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Connecting Ideas
For us, comics is about communication,
and connecting ideas. We run a variety of exercises
and projects designed to get students thinking complexly
and to learn to integrate one communicated idea to another.
Often this works by establishing two "plot points"
and help students go from point A to point B. More often,
it entails looking at ideas in a new way, and we frequently
swap projects and build from a fellow student's story,
or work from an existing solution to form our own new
understanding.
Some Sample Exercises
(Click to jump to the
specific exercise or scroll to browse.)
Beginning
Exercises:
Warming Up
Two Panels, Then Three
Visual Metamorphosis
Character Telephone
Storytelling:
Tell a Strip in a New Way
From Nancy to Nancy
Start with Nancy
Breaking Routines
Cinderella
Scripting
Two Changes
Learning Intensive:
Interviews
Create a Story from Science
Class
Create
Comic from Bulleted Fact or Refresher List
Create a Log
Create a Story Using Facts from
History Class
Movement Workshop
Scientific Experiments
Other Work and Games:
Jams
5- Card Nancy
Marathons
Beginning
Exercises:
Warming
Up
We often warm up by handing
out sheets with geometric shapes peppered on them. The
students make these into characters or other visual
ideas. We look at how faces and bodies are made with
a small number of marks on a page. And how simplicity
is the essence of narrative communication with pictures.
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Two Panels,
then Three
To get students used to the
idea of delivering their ideas in sequential form, we
begin with two panel assignments. Often, we hand out
cards with panels printed on them, and ask the student
to imagine a follow-up panel. Then we hand out blank
cards and ask the students to work together to create
2 panel combinations that convey an idea. We focus this
exercise by looking for action/reaction combinations.
From there
we move to three panels, which is the beginning of complexity.
We show how new dynamics can occur even in this small
number of "beats."
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Visual
Metamorphosis
From warm up drawing exercises
like the geometric shapes, we then hand out sheets with
two drawings of simple objects or animals and ask the
students to create a "metamorphosis" between
the objects. This entails inserting new visual parts
and removing some at every step.
This build
visual focus in the students, and it gets them paying
attention to detail of all kinds, and then thinking
about how they can apply their knowledge of the details
at hand. Like many assignments, this is fun because
they are under no pressure to "create", yet
their solutions have to be creative.
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Character
Telephone
We sometimes ask the students
to create a cartoon character using the above methods.
The students are then asked to hand their paper over
to the next student who is asked to change one aspect
of the character's appearance (and personality traits,
sometimes.) The sheet is then handed around the room
continuously, until it returns to the original creator.
This version of "telephone" is a lot of fun
for the students, and encourages them to see that from
one idea, can sprout many ideas, and sometimes working
on an idea can involve changing it and changing it until
it says most clearly what you want it to. These exercises
get students intimate with their own creative processes.
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Storytelling:
Tell a Strip
in a Different Way
We hand out Sunday comic pages
(usually from the 60s or earlier because frankly, we
feel the quality of these stories is higher than many
of today's strips) and ask the student to retell the
story they have been handed in a different way. This
can mean from another character's point of view, or
as a flashback, or as a story in a story. We use this
as a warm-up to doing this to their own projects. This
encourages students to begin editing, to see every concept
as something to look at from many angles and create
a hierarchy of communication that is most clear and
direct.
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 From
Nancy to Nancy
We often hand out two random
panels from Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy to each student.
They are told one is the first panel of their story
and the other is the last. Their goal is to create a
whole story unifying the two cartoon images they have
been given. This is a cousin to visual metamorphosis,
above.
This exercise is about connecting
ideas, about stretching their imaginations and attention
to create connections out of difficult juxtapositions.
This exercise is always fun for students; they don't
have to be so clever as to "think of an idea"
or "use their own characters", they merely
have to react to what is presented to them. Kids always
turn out surprising, fun and smart stories working this
way.
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Start
with Nancy
We often merely use Nancy as story starters, too. If
students have at this point created characters, they
can graft those personages onto the figures in the Nancy
panel and springboard to new realms. This often is gratifying
for students. Creator Ernie Bushmiller's visual sensibility
is so simple and direct that is often helps kid further
understand what makes for clear communication.
Why Nancy?
Click
here to go to historian Scott McCloud's site, and
scroll down to "Why Nancy?"
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Breaking
Routines
We like to teach that storytelling
is often about breaking routines. We create two panel
comics that create a routine and then offer those works
to our neighbors to break in specific and categorical
ways like opposite, advice, surprise, etc. We sometimes
continue this exercise until we return to the original
"routine." This teaches students about natural
rhythms in storytelling, about pattern making and pattern
breaking, and frankly we feel it also encourages students
to be more intelligently adventurous in their everyday
lives.
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Cinderella
Cinderella is one of the most
basic story structures, and after explain the patterns
contained in it, we like to encourage students to create
their own. We do this by asking them to create the story
using existing panels of manga and other comics that
we provide. This teaches students to see patterns and
content where they might otherwise not. It helps them
think metaphorically, complexly, and in patterns. It
also helps them see the validity in adhering to structures
that already exist.
An example
of a page from the Cinderella exercise can be seen in
the STUDENT WORK section.
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Scripting
Our two part lesson in scripting
begins when we hand out a short story in one paragraph.
We ask the students to script a one or two page comic
story. They are asked to write the panel numbers, what
is in the panel and what the text or dialogue is. They
do this for every panel.
From
there we hand out an array of visually striking photographs.
We ask the kids to write a one paragraph story based
on what they see, using the photograph as inspiration.
We ask them to peek into the photo and look for details
that might help them write their story. From there,
we continue by asking them to script their story in
the same manner as the first exercise.
Sometimes as a resolution,
the students then hand their script to another student
to draw.
The benefits of this
large scale exercise is that students learn to think
visually, learn to manipulate information in multiple
languages at once. They learn to solve problems (how
to depict or communicate certain actions and ideas)
in a different medium than the one those problems are
presented in. In other words: translation.
Moving information from one medium to another is a complex
process that teaches students a lot about problem solving
and
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Two Changes
We tell students that two changes
in a character generally makes an interesting story.
One is often a surprise at the beginning of the story,
and the second settles the story down at the end. This
second one can also be surprising, but it usually tends
to bring the character to a new ""ordinary
state" or happily back to his or her older one.
This simple formula often gives children
who feel unimaginative to instantly make a unique story
that often surprises and delights them. This structure
is a loose simplification of the structure of classic
myths; the purpose of which has been to familiarize
us with the patterns that life's obstacles and complexities
often take. Storytelling is invaluable to us as humans.
StoryArk workshops help kids integrate these understandings
into their daily lives.
Read more about this exercise on
page 4, Starting with Characters
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 More
Intensive Learning Through Comics:
Interviews
We ask students to interview
friends or family or people in their lives. We ask them
to bring records of their interviewers questions and
answers, and from there we look to create a comic record
of that interview. How much should we convey as monologue?
What events should we depict fully? How do we depict
the person's thoughts or impressions? This exercise
works well with Historical Figures, below, and also
the Log.
Two student
examples of BIOGRAPHY COMICS can be see in the STUDENT
WORK section.
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Create
a Story Using Facts from Science Class
One way to use Science or History
(for instance) information is to extract and list facts
and then examine ways to craft a story that uses all
of the learned facts. The best example of this that
we are aware of is Jay Hosler's excellent Clan
Apis! These comics by a biologist are about bees
and cover many bee facts over the course of each story.
Fans of
classic comics can click
here to see the first few panels of this whaling
sequence from Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy.
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Create
comic from bulleted fact or refresher list.
One variation on the above is
to create one panel for each bullet point at the end
of a text book. This creates a story-less comic strip,
but one which creates what sequential artists call an
"aspect-to-aspect" work, where the narrative
voice serves to find differing parts of a unique whole
over the passage of time. Drawing keeps the easily distracted
part of a student's mind occupied while the information
sinks in. This is true of the teachers too. Both Lauren
and Tom
have been grateful for the learning they have acquired
by visually studying and representing the real world.
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Create
a Log
We often use this as a warm
up to the History assignment, below. We
record a log of our day yesterday, from when we woke
up to when we went to sleep. We draw one panel for say,
every two hours. By the end we often have a finished
6-10 panel comic strip.
At this
point we ask the students to find the two panels or
events that are the most interesting to them and we
ask them to create that event using a sequence of at
least 3-5 panels, and then to insert them in the proper
place in their log.
The result
is more rhythmic comic, and a student who has learned
something about editing through additive measures, about
the hierarchy of information in an essay, biography
or story, and about rhythm in storytelling, and the
value of changing that rhythm.
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 Create
a Story Using Facts from History Class
In a variation on the log assignment,
above, to bring historical facts into the student's
new vocabulary, we often ask them to create a log comic
of a historical figure's life, or the timeline of an
historic event. Then we work with them to find the two
or three most relevant and informative details to flesh
out.
This is also a good time to learn
about using reference in drawing. Costumes, landscapes,
and other historical details are worth getting right
when they are being depicted visually by the student.
We encourage proper research and help the students learn
to find this information in libraries, on the web, etc.
Cick
here to take a look at Jason Lutes' BERLIN for a
professional example.
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Movement
Workshop
 Tracing
Muybridge-
In investigating and
learning about depicting movement on a page, we usually
start with Eadweard Muybridge, whose photos of people
and animals in movement were the first to let people
examine whole sequences of action in minute detail.
Dancing-
We sometimes ask our students to draw their characters
in a physical, 8 panel dance. This gets kids thinking
physically, embodying their characters for the duration
of the exercise. It also helps them learn to order things
naturally. From their first drawing, what other drawings
would make a logical follow-up drawing? We ask them
to create a smooth sequence of gestures, which helps
them think linearly and is great training for communicating
and understanding gestures of human interaction. It's
also tons of fun.
Two
student examples of DANCING COMICS can be see in the
STUDENT WORK section.
Cliff
to Cliff- We often follow the dancing exercise
with a jumping exercise, giving them one panel to begin
with depicting a character on a cliff with a variety
of objects around him or her. The students are then
asked to get the character over to the other side. Many
clever solutions come from this, including clever workings
of the objects scattered around. Others grow super powers
(slowly) and others are rescued after sending messages.
This exercise is about sequence, like above, but also
about problem solving, and often tells us a lot about
the student's personalities and learning styles.
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Scientific
Experiments
A good exercise is to ask students
to explain a scientific experiment using silent comics.
This is basically asking them to create an instruction
manual. This helps students think about how to depict
difficult or complex information in a straightforward
way. This obviously also helps them to remember and
be excited by the scientific experiments in question.
A variation on this asks a
student to illustrate a household recipe in comic form.
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Other Games and Exercises:
Jams
Sometimes Just collaborating
is the best way to learn. Students begin stories and
hand them to following students to continue. The stories
are continuously handed forward until they are finished.
Like theater improvisation, we encourage these exercises
to be about accepting
other's offerings. Thus,
we use the "Yes and... " rule, where we ask
students to take the previous concept laid out by the
previous student and ask them to accept and add to it.
This always results in interesting stories that no one
could have imagined on their own. It's great practice,
it teaches cooperation and equality in the classroom,
too.
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5-Card
Nancy
5- Card Nancy is a game created
by Comics scholar Scott McCloud, to spark interesting
connections in storytelling. We start with a deck of
isolated Nancy panels, and hand every student 5. The
game is played by laying down successive panels to create
a unique (and always bizarre, but often coherent) story.
Read more about this game here.
Play a limited on-line version
here.
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Marathons
Sometimes a marathon is the
best way to be confronted with a concept. We sometimes
ask our students to draw 4 whole pages in 2 hours. This
encourages students to disregard the critical impulse
in favor of letting them discover what they really think.
It also helps them focus when they know there's an impending
goal. Lauren and Tom have both seen this work when they
themselves have participated in "24-Hour Comics",
where artists are asked to create 24 complete pages
in one 24 hour period.
You can click
here to see one of Tom's "24-Hour Comics"
in Flash format.
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