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Late in the summer of 2001, I was invited (by my ex-girlfriend: the only way it could have happened!) to speak to the art classes at the Harold Alfond Youth Center in Waterville, Maine on the subject of making and drawing comics. Since I am not the best example of a cartoonist, I brought a lot of real comics and comic art pages with me to show the kids -- everything from POPEYE and LITTLE ABNER to early FANTASTIC FOUR and SPIDERMAN comics, along with original art pages by Gene Colan and others. I also brought along a large stack of QUIRK #2 as freebies for the kids. This, more than anything else I did, virtually guaranteed me a good reception (most had never seen classic Spider-man or FF comics before)! |
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| My approach was to explain, as briefly and simply as possible, how professional comics are produced, to show a variety of styles from the very complicated to the very simple, then to pass out the free comics, paper and pencils and let the kids start drawing. I have no kind of background in teaching or public speaking, and felt kind of like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel, but over the course of the afternoon (I spoke to three separate groups of various ages) we started to get a kind of backwash of kids flowing into the room from other parts of the building, asking if this was where the comics guy was. Two administrators even dropped in to say that they were hearing good things about what was going on in our room. |
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| I encouraged the kids to draw any kind of story that they wanted and explained that a story could be as simple as seeing something through a window, but there wasn't really enough time for them to work on a real story, so most of their "comics" were single pictures with captions or word balloons. Many of the kids drew pictures of their own lives; but a surprising number of them (to me, anyway) began to copy the pictures of Quirk, Sludge and Smith off of the cover of QUIRK #2. I got a big kick out of that! At the end of the day there were a few abandoned drawings left behind, so I kept some of their renderings of Quirk and the boys. Their pictures are the ones you see on this page. You can click on the small images to see larger versions. |
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| I hope you like looking at their drawings. I wish that I knew their names to give them credit. I particularly like the drawing of Quirk that's at the top of the page -- he looks sort of like the Aardvark in the Depatie-Freeling Ant & The Aardvark cartoons of the late 1960s! | |
