Hey Friends- A hearty WELCOME BACK! Can you believe we've been at this for three years- that's half a lifetime for some of you, amazing! So great to be getting back to the hard work of drawing funny pictures and writing funny stories! Just a few quick updates and then we'll get to a re-cap of this week's session-
We'll be meeting in Logan's classroom from here on out- there is a bit more room to spread out and it won't cut into the valuable snack time portion of Comic Club- all great artists need to eat!
We've got lots of big plans this year... We'll be making a personal comic, hopefully a group comic, build a comic city diorama, cause a ruckus at the Stumptown Comic Fest in April, make some costumes and have another tummy assaulting Comic Feast! Can it all be done, maybe, hope so, we're just the kids to do it!
This year as we expand our comic creating horizions, you may want to make a few personal investments... A blank page spiral notebook- it's a great place to keep work you're developing over time, a nice set of pencils of various degrees of hardness, a couple sharpies both thick and ultra thin point and something to color with either pencils or crayons- we'll still have things for the club to use but many of us are creating at home too and it's always nice to have supplies handy.
Well we're off to a great start- This week we started playing with names- Why we name things or personify them and how funny names make great fodder (subjects) for comic illustration: For our 1st exercise we scanned through the newspaper and hit upon the Restaurant Guide- we decided to illustrate the names of some of Portland's favorite culinary hot spots...
There were a bunch of great places to choose from, but by far the most popular was Sushi Land- Imagine if you will an entire building made of Sushi...
We also browsed through an encyclopedia of famous Americans looking for names which might be fun to illustrate just based on how they sound not on the person themselves. Why the heck would we do that? Well, take our 20th president for example, he had only 200 days in office, we don't remember much about where he stood on policy
...and he is really remembered most for being the 1st left handed president, having the uncanny ability to write with both hands at once- Latin with one hand and Greek with the other, supposedly he discovered a "novel proof of the Pythagorean Theorem using a trapezoid" and he juggled "Indian Clubs to build his muscles" and what do we actually associate him with? A cat...
So, which famous Americans did we choose to draw? Well we picked a few who's names weren't completely familiar:
Fanny Lou Hamer, for one! Who we really ought to be reading up on since her civil rights activism would make a great comic novel.
We also picked the name...
Althea Gibson, which makes a great visual for a cat goddess or medieval maiden as Simone drew her, while in actuality she smashed through racial and gender barriers using her tennis racket, being the 1st African American woman to win a Grand Slam Title in 1956 and was the #1 ranked tennis player in the world in 1956 and '57. You know what, she'd make a great comic hero too!
We had some great drawings of Woodie Guthrie and Dizzy Gillespie too. Gabe went a bit free form and did a drawing of "Woodie Gillespie fighting the Jedi" which is at the top of this blog post and perhaps the greatest comic mash-up of all time! Great work club, can't wait to see what you throw down this week!