Teaching Comics Level 2

I’ve taught a comics class to high school students for the past 6 years, and I just found out that next school year I will be teaching two comics classes - level 1 and level 2 comics!  So now I have to figure out what that even means. 

For the past six years my basic structure has been, the first semester is all about joke-writing, from gag cartoons to comic strips. Then the second semester is all about storytelling, doing a very simple narrative arc in just a few panels and then building all the way up to a multi-page story. 

I sprinkle in a little bit of drawing technique and trying out different drawing materials, but it’s really not a “how-to-draw“ kind of class. I’m a firm believer that you don’t need to “draw well“ to make good comics, but also the best way to get better is to just do it.

This year I backed off of the storytelling stuff a bit, partly because I found that the kids struggle a little with the longer form stuff and partly because, to be honest, longer form stuff isn’t really where my interests lie either. I like making jokes.