later, each child will have a finished four-panel comic, which is then returned to the original author so they can see what kind of adventure their character has been on.


From the Year 3 group at Tupton Primary School in Chesterfield

Besides being fun, I’ve found the Comic Jam can be a strong learning exercise in these ways. It can:

1. Teach clarity
The children learn that their storytelling has to be comprehensible to another person. If they get someone else’s comic and find it’s not clear what’s happening, they begin to comprehend what it’s like when their own stories aren’t clearly told. They realise that what they see in their heads has to go onto the paper, or others will struggle to understand. And they see the importance of writing legibly.

2. Thicken plots
Writing comics is a good practice in storytelling: children have to think ‘in this situation, what might happen next?’; random events aren’t as funny or interesting as events that have some sort of logical progression. They learn about the importance of creating a setting for their characters.

3. Set a good pace
A comic jam helps pace the lesson. If each child created his or her own comic, you’d have some children finishing in three minutes while others would still be working on the first panel at the end of the session. The game helps slow down children who work too quickly (“Now think, what else could you put in that scene?”) and speeds up children who might be so precious about their work that they never finish. A comic jam is more about communicating than making perfect artwork.

4. Create new possibilities
Because multiple authors are working on the same comic, children see how stories can take different turns. The sequences might be action-packed or slow and reflective. They might be funny, sad, or very ordinary. There’s no set way to tell a story, and comics help children to understand this. By taking on a character someone else has created, pupils are also forced to empathise.

5. Inspire different endings
The children get a chance to reflect on what they’ve created. If they like the way their story has turned out, they can use it as inspiration for making more comics in a similar vein. If they hate what happened to their character they may feel indignant. But even that negative feeling can be inspiring; they can now go and create the story they envisioned – the ‘wrong’ ending having shown them the way forward.


Young comic publishers Jordan Vigay and Jonny Toons at work on a Comic Jam at the annual Thought Bubble comics festival in Leeds

Finally in Video 4, children can sing along with a Sea Monkey sea shanty. Ending with a song gives a fun, noisy finale to a focused story session, but it also shows children that their characters don’t have to stay on paper. Stories can find life in many different forms – songs, animations, puppets, and theatre – any of which may be less daunting to children than the blank white page.

A note about participants with autism: empathising with someone else’s character may be hard for them, and they may balk at having to relinquish their work to someone else. In severe cases, it might be better for this person to work on his or her own comic, keeping the same panel-by-panel pace as the other people in the room.

Age appropriateness: Some children under 8 will be able to make comics (particularly with one-on-one adult help) but I've found that as a group, children under the age of 8 struggle to have enough literacy to make their work understandable to each other without explanation. Many also get upset when they have to swap papers, seeing someone else drawing on 'their' paper. While younger children will enjoy learning how to draw the Sea Monkey in Video 1 and singing the song in Video 4, I recommend sticking to ages 8+ for the Comic Jam in Videos 2 & 3.


Find out more about Book Trust’s primary writing project The Write Book – and access the four videos of Sarah’s Comics Jam film workshop in the classroom here on the Book Trust website.


Video 2 of 4



I also created a picture book that started out as a Comic Jam with my friend David O'Connell! It's called Jampires and you can read more Comic Jam tips over at jampires.com.




My comics include Vern and Lettuce, and the Shark & Unicorn strip in The Funday Times. Find lots of tips on my FAQ page and follow me on Twitter: @jabberworks

Guys, this is exciting! Booktrust have worked with me to come up with a whole online class on how to make comics! I'm always wishing I could get around to more schools, so this is a huge help. There are four videos: how to make a character, tips on making comics, a walk-through where kids can make a comic along with the video, then a fun song at the end, inspired by the comic character.



The video editor has expertly paced the tutorial so teachers can use it in the classroom. But I think people at home can get a lot out of it, too: kids or grownups! You can watch the videos on the website here.



Here's the second video, so you can get a taster. Kids find making comics fun, but it also focuses them on learning how to make a story very clear to a reader. When I lead kids in Comics Jams, I often see them coming to grips with the idea that it's not enough to have a story in their heads, but that they have to give enough clues on the paper for someone else to understand the story without them hovering nearby, explaining it. They partly learn that by drawing the comics, but also by being given someone else's comic, and seeing why it might be difficult to work out what's happening. Learning how to express a series of thoughts clearly is a great concept lesson that applies to any form of communication.



You can find some more tips on leading Comics Jams over on my Jampires website with David O'Connell (who does great workshops). The Write Book site went live yesterday and a few people have already spotted it and seen its potential. Yay!




And you know how I'm always banging on about us needing an online comics database? Well, it looks like something's starting to happen! Check out this Booktrust Bookfinder on the website. For people who have no idea what kind of comics to give kids of various ages, this could be super-helpful. It's by no means a comprehensive list, and people can question the age ranging but it's a great start, and user-friendly. I'm always meeting teachers who want to do more with comics but they don't know much about them and need help.



On the Bookfinder, you can find out about my Vern and Lettuce comic book:



You can even download some pages, so you can get a feel for what kind of comic it is!



I'm really excited about this Write Book teacher toolkit; I think it could become a sort of TED Talks about children's books, with good resources just clicks away from the videos. I know kids get a HUGE amount out of it when I lead them in Comics Jam sessions, and I really hope people will use and share these videos.



And explore the other resources on the site! You can watch videos by Tony Bradman on rewriting fairy tales and Laura Dockrill's tips on writing and keeping a notebook. If you use our videos to come up with something creative, we'd love it if you'd share them with us! You can tweet them (or get someone to help you tweet them) to @Booktrust, using the hash tag #thewritebook. (And include me - @jabberworks - I'd love to see your comics!)



Big thanks to Anna McKerrow and the Booktrust team for making this happen!

Last weekend, the Jampires were out in force at Thought Bubble comics festival, to spread Comics Jam over Leeds! Here's team Jampires' David O'Connell, Matt Badham, Molly Bruton and me:



So what distinguishes Comics Jam from, say, raspberry jam?


Badges designed by David O'Connell; Jampires jam by the Butch Institute

A little explanation (as seen in the Thought Bubble anthology):




Our Comics Jam session attracted fellow Jampires like, uh, bees to honey. (These were Phil Welch and Katie White, who stayed with us and blogged all the way through the 24-Hour Comic Marathon at Lakes International Comic Art Festival in Kendal, earlier in the autumn.)



We ran a Comics Jam competition, and here's the winning comic! It's by 13-year-old Jordan Vigay and 10-year-old Jonathan 'Jonny Toons'.




Congrats, guys! Here are Jordan and Jonathan drawing away at our activity area tables, buoyed up by jammie dodgers.



Actually, the competition was a close call. Their original Comics Jam was in black and white:



And was competing hard against this Comics Jam, which really zinged off the page with its colours.



So we struck a deal, that if Jordan and Jonathan promised to colour the comic right after the festival, they'd be the winners. (And they did, using a mix of digital and coloured pencils.) You can find out more about running Comics Jams at home (or in school!) over on the Jampires website.

So let's meet the creators: I filmed Jordan and Jonathan each giving a lesson on how to draw a character from the comics they self-publish. And you can get a glimpse of other kids getting involved with Thought Bubble:



If you're scrolling through this and can't see the video, here's the shot of Jordan and me with the Red Crow comic he publishes. (You can buy the latest issue, No.8, for £1.75 via his website.)



Issue 8 includes a Comics Jam that Jordan and I did at the end of my signing session in Page 45 bookshop's room at the Lakes festival.



Oh, and you may have noticed that Jordan dressed up! He's cosplaying as Captain Spaceington from James Turner's Star Cat (which is hugely funny and I recommend it for kids AND adults). Here's an interview with James on Comics Beat.



James was super-pleased to see his own cosplayer! Right behind him, you can see Liz Payton manning The Phoenix Comic table (a weekly comic which I also highly recommend).



And here's Jonny Toon's table! Not many 10-year-olds are on Twitter, but you can follow this one at @JonnyToons. (He's just tweeted the work-in-progress cover of his Christmas issue.)



I was very impressed with Jonathan's design skills for Crystal Orb...



...and the comics inside are funny and remarkably sophisticated for someone his age! Keep an eye on this guy, I think he may go far. It was great to see him teaming up with Jordan to draw stuff; they're a real power duo.





And of course, if you read the Guardian, Independent, Vogue, almost any newspaper, you'll have seen articles about Zoom Rockman, who's been making comics since he was 8. He's 14 now, and has a lot of issues under his belt. He sources local advertising and has been a real pioneer in kids self-publishing comics. Check out his website and you can follow him on Twitter as @The_ZoomComic



I love the Skanky Pigeon quill pens!



His younger brother, Ace Rockman, also loves to draw and drew up a storm at the activity tables. (Great hat, Ace!)



Here's a video Zoom made about how to make comics when he was much younger and still too shy to talk on camera.



And it was great to see the debut of TEAM KETCHUP with their comics anthology Issue No.1! They found local Yorkshire funding and the kids involved worked shifts at the table, selling their comic and badges and running their doodle area. If you have questions about how they did it, have a chat with coordinators @_Joolze, @Coldjenius and @beth_k_t.



And you can follow Team Ketchup collectively as @theteamketchup! Here's a recent tweet of their doodle wall:



One of the coolest thing about Thought Bubble is seeing parents and kids geeking out together about books, comics and artwork. It's such an awesome way to spend time with your kid and let them see that reading is fun, without turning it into a lesson. This family were a joy to watch, and that little Green Lantern Guardian went straight for the books and got stuck into them. Ha, one of the funny things about Thought Bubble was that my picture books sold much better than my chapter books. Usually it's the other way around at book festivals; people see Oliver and the Seawigs or Cakes in Space and prefer them to the picture books because they have more words and are therefore deemed more like 'proper books'. Whereas I'd see Thought Bubble people leaf through them, realise they didn't have quite as many pictures, and move on to the fully-illustrated picture books, with 'proper illustrations'. This crowd is a visual crowd, and they appreciate reading pictures as much as words. It's a wonderful place to be.



My Jampires co-author David O'Connell and I kept looking over and breaking into broad grins as we saw our teammate Matt Badham working his magic. He's SO GOOD at relating to people, I wish I could work with him full-time. He could talk to anyone, on their own level, and he made a lot of people feel very welcome. It was almost poetic. (And he also sold a heap-load of books. Matt could very easily lead courses for booksellers.)



Here's a look at the two activity tables we had in our area. We had four tables in total: one for display, one for talking with people, book signing, laying out drawing supplies, and two table with chairs around them for families (and anyone who fancied a sit-down) to gather and draw. Some people wanted to keep their drawings, but we hung a lot of them up on the backboards and had a flip-chart ready for people to draw on and other creators to come over and do drawing demonstrations.



Some people did Comics Jams with other people, but a lot of kids were happy just to draw comics on their own. We found they didn't actually want much adult intervention; most of them were familiar with comics and happy to be left alone to get on with making things.



There were LOTS of jammie dodgers. When we ran out, we gave Jordan and Jonathan money to go off to the Tesco and buy us more.



It was fun seeing people of all ages getting stuck in.



Some people were a bit young to draw comics, or just wanted to do something a bit more relaxing, and we had a sheet posted, showing them how to draw a Jampire.



I always love seeing the Jampire variations. (I hope someone someday writes a symphony called The Jampire Variations.)









Flip chart fun times:





(Who can even SPELL 'submarine'?)














Here's Jordan and his mum, running The Phoenix Comic tables for awhile, so Liz could run around and talk to people.



And look at the fabulous volunteers, in their matching Thought Bubble staff t-shirts! They're designed by partners Donya Todd and Jack Teagle. (I sat next to Jack and Donya for a full 24 hours to do our 24-hour comic, and they're both ace.) The lady in the middle was our main contact for the family activity area, Martha Julian, and she really worked with us to make the best possible space for everyone. Thanks so much, Martha and team!



Of all the comics festivals I've been to, Thought Bubble and Lakes have by far been the best organised, and you could really tell, the way everyone talked about them so positively afterward. They made creators feel welcome, and we didn't have to fight like cats to make sure we had all our backboards, and they went out of their way to get stuff for us, to make things work more smoothly. Having a team in matching t-shirts is really helpful, there's always someone in view that you can run over to and get some help. I also did some planning with Lisa Wood (shown here) and Clark Burscough. If you follow @ThoughtBubbleUK, that's Clark manning the Twitter feed.



Huge thanks from Dave and me, and team Jampires!



Another cool thing about Thought Bubble is that kids can meet their favourite creators milling about everywhere! Here's The Phoenix Comic's Matt Baxter at the activity table:



Hey, look, it's my studio mate Gary Northfield! Gary did some awesome drawings and little watercolour paintings at his table. Check out his family-friendly The Terrible Tales of the Teenytinysaurs and Gary's Garden comic books; they're ace. Gary's the guy who originally walked me through how to do workshops and went with me on my first library event.



Check it out, Glasgow-based Adam Murphy and Lisa Murphy, creators of Corpse Talk! Lisa's done colourist work for Adam, Gary and lots of other people, and she's an important part of The Phoenix Comic team. I'd never really talked properly with her and Adam (other than fleeting festival chic-chat) but we had dinner together on our first night and really got to chat, which was one of my highlights of the whole trip.



Here's a look at their latest Phoenix cover. ZING!



And it's Neill Cameron and family! Neill's latest book, How to Make Awesome Comics is something I've been waiting a long time for; something I can recommend to kids who want to know more about making comics but are too young for the Scott McCloud books. Neill packs in loads of inspiring challenges and tips to get kids drawing and writing comics. And he's great at running workshops, too. In fact, Gary, the Murphys and Neill are all good at that, book 'em into your event diary, librarians, festival people, teachers, etc. His wife, Di Cameron, works at The Story Museum in Oxford, so they're a story-packed power team.



Neill and Adam had printed up their own Comics Jam for the festival, a humourous horror story called The Curse of Barry Starkey, which you can read about on Neill's website here.



Thought Bubble was so large this year that it filled three separate huge venues, all inside the big square at the Royal Armouries. The Jampires Comics Jamtastic area was in the Royal Armouries Hall, and there was a real effort to make that area the most kid-friendly place, including a special chill-out lounge for people with autism. In the middle of the square, the organisers erected a white marquis called 'The Teepee', a slightly misleading name because it was Enormous. A lot of the celeb signings were happening in there. And across the square was New Dock Hall, which has much higher ceilings, black walls and hosted more of the grown-up comics (although there was still a lot of family-friendly stuff there).

I first made a bee-line for Philippa Rice's table. I love Philippa's comics, and she always makes the most beautiful table displays. When I do talks about getting kids involved in comics festivals, I always show photos of Philippa's tables because I think I would have LOVED to have made dioramas and things like this as a kid. Check it out:



And a closer look. Those are real lights in there! So awesome.



Last year I came to Thought Bubble as a punter and had a great time going to events, browsing comics and talking with people at their tables. I'm quite tempted to do that again, one year at table, one year as punter, on and off. This year I hardly had any time to see anything, but the Jampires team let me off for half an hour to run around and see as much of the festival as I could. (Huge apologies if I didn't manage to say hello to you as I madly dashed about!) This book by Becky Palmer caught my eye, La Soupière Magique (The Magic Tureen?). Becky originally wrote it as The Biggest Helping but she couldn't find an English-language publisher, so she got it published in French instead, by SarBacane. You can see some pages of it here on her blog and it is GORGEOUS. It's quite startling to think that this is her very first comic book. Wow!



Hey look, it's Dan Berry, who ran our 24-Hour Comic Marathon! He makes fab comics and always uses hand gel. If you're not following him on Twitter, get on the case: @thingsbydan. And he also makes wonderful, professional-quality podcasts with my favourite comics creators for his programme Make It Then Tell Everybody. Check it out!



Here's Mhairi Stewart and friend manning the Roller Grrrls table she runs with Gary Erskine. There were table neighbours at the very first comic con I did by myself, and I was very clueless and they made me feel incredibly welcome. I love those guys.



And I'm a big fan of all three people here! That's Moshi Monsters' Nana Li, buying prints from North-Wales-based Jonathan Edwards (aka Jontofski) and Louise Evans (aka Felt Mistress).



Coffee time for Lizz Lunney, Joe Decie and Joe List. ...Oh, look, Decie has posted a Thought Bubble DRINKS TASTE TEST.



On Saturday night, Molly and I trotted along to the British Comic Award ceremony, hosted by a blue-suited Adam Cadwell and David Monteith, where we got to hear Maura McHugh interviewing Hall-of-Fame winner Posy Simmonds. Here's Molly, Posy and Maura with Alison Sampson, who won the New Talent award. Congrats! I was also hugely chuffed that Isabel Greenberg won Best Book for The Encyclopedia of Early Earth. (You can read my fangirl meltdown blog post about it here.) And it was no surprise, Luke Pearson winning the Young People's Comic Award again, this time for Hilda and The Black Hound. The competition was stiff, but Hilda is MEGA.



You can read about the awards over on their website here. (Vern and Lettuce won it back in 2011 and you can read my blog post about that here.) I was a judge last year and it was great to see fellow judge Jamillah Knowles again! She caught me up on some of the comics I was missing out on by being at a table.



Okay, now for a few costumes:







Ha ha, here's when things started to get a little weird:



And finally, a good place to end, Dr Mel Gibson with the elephant in the room:



Oh wait! One more thing... what is this? Ha ha, this is what I look like to the kids I'm working with:



(THANKS, Jordan and Jonathan.)

Last Friday I went to the huge international Science Fiction convention that is World Con, this year hosted right in my hometown! (And somewhat confusingly, also called < ahref="http://www.loncon3.org/">LonCon3</a>.) And I saw some familiar faces right away! Spot the family who were in my Nine Worlds convention blog post from the previous weekend... (The lady in the excellent Vivien of Holloway dress is Adela Terrell.)



And since I was going to lead a Comics Jam session, I wore my best Jampires dress! And brought along my beautiful new Jampire friend, knitted as a surprise by Ann Lam. Poor little Jampire; World Con was a BIG PLACE and he couldn't find jam anywhere, just post-apocalyptic landscape.


First photo tweeted by @ExLibrisNora


Meanwhile, I was schmoozing it up in the Green Room with writer Emma Newman in her amazing red frock coat. Wait, check it out, the Green Room at the Excel Centre was in this crazy pod on stilts. Funnily enough, I also sat right by George RR Martin in there, but since I don't watch or read Game of Thrones;, the experience was a bit wasted on me and I chatted with fab Hannah Berry instead. Cons are like that for me, I don't know any of the people I'm supposed to know, because I never get a chance to WATCH TELLY.



So for the Comics Jam session, I brought along a range of indie/self-published comics, a mix of work by adults and kids, to show to the group. And I talked about how writing and drawing are one thing, but making their own books is even better, because they can learn how a whole book is put together, practice the form, and play around a bit with marketing it, designing covers, etc.



Here we are, in the midst of the Comics Jam, everyone working on panel number three at the same time.



And a couple of the comics we came up with, each panel drawn by a different person:



One of the dads in particular was very interested in helping his son find out more about making comics, and I was hugely pleased to be able to recommend Neill Cameron's brand-new book, How to Make Awesome Comics. In the past, I've recommended Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, but I find Scott's book has a bit too much advanced technical theory for younger kids, say, under 10 or 12. Neill's book is a wonderful gap-filler and I know I will be recommending it often. (You can buy it here from The Phoenix Comic online shop, among lots of other great kid-appropriate comics.)



Oh, and as a side-note, Scott McCloud will be a special guest this October at the Lakes Internation Comic Art Festival in Kendal, which I'll be attending. Neill does lots of workshops at the Story Museum in Oxford and elsewhere, so keep an eye on his website events page.



If anyone from the Comics Jam is looking for guidance specifically on running more Comics Jams, I've created a guide with my Jampires picture book co-author David O'Connell on our Jampires.com website.


Click here to read more

I also spoke on another panel on art, and then went to see Audrey Niffenegger give the English PEN H.G. Wells talk. I sat next to Sophie Lyons, who'd studied on Audrey's novel writing course in Chicago. Audrey talked about Wells' short story The Door in the Wall, which I managed to find and read online late that night. It's like a dark inversion of one of my childhood favourites, The Secret Garden, about a man who once finds a wonderous door to a garden and then spends the rest of his life yearning for that garden; he's unable to find the door, except at the most inopportune times, when he feels he can't take time to walk through it. Good stuff.



And here are some of the LonCon team! There's Maura McHugh, Erin Horáková, James Bacon and Esther MacCalum-Stewart, and they all looked after me very well. Thanks so much!



I knew Maura from trips to Ireland, where she had hosted me when I spoke to the Dublin chapter of Laydeez Do Comics. Maura does loads of things, but you might know her for the famous list she made of currently practicing female comic artists in the UK and Ireland... Ah, and I see she's widened it to Wome in Comics in Europe! You can follow her on Twitter as @splinister.



I made a quick foray into the Dealers Hall and saw the art exhbition, and was particularly pleased to see my ol' studio mate Ellen Lindner's books on display at the Soaring Penguin table, manned by John Anderson and Nora Goldberg.



So my experience doesn't even begin to encompass the vast scale of the con, and it ran for five days. But I was glad to have a little window into it, for the day I was there. Thanks, Maura and James, for inviting me to be a part of it!



I'll leave you with a few more of the Comics Jams.

During the first of two 2-hour workshops I led at the Cartoon Museum on Thursday, we started with warm-up sketches. Here's mine, some sort of burping rodent.



The first session was very chilled out, only three kids, and we had a wonderfully companionable time drawing together. They were old enough so I could just keep setting them tasks, then letting them get on with it, which let me take part in the drawing, too. For the warm-up sketches, we started with putting some random eyeballs on a page, drawing a simple shape around the eyeballs, then turning it into a character.

The second workshop had loads more people show up, including two mums who happily mucked in. The day's theme was Comic Jam, so first we designed characters (the way that Emma Vieceli taught us all last year at the Crystal Palace Children's Book Festival), making a list of professions, then a list of animals/objects, and combining the two (hairdresser cat, assassin chicken, chef toilet, etc).



Then I showed them the Airship comics jam I did with my friend David O'Connell (you can read it here on my website) and then they set their own characters off on a four-person comics jam (passing to the left, like with cards). Then we designed mini comics so they could make their own story, inspired by things that had popped up in their comics jam if they wanted.


Comics Jam, here's how we did it:
* Design a character on a piece of scratch paper.
* Fold an A3 piece of paper in half twice. Open up, there will be four square, or panels.
* Decide if you want to turn your page so that your comic is portrait or landscape format (either will work)
* Start with the top left-hand panel.
* Start off a story using your character. The scene can be fairly ordinary, but bring in a hint that something unusual will happen in the next panel.
* After five minutes, everyone holds their papers up in the air.
* Pass your paper to the person on your left (or swap, if there's only two of you).
* Read the first panel, then decide what happens next in the story and draw it in the second panel (top right).
* After five minutes, swap again. By this third panel, the story should be in full swing, possibly with its most dramatic scene.
* After five minutes, swap again. This fourth panel will finish the story; so think about a way to bring the story to a conclusion, whether it's with something funny, a tragic end, or have the character making an observation about what's happened to it that best fits that character's personality.
* Pass the story back to the person who drew the first panel, find yours, and find out what kind of adventure your character's gone on while you've been away.



Using a Comics Jam in a workshop, some great things:

* It forces the kids to to concentrate on storytelling clarity. It doesn't matter how great the picture is or how passionate the writing is if the next person can't understand what's going on or read their writing. So the creators have to keep stepping back and trying to look at their single panel from another person's perspective, and understand that just because it makes sense in their head, they have to put in extra work and attention for it to make sense to someone else. (Which contrasts to the warm-up

Or, The Return of Sheep Swap! For the last week or so, Gary Northfield and I have been waving at each other over a gigantic stack of work piled up between our desks, but now we're buckling down and getting back into the world of Derek and Vern. (Read earlier pages here.)

Have you seen the great review of our Birdsong anthology over at Forbidden Planet International? Thanks you, Richard Bruton, for discussing each contribution in such detail! You can buy Birdsong here and I'll be taking some copies up to Hi-Ex in Inverness, 27-28 March.



Some other diary dates:
May 28 & 29: Gary and I will be sharing a table at London's MCM Expo and supporting the DFC Library gang, who will be out in full force!

Saturday, April 24, St Albans: I'm leading a Hungry Aliens & Manky Monsters workshop at a new comics festival, UniComics, at the University of Hertfordshire. Keep an eye on this festival to see where it goes!

Thursday, 8 July, London: Get your booking in soon if you want to hear Giles Andreae and me talk about working together to make our book Morris the Mankiest Monster. **(Note that the date's changed from 1 July.)** These talks in the SCBWI Professional Series tend to fill up fairly quickly, so don't wait until a few weeks before.


If you're in Brussels anytime until Aug 29th, pop into the Belgian Comic Strip Centre to see the Moomin exhibition. We're hoping this exhibition will also come to London, fingers crossed!

Starring Derek the Sheep and Vern! (Read from the start.)

Derek and Vern will both be at Hi-Ex in Inverness on 27-28 March along with Dave Shelton's Good Dog and Bad Dog, and Jim Medway's cats, don't miss them!

Starring Derek the Sheep and Vern! (Read from the start.)

Starring Derek the Sheep and Vern! (Read from the start.)

Starring Derek the Sheep and Vern. (Read from the start.)

Here's the first double-page spread in our mini comic! And a deadline! We're going to try to tell the whole story in time for London's MCM Expo so we can sell it at our table. Whee!

Gary and I were whinging across the studio how we've fallen behind on coming up with new stuff for our blogs. So we decided to herd Derek the Sheep and Vern into one ongoing comics jam. We'll move Derek to Vern's cosy block of flats, and thrust Vern out into the wild of Derek's field. (Vern was getting a bit chubby from Christmas, he could use some fresh air.) Here's the cover for our mini comic:



Good news! I just got a date for the publication of Vern and Lettuce in book form... September 30th!

I've finished almost everything and sent it off to Laurence Beck, who's putting together all the last bits of layout stuff in his studio on the other side of London. I even got a little peek at the cover-in-progress for Mo-Bot High, another DFC Library book coming out about then, by Neill Cameron ... it's looking fabulous!!!

Exciting, I can't wait to see Vern and Lettuce running around in a book! John Aggs was plugging for Neill's robots and Vern and Lettuce to meet at some point, or make Vern and Lettuce robotic... (We'll have to talk, Neill.)

Read from the start.

Dave, you are too much!

(For any of you who have just joined us, this is the latest addition to the comics jam by David O'Connell, aka tozocomic).


Read from the start.

Read from the start.

Read from the start.

Read from the start.

Dave did the left side, I did the right.



Read from the start.

Read from the start.

This one by Dave O'Connell (tozocomic)



Read the whole story so far!

The latest installment by David O'Connell (tozocomic):


Read from the start

Your turn, Dave!

Dave (tozocomic) and I are taking turns doing a page each for our Airship mini comic, mostly inspired by this exchange we had a few weeks ago. I'm trying to keep mine quick and simple, a morning warm-up sketch type thing, and not obsess over making it too perfect. We have no idea where it's going.

You totally rock, Mr tozocomic!