Recently alluded to a special event I was invited to participate in out in North Pole at their fabulous library (and supportive staff), which I had visited years ago for a Comic Book Day and a Guys Read gig.
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| Image: Somer Hahm |
This was part of their "Find Your Voice" summer reading program and I gave a workshop on cartooning to a full room of 30+ kids: an introduction to my process, then a couple exercises in coming up with content and then making a minicomic (which was a bit too much in retrospect but fun was still had). It was definitely full-immersion for me to be surrounded with such an attentive audience.
It was a good reminder that I really ought to downshift from my usual expectations of output when switching to younger folks, as opposed to college-level... it's good to push people and set the bar high but sometimes I need to come down from the mountain when preaching about comics and just relax and just doodle and have fun letting it happen. The energy and passion some of these participants is so inspiring to me, and I will never pass up an opportunity to extol upon the power of sequential art to instill a life-long love of literacy... and creating comics.
Seeing as how they set up a nice little display table with some samples culled from their collection, we wrapped up the session with a sortie into the stacks to see about their stash. I took this picture because it really summed up most of my formative years with a reference librarian mom and a regional manager for a chain bookstore (B. Dalton's of old) - as an only child I spent half my life camped out in aisles somewhere sitting with a similar stack of books. And back in the day there wasn't a dedicated section for Comics like so many contemporary libraries and bookstores - how awesome is that? So for me, this is simply what it's all about.
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