Adventures in Cartooning

Word of Mouth would like to introduce the newest member of its blogging team! KJ Dell'Antonia is a freelance writer and author living in New Hampshire's Upper Valley.

Once upon a time, a mom wanted to introduce her kid to comics...POOF!

Once upon a time, a brilliant graphic novelist and two of his students wanted to show off their art form to a new audience...SHAZAM!

Once upon a time, a dad wanted to show his daughter that she could do what he did...WAHPOWIE!

And thus, Adventures in Cartooning: How to Turn Your Doodles Into Comics was born. Either a how-to book cleverly disguised as a laugh-out-loud picture book or quite possibly the reverse, Adventures in Cartooning is the brainchild of James Strum, founder of The Center for Cartoon Studies, and Arthur Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost, two of its graduates. Strum saw his own grade-school daughter and her friends insisting that they couldn't draw well enough to make their own comics, and set out to show them that, with a little help from Ed Emberly and a few tricks from the graphic novelist's style book (like panels, word balloons and a few common symbols), anyone can - and should - make a comic of her own. Their success is evidenced by Strum's daughter's uncredited contribution on the book's final pages, and by every kid who'll close this book and demand paper and a pencil.

Graphic novels and the artists and writers who create them have come a long way into legitimacy in the past few years (see Alison Blechdel's graphic review of Jane Vandenburgh's memoir A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century), and The Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont offers two-year college degrees, MFAs and, for the high school student who's long since absorbed the lessons for Adventures in Cartooning, summer workshops.

(Photo courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency)