I’m an English teacher from Cambridge, England. I work in an 11-18 comprehensive school, teaching students across the full age and ability range. Like most English teachers in the UK, almost all the reading I do with students in the classroom involves purely print-based texts. However, for a while I’ve been wanting to explore how teaching comics might work in an English classroom.
My students are never artists, are always timid and shy about their drawing abilities, and have very little or no experience with comics (most of my students say they have never even held a comic book before!). But the jam comic lets us jump right into sequential art in a way that promotes creativity and removes the academic pressure of what my students believe they ought to be doing in a college classroom. I like to think of the jam comic as a kind of secret weapon against the stuffiness of academia: I can pull it out at any moment, in any class, and the classroom instantly turns into a place of play and creativity.
The “pictureless comic” activity, originally from Chapter 7 of DWWP, is one that we use constantly, in formal classes, in intensive workshops, and in casual talks and improvised situations. We once did it in a lecture hall at a comic convention with 200 people! It has so many advantages: at its core, it’s a study of how comics work, the elements of comics and how they work together to create meaning, even without pictorial images. It’s also a great way to learn layout and lettering skills, and to concentrate on those technical skills, again, without distraction. Finally, it’s an activity that anyone can do. Drawing skills are unnecessary (though a design sensibility is certainly a help!).
A great way to introduce people to the world of comics is to make a “jam comic” —an improvised collaborative comic. In addition to being a relaxed introduction to creating comics, jam comics are a great warm-up activity and icebreaker.
I’ve done this mini at the end of a 3-hour workshop, and it provides some of the same satisfaction, and the same understanding of the issues involved in going to print, that a 16-page digest-sized mini would. When you’re working on your own, too, the ability to work more-or-less on the fly and have a nice little printed package when you’re done can be motivating and fun.
Here’s a warm-up exercise whose goal is to activate your drawing and storytelling muscles at the same time. It could be a classroom activity but it also works great to do on your own, at home or in a café or bar.
The basic idea of this weird and fun activity is that you give students a one page comic with all the dialogue and narration whited out of the balloons and boxes. They fill in text while deliberately disregarding any correspondence to the images–the goal is “nonsense”. Then each student compares his or her comic with the others and they collectively discuss which ones make the most sense when read as a comic and which, if any, can really be said to make no sense at all.
In our recent workshop at the Huntington Museum of Art, we had the opportunity to try out one of the few exercises from DWWP that we’d not used in a classroom before: the Sum of its Parts (page 23). This is a version of an activity we found in a few advertising class syllabi and Read More
This is a collaborative game activity we came up with in order to teach principles of panel-by-panel storytelling. It is inspired by Scott McCloud’s 5 Card Nancy and can be done in a classroom or in a more informal context.
