Creating a Comic Book with a 4-Year-Old

I've been thinking about how to make a comic book with Jack, but it took me a while to figure out how to do it. He can't read or write and he mostly just draws shapes, all of which is a bit of hurdle. But he loves to tell stories, so I wanted to figure out how to make this work.

First, I downloaded a free DIY comic book pack. The PDF has several different comic book page layouts, speech bubbles, and explosions and lightning--a good start.

I was surprised to find that Jack jumped in with both feet when I gave him the blank comic book pages. He has really made a leap in his drawing skills in the past couple of weeks. And the night before I gave him the pages, he made up a Walrus Man character while playing in the bathtub (the place for inspiration).

Walrus Man is just a head with big eyes and arms and legs and two tusks sticking out, but I love him. He also, in Jack's mind, uses many spiky weapons and builds traps (which he draws plans for first). Jack would draw and then tell me about his drawings. I would add words to the speech bubbles, explosions, and lightning based on what he told me.

Jack even created sidekicks for Walrus Man and a tag line: "Adventures...and beyond!" (Obviously a play on Buzz Lightyear, an appropriate 4-year-old pop culture reference.) He made more pages the next day, each growing a bit more abstract and less story driven than the next. But it was good start.

The next step is to keep him focused on one story long enough to create something that has a beginning, middle, and end. I learned from teaching elementary school that the concept of "beginning, middle, and end" is very difficult for young children. Surprisingly, it's not necessarily the most natural way to tell a story. It has to be learned.

So my next steps are

• Take pictures around our neighborhood and around DC and print them out in black and white to create backgrounds. I could even let Jack help me take photos. (As you might have noticed if you follow me on Instagram or are friends with me on Facebook, Jack has suddenly become interested in taking photos of himself, so why not use that?)
• Take pictures of Jack's Lego people and action figures, print and cut them out, and let Jack glue them onto the backgrounds. With multiple photos of each toy, I can keep him focused on a few characters. When he just draws what he wants to draw, he's constantly creating new characters, gadgets, and story lines, so having a limited number of characters will rein him in a little. 

I will let you know how this works.

Super Links, March 18, 2016

Jezebel

*Note: I originally linked to 4929dc.blogspot.com, my original home improvement blog I started in 2009. I moved the blog to 4929dc.tumblr.com many years ago, so I meant to link to the Tumblr blog. I have serious baby brain right now, so please forgive me. I have corrected the links in the post.

Two sick days with Jack have really eaten into my writing time. I have a post that is finally almost ready, but I'll have to finish it over the weekend. The little guy needs my attention now.

I have some interesting reading for you this week, but I also have a plug for my sister site, 4929, which I haven't updated in a while--until now. I started 4929 soon after we moved into our house in late 2009. It is a record of all the work we've done on the house so far, and it will soon include my plans to update the nursery for Baby Chu #2 (a.k.a., Lady Baby Chu). The latest post is a round-up of our most recent improvements, including refinishing the upstairs floors (oh, lovely heart of pine) and getting a new dresser for Jack's room.

Alright, now that you're finished enjoying our home improvement escapades, here is your reading list for this week:

This one was hard for me to read, because I hate making people uncomfortable--and even reading about someone making people uncomfortable makes me squirm. But I totally agree with the author, even if I can't live her philosophy as fully as she is. The small things, the little gender imbalances and slights, add up over time, and it's so unfair that little girls have to put with so much of it so soon. We have to stand up for them if we want their world to be better than ours.

McSweeney's never fails to make me laugh, and "Reasons You Were Not Promoted that Are Totally Unrelated to Gender" is no exception. "You don’t smile enough. People don’t like you. You smile too much. People don’t take you seriously."

This article is a great starting point for discovering mostly forgotten great female writers. I want to attempt to do a semi-regular feature of my own on feminist writing, starting with "The Yellow Wallpaper." (I am writing this now so that it will actually happen.)

And let's finish things off with a little education soapbox reading. I briefly worked as an elementary school teacher in a low-income school, so I know how administrators are obsessed with homework. But study after study shows it has no benefits for elementary students, so it's time to stop forcing teachers to do extra work that only makes administrators and parents feel better without having any actual impact on student learning.

But wait. One more thing. I want to read this comic book so badly.

That's Just Super

The best way to begin is with superheroes. They saturate a little boy's life from birth. My son, Jack, knew superheroes' names before he knew their stories or watched or read about them. They were on his clothes, in his toy box, on our bookshelves. So when my husband said jokingly, about something or other, "Oh, the irony!" Jack looked at him quizzically. "Oh, the Iron Man?" Barely three, and he had already been indoctrinated.

The superhero tales that inspire huge nerd followings have story lines and illustrations filled with sex and violence. Female characters are all cleavage and half-exposed butt cheeks. Every wrong is righted with bloody (or weirdly bloodless) revenge. These are not the lessons my 3-year-old son needs to learn, and they are not the lessons I want to teach him. The problem is, I love superheroes and so does my husband. Everything from Ant-Man to X-Men is part of our pop culture lexicon. We could hardly wait to share these things with Jack because they mean so much to us. So how do I let my kiddo act out superhero stories without acting out (too much) violence, without learning the wrong things about women, without becoming one of those guys?

When Jack was about two, we started letting him watch a little TV. We stuck to PBS, because it was educational and appropriate. Right around that time, PBS premiered a show called Peg + Cat. The show's main character is a little girl named Peg who loves math, singing, and her hilarious sidekick, Cat. In some episodes, Peg becomes Super Peg, and along with Cat Guy, she protects the city of Mathtropolis from the Arch Villain, Triangulo, and other math-themed supervillains. I saw in this the superhero lessons I wanted Jack to learn: kindness, fairness, imagination, empowerment, fun. If only all superhero stories could be so toddler appropriate.

From there, it got harder. Now I spend a lot of time reminding him that we don't shoot people, or hurt people, or kill people. What I've realized, especially now that we're expecting our second child, is that I need to figure out how to raise Jack in a world that, for the most part, still wants boys to be something very different from what I want Jack to be.

Coming up on Oh, The Iron Man: I will stress about raising my little feminist so you don't have to (or don't have to as much). I'll spend all my time scouring the world of comic books and story books for little-kid-appropriate stories, preferably with strong female lead characters. And I'll read books I would never voluntarily read so I can better understand what I'm facing--for example, Strong Mothers, Strong Sons: Lessons Mothers Need to Raise Extraordinary Men. If the title of that book makes you want to throw up, this is the blog for you.