Donald Trump Sucks - comics by primary school kids

A wee bit of travelling for this week's visits to schools, taking me up to Southport in Merseyside for two days at Bank St Stephens primary. I effectively taught the entire school, doing an assembly to the whole lot of them, then classes with the years 3 to 6s (of whom there are only 3 groups, the school being that small), then an afternoon spent just doing caricatures of every single pupil in the school, from reception (who are as hard to draw as puppy dogs, by the way, you try keeping them still), through years 1 and 2. I don't think I've drawn an entire school before. Skills to pay the bills.

It's interesting to see the titles the kids choose for their comics, and tracing a slight maturity as we ascend through the years. So year 3/4 choose Sweet Mania, year 4/5 choose The Teacher With The Big Head, and year 6 give us Donald Trump Sucks. Giving me the opportunity to draw the highly topical "orb of evil" picture from yesterday's news, for which many thanks.

You can usually predict that, when a school has something rural in its name, that it'll be on a council estate. Words to look out for are Farm and Wood. Thus we find Fair Furlong Primary in Bristol, a lovely bunch of kids whose year 6 pupils had classes with me this week. Hello must take the prize as least inspiring title of the month, though I can hardly talk. Look at my cover for Capoop and compare it with Sweet Mania, above. Coming to the end of a cold all week and still feeling rather drained, you can see I pretty well phoned in these covers (drawn during the class, as ever, so it's amazing I ever get anything better drawn. But I usually do.)

The celebrities these five classes chose for my demonstration strip were Donald Trump, Simon Cowell (twice, he's making a comeback), Keith Lemon, and The Queen.

Comic Art Masterclasses coming up in 2017:

Jun 4 - Martlets Hall Burgess Hill 

Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.

Doctor Who Toys, Only Connects & Facebook nonsense

Andrex, "Skin Kind"? Call me picky, I prefer the paper kind.

In praise of Doctor Who Magazine Toys & Games special.

http://merchandise.thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/doctor-who-magazine-special-46-toys-and-games/

On a totally spontaneous impulse purchase the other night, I bought the Doctor Who Toys & Games Special. Given that I usually don't buy DWM itself, this was an odd one for me. But I was taken by the bits I'd thumbed through in the shop, and found myself later in my hotel room devouring a surprisingly fascinating read.

Part social history, part fanboy nostalgia, if you enjoy interviews with old blokes who ran plastics factories in the 80s, or the son of the bloke who set up BBC Television Enterprises and issued the first licences for Dalek toys 50-odd years ago, you'll love this magazine.

Most fascinating revelation for me was the secret of the Scorpion Automotives Dalek costume. For anyone who's familiar with the rather cheap-looking Berwick Dalek playsuits that became ubiquitous during Dalekmania, with their cardboard visor and floppy red sheet for a body, the Scorpion Dalek is quite the contrast. Its head is a perfect Dalek replica, and its body a much more accurately proportioned thick vinyl. Even its eye-stalk and plunger are spot on. So why aren't we more familiar with this superior Dalek? You have to read three interviews to get the whole story.

John J Johnston's article tells us the full history of the Mark I, II and III models, at their ridiculously high price of £8, then tells us a fire at the factory wiped out the company. But was that the whole story? David J Howe's overview of the 60s gives us this same story, the factory fire being the cause of the costume's demise.

It's not until you read the interview with Richard Culley, who worked in brand licensing back in the 1960s, you get a hint of what might really have happened. He says "Somebody rang up from the press and said some kid had walked in front of their fire and this suit had gone whumph! We flame-tested another suit and it also went up. Yes they were flammable, and if you picked one of them up and smelled it - ugh, the stuff that was in there."



Q1
Okay, got an Only Connect for you. What links..?
Mitchell & Webb (2012)
Armstrong & Miller (2008 & 2014)
John Cleese & Eleanor Bron (1979)
Hale & Pace (1989)



Q2
Right, got an Only Connect for you. What connects these four?
9 to 5
Utopia
Dennis The Menace
The Avengers

Q3
Okay, got a Tea-Time Theme-Time for you. What do these 3 songs have in common?
Rock DJ - Robbie Williams
Tubthumping - Chumbawumba
Guantanamera - The Sandpipers

Q4

OK, a quick Tea Time Theme Time. What links these three records?

The Clapping Song by Shirley Ellis
Young Hearts Run Free by Candi Staton
Kiss and Say Goodbye by The Manhattans

Extra clues. You could also have:
She Said by The Long Pigs
Here We Go Again by Governor ft 50 Cent
Since Yesterday by Strawberry Switchblade
American Idiot by Green Day

Comic Art Masterclasses coming up in 2017:

Jun 4 - Martlets Hall Burgess Hill 

Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.

ANSWERS:
Q1 - Comedy double acts and when they appeared in Doctor Who
Q2 - Had to change their name when they crossed the Atlantic (Sheena Easton's Morning Train, Australia's Dreamland, USA's Dennis, and Marvel's Avengers Assemble)
Q3 - Sing when you're winning
Q4 - New York Islands

Season 10 - My Doctor Who reviews

The more I think back over it, the more I enjoyed last night's Doctor Who, The Pilot. No spoilers here (that weren't in the trailer or the clips already shown) I hope, but was there a callback to every single other Doctor?

William Hartnell - Susan's photo, the sign from the Mary Celeste
Patrick Troughton - his sonic screwdriver on the desk
Jon Pertwee - his sonic screwdriver used by Nardole
Tom Baker - the Movellans, Professor Chronotis in Shada
Peter Davison, Colin Baker or Paul McGann - I need to look again to find these three
Sylvester McCoy - the Dalek ship landing footprints & the pool of oil
John Hurt - the oh-so-inaccessible Time War
Christopher Eccleston - this episode having almost the same plot as Rose
David Tennant - the mind wipe he did on Donna, School Reunion, Human Nature, Waters Of Mars
Matt Smith - River Song's photo, Curse Of The Black Spot water lady
Peter Capaldi - the Clara theme

Doctor Who spoilers from last night (so don't read if you've not watched it yet)

(To the tune of Melting Pot by Blue Mink)

Take a pinch of Gridlock
And the Empty Child's Nanobots
Blink & The End Of The World
And a little bitty of The Happiness Patrol

What you get is an episode called Smile.

...okay, that's all I've got for the Blue Mink song. But I enjoyed that (8/10). They're studiously avoiding the fanboy-heavy audience-scaring indulgence of recent series, and giving us Rose in The End Of The World. I think it worked. Very much one where I want to hear what the new 8 year old viewers thought. I'm hoping they liked it.

If I had any criticism, it was too exposition-heavy, and seemed to explain many things twice, and was a bit slow at times. But that's me being over-critical.

Also the trailer! Gave away how many plot twists? Showed the skeletons in the garden and included the "fertiliser" line. That's not a trailer, that is the definition of a spoiler.

I liked the attempt to turn "Smile" into the new "Don't Blink", but I don't think it'll catch on.

And I liked the bit where Bill opens up a book and its starts playing the opening titles to Big Bang Theory.

(Also did we get a hint that Bill might be meeting Chris Chibnall's Nefertiti sometime in the future? Being the only person who likes Dinosaurs On A Spaceship, I think that would be nice).

It's quite possible that watching it at 10.30 at night while drinking a couple of pints of beer in a hotel room having just done a great gig makes you better disposed to an episode of Doctor Who, but I though that was cracking. Gave it 9/10.

"So was Jesus". Oh yes, they went there.

The concentration on the central characters, their humanity, their empathy, their alien-ness, was really convincing, and made the whole thing all about something so much more important than the Maguffin, the big fish under the Thames. If that was all Sarah Dollard, and I'd like to think it was, then I'd like to see more of what she writes (and I hope some more of it is Doctor Who).

Who else was expecting the boss in the big house to turn out to be The Master (and not just Nathan Barley?). I was thinking "so that will explain why Missy wears period costume, cos she regenerates in Victorian London". Really? Just me?

Great comedy - The Doctor punching a racist is what this show should be more about more often - and a really human level story. Bill was great, The Doctor was great, the child actors were... did I mention Bill was great?

Echoes of all the right old stories in all the right ways. Bits of Empty Child, bits of The Next Doctor, bits of The Unquiet Dead, bits of Deep Breath, bits of Shakespeare Code (actual lines from The Shakespeare Code if I'm not mistaken), but all to a greater good.

I'll probably watch it in daylight sober and think it's cack, but right now it's the best of the series so far.

I think 'corny' is the word we're all groping for. Every haunted house trope, done not that originally, with lots of running down corridors, and a creepy villain delivering some of the hokiest dialogue ever.

And did the maguffin actually make sense? The woman's son discovers some alien insects that preserve his mother but somehow eat everyone else, suck them into the wood of the house, reshape the wood of the house, creak occasionally - for no reason other than to be like a bad trope from an unimaginative horror movie - and this keeps the woman alive, but she stays in bed all the time?



And meanwhile the boy grows up, but the house is frozen in time, and he brings in a new set of victims, but only every 20 years? What's he doing the rest of the time?

And our recent victims can be instantly restored to life by the woodworm?
And this was written by the guy who wrote Doctor Foster??

The more I think about it the more I wish I'd given it a lower score.

(I seem not have written a review of Oxygen, which is surprising. Obviously couldn't find fault. Which brings us to Extremis)

Last night's Doctor Who (spoiler-filled mini-review, look away now).

Very good. It had a few common Moffat tropes:

- You think Person A is the subject of the execution/funeral/etc, it turns out to be Person B (he did this way back in Press Gang)

- It's all been a dream/VR/fake person (plastic Amy, plastic Rory, Silence In The Library, all that Zygon stuff)

- Over-labouring the lesbian bits. "No need to feel guilty"? Really?

- Dialogue is unrealistic because it's the set up to a gag. "No need to feel guilty"? I see, we geddit. Still, really?

- Some bad poetry. If those lines quoted from River Song's diary are supposed to mean anything, they're very contrived.

I'll confess I was a little confused by just how long we've been in the hologram version of reality. Since the start of this series? This episode? 1963?

And when Nardole says "what do those look like to you?" and Bill says "projectors". They couldn't look less like projectors could they?

I'm also tempted to do some more spoilery guessing. After all, those decayed monks' mouths are very static, in a very similar way to the Mondas Cybermen's mouths. They couldn't be, could they?

But it had some good zapping between flashbacks, and a good set up for whatever comes next so it got 9/10 from me.

Last night's Doctor Who (spoiler-filled mini-review, look away now).

Very good. It had a few common Moffat tropes:

- You think Person A is the subject of the execution/funeral/etc, it turns out to be Person B (he did this way back in Press Gang)

- It's all been a dream/VR/fake person (plastic Amy, plastic Rory, Silence In The Library, all that Zygon stuff)

- Over-labouring the lesbian bits. "No need to feel guilty"? Really?

- Dialogue is unrealistic because it's the set up to a gag. "No need to feel guilty"? I see, we geddit. Still, really?

- Some bad poetry. If those lines quoted from River Song's diary are supposed to mean anything, they're very contrived.

I'll confess I was a little confused by just how long we've been in the hologram version of reality. Since the start of this series? This episode? 1963?

And when Nardole says "what do those look like to you?" and Bill says "projectors". They couldn't look less like projectors could they?

I'm also tempted to do some more spoilery guessing. After all, those decayed monks' mouths are very static, in a very similar way to the Mondas Cybermen's mouths. They couldn't be, could they?

But it had some good zapping between flashbacks, and a good set up for whatever comes next so it got 9/10 from me.

Last night's Doctor Who (spoiler-filled mini-review, look away now).

Very good. It had a few common Moffat tropes:

- You think Person A is the subject of the execution/funeral/etc, it turns out to be Person B (he did this way back in Press Gang)

- It's all been a dream/VR/fake person (plastic Amy, plastic Rory, Silence In The Library, all that Zygon stuff)

- Over-labouring the lesbian bits. "No need to feel guilty"? Really?

- Dialogue is unrealistic because it's the set up to a gag. "No need to feel guilty"? I see, we geddit. Still, really?

- Some bad poetry. If those lines quoted from River Song's diary are supposed to mean anything, they're very contrived.

I'll confess I was a little confused by just how long we've been in the hologram version of reality. Since the start of this series? This episode? 1963?

And when Nardole says "what do those look like to you?" and Bill says "projectors". They couldn't look less like projectors could they?

I'm also tempted to do some more spoilery guessing. After all, those decayed monks' mouths are very static, in a very similar way to the Mondas Cybermen's mouths. They couldn't be, could they?

But it had some good zapping between flashbacks, and a good set up for whatever comes next so it got 9/10 from me.

Doctor Who episode edited for Saturday airing following Manchester bombing

The BBC sci-fi series is removing dialogue from a scene out of respect for victims of the terrorist attack

RADIOTIMES.COM

It's not surprising that a few lines about terrorism have had to be edited out of tomorrow's Doctor Who. I was reminded of the plot of Extremis just now, reading a dumb thing someone had said on the TV news, about how "if they had something to live for why would they have been a bomber?". This is why we atheists struggle with religion, and why we sometimes need fantasy writing to explain it to us. There are people in the real world who have, in effect, "read The Veritas" and believe, as a catholic friend used to phrase it, that this material world is just a "five minute life". The real life is the one that waits in heaven. If you believe that, and if you also believe that dying in a just cause benefits you on the other side, then would any true believer have any difficulty being a suicide bomber? Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori*, and all that.

Pyramid At The End Of Time

That was brilliant, 9/10.

I'm actually enjoying an ongoing story arc. It's not too contrived, it's gripping and keeps you wondering what's going to happen next.
It's not up itself with story-telling show-offness (and the bits it did were excellent). Has any show ever done that Previously / Now / Previously / Now playing with the "Previously" format before?
It was reminiscent of old Who, especially Inferno, without directly referencing it, and even of 60s Who in its cliffhanger/serial feel.

Moffat and team have spent a few weeks building up characters we like, believe in and care about - in a way we might not have seen since Rose & Donna - and now we're embarking on a proper box-set serial drama. I do hope they don't drop the ball now, cos this has been the best unbroken run of a Doctor Who series since, quite possibly, Christopher Eccleston's series 1 in 2005.

Empress Of Mars

Though I gave the show 8/10, I'd have to say anticlimactic is the word, for two weeks in a row.

Is Alpha Centauri supposed to mean anything to anyone? Obviously I vaguely recognise him or her, because I'm over 50 years old and watched Doctor Who as a child, but it would be meaningless to 99.9% of viewers, so a pretty rubbish punchline.

And how furniture-chewingly corny was the Empress? Most cliched dialogue from a villain that I can remember since Trigger as Cybus, or her from W1A as the Racnoss.

Fun though, I bet the kids liked it.

World Enough & Time


How spoilered?


That must be the most spoilered episode of anything I've ever seen.


If all you have to offer is surprise, and the system won't let you do surprise, your game is over. Go write Dracula or something.
When the two big surprises you're waiting for are "It's John Simm as the Master" and "it's the old-fashioned Cybermen from the olden days that no-one remembers", and those were the only two things you knew were going to be in this series before it started, there's precious little point trying to build up any tension over your reveal.


This has always been the problem with Moffat stories. He loves a puzzle that you have to solve. Then he loves to go "ta-daa", and he wants you to go "well I never saw that coming". It's 2017. You have a marketing department full of Millennials who don't get the idea of waiting, they don't understand deferred gratification.


They don't get "spoiler"!


(I enjoyed it, and it even took me a couple of minutes to realise it was John Simm. Though I instantly realised Bill was going to be made into a Cyberman. Not cos I'm old enough to have seen it happen to Rose Tyler's Mum 10 years ago. I'm young enough to remember it happening to Danny Pink two years ago! If I was an 11 year old kid I might be well freaked out by it. Though I'd be left wondering why the Cybermen don't look like proper Cybermen, obviously.)



2017 TOUR
May 12 - Croydon Spread Eagle
May 13 (4.30pm) & May 14 (5.30pm) Komedia Brighton
May 19 - Carriageworks Leeds
May 26 - Aberdeen May Fest
June 2 - Eden Ct Inverness
June 15 - Crescent Arts, Belfast
June 20 - Grassington Festival, Yorks
June 23 - Hertford Comedy Festival
June 24 - Ludlow Fringe
August 15 - 17 Camden Fringe

Comic Art Masterclasses coming up in 2017:

Jun 4 - Martlets Hall Burgess Hill 

Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.

Have snot will travel - a week with a cold

Me in Brighton. Time flying.

It was on the Thursday night, during my third Comic Art Masterclass of the day in St Peter Port Guernsey, that I realised I was getting a cold. That feeling you get at the roof of your mouth, like the ceiling between your pallette and your nose is getting thinner (is that just me?). The meal that evening, where I was sat just 4 places along from Clare Balding and at the far end of the table from Terry Waite, saw the cold progressing.

The next day, Friday, went from drained to fraught as I flew back from Guernsey, trying my damnedest not to infect everyone else on our propellor driven plane. Then, having landed in Bristol and got home just before 1pm, the plan was simple. Hev and I were staying in a hotel in Brighton, I had a gig in Croydon. We'd drive to Brighton (3.5 hrs), I'd drop Hev off then nip up to Croydon for my 7.30 gig (1 hr away) then back to Brighton, all ready for two days of shows at Komedia.

Croydon Spread Eagle, our name in lights

As the traffic ground slower and slower and satnav's ETA went up and up it was clear that this wasn't going to happen. And not only was my cold getting increasingly draining, but I may have forgotten to mention that Hev is much much more unwell than me. She went to the Doctor the previous week, suffering kidney pains and other symptoms akin to those that saw her hospitalised a year ago. The Doctor fobbed her off having found nothing. So she went back to see the Practice Nurse on Monday and, much more sensibly, got prescribed a course of antibiotics. I'm happy to report that, at time of writig a week later, these have been having the desired effect and she's feeling a lot better. But on Friday May 12th, the course was only just starting and she was feeling very very unwell, in great need of a lot of rest.



What she didn't need was to be stuck in a car with me for 5 hours. What she really didn't need was for us to change our plans so that, instead of going to Brighton first, she came with me to Croydon and sat at the back watching the Socks Do Shakespeare.

It was a great Socks Do Shakespeare gig, now you ask, and a near sellout, so all good there. We finally got to our hotel in Brighton at about 10.30. Did I say hotel? It's a guest house, with a very friendly hostess Marina, but my god a lot of details to explain when all we wanted was to go to bed. They don't have keys, they have codes on the doors. They don't have breakfast, they have vouchers for nearby cafes. Oy vey. Whatever, we got parked on a free spot in front of the building, so that's good.

Saturday we did some lovely Brighton-seeing, then I did a cracking Socks Do Shakespeare gig at Komedia, then it was off to Stephen & Nick's for the most delightfull dinner. Between us, Stephen, Nick & I got through 5 bottles of wine. I failed to take any photos of us of course, the only photos I took being of Stephen's brilliant bookcase devoted to books with double-entendre titles. Best bookcase anywhere ever.

Sunday was hard. Hev was suffering very badly from the effects of the antibiotics, and we started the day by checking out of the guest house and being charged for two days parking, which we'd thought was free, at £12 a day. We were both too drained by illness to argue, only working out afterwards that, arriving at 10.30 Friday night & leaving at 10.30 Sunday morning, we should only have been charged for one day's worth of parking anyway. This is the sort of bad mood thing that starts a day off badly, and as it progressed Hev got nightmarishly bad. She became hypersensitive to sound, which was very badly timed with us being on Brighton seafront as a drum band started up. We ducked into the boat museum to get away from it, only to find that it acted as an amplifier for the noise. We escaped to the beach to get away from the noise, only then realising that Brighton beach is made of noise. Its entire surface is pebbles, so every step anyone makes is piercing to hypersensitive ears. Add to this the whizz of low-flying frisbees (I fear I traumatised a child by flinging his frisbee back at him when it missed us by inches) and the thud of boot against football, and the beach very quickly proved to be somewhere else we needed to escape.



We found respite by having a snooze in the car, in the quiet of a car park. Then I went off to do my Socks gig (both of these being afternoon shows) while Hev stuck to the quieter streets. Then we headed off home and had a much smoother drive back than the drive up had been.

I then had 4 days in schools, two in Wiltshire (a 2 hour drive turning into a 3 hour one on Tuesday, but I've had worse) and two in Kings Heath. It's fun and it pays the bills, all the time monitoring the progress of my cold, from the dizzying stage (over in a day really) to the nose-blowing. My god, the nose-blowing. I have expelled my own body weight in snot, and 8 days later it's still coming.

As I posted on Facebook, I know the Doctor Who episode I'll write. It's called Bogey.
- Opening scene is on a golf course
- Lead character's a big fan of Casablanca
- Chase scene uses one of those hand-operated railroad carts
- The Doctor whistles "Hitler has only got one ball"
- Guest appearance by Dick and Dom
What did I say? Writes itself.

Bringing us to Friday, and a drive to Leeds. Because I don't do nearly enough driving, and why get a new car if you're not intending putting 5000 miles on the clock within its first month and a half? Friday night, the Socks played to a full house at the Carriageworks in Leeds, and took a record breaking ninety quid in merchandise (having taken delivery of the brand new Socks Richard III comic at last, courtesy of our new printer Stuart Gould, and having dropped the price of the Shakespeare t shirts slightly).

Saturday night we were home in time to watch Doctor Who on only an hours delay, and Sunday is very nearly a day of rest. Very nearly. I'm about to drive off to Merseyside for 2 days at a school in Southport. And on the horizon we have the Socks playing Aberdeen on Friday and Inverness the week after. And somehow I'll be artworking that whole Milton Keynes 50 comic during all this time.

Yes, I work out this schedule all by myself, thanks for asking.

UPDATE: Chronology of a cold
Weds 10 May - On plane to Guernsey, woman sneezing
Thu 11 May - By evening I feel cold beginning in roof of mouth
Fri 12 May - Sneezing, nose blowing, irritable. Drive to Croydon, perform, & to Brighton
Sat 13 May - Sluggish, heavy nose blowing. Play Brighton & do dinner party
Sun 14 May - Weary, heavy nose blowing. Play Brighton & drive home
Mon 15 May - Feeling OK, heavy nose blowing, day in Trowbridge school
Tues 16 May - Feeling OK, heavy nose blowing, day in Salisbury school
Weds 17 May - Feeling OK but upset tum & heavy nose blowing, day in Kings Heath school
Thu 18 May - Upset tum better, heavy nose blowing & chapped nostrils, Kings Heath school
Fri 19 May - Still nose blowing, drive to Leeds and play gig
Sat 20 May - Still nose blowing, drive home from Leeds
Sun 21 May - Still nose blowing, drive to Southport
Mon 22 May - Feeling fine, still nose blowing, day in Southport school, artwork at night
Tues 23 May - Feeling exhausted, still nose blowing, Southport school then drive home
Weds 24 May - Feeling very weary, day in Bristol school, early night
Thurs 25 May - Might actually be free of cold. Day off, only slight nose blowing.
Fri 26 May - Fly and drive to Aberdeen, cold gone I think
Sat 27 May - On plane back from Edinburgh, woman sneezing. Stay tuned...



2017 TOUR
May 12 - Croydon Spread Eagle
May 13 (4.30pm) & May 14 (5.30pm) Komedia Brighton
May 19 - Carriageworks Leeds
May 26 - Aberdeen May Fest
June 2 - Eden Ct Inverness
June 15 - Crescent Arts, Belfast
June 20 - Grassington Festival, Yorks
June 23 - Hertford Comedy Festival
June 24 - Ludlow Fringe
August 15 - 17 Camden Fringe

Comic Art Masterclasses coming up in 2017:

Jun 4 - Martlets Hall Burgess Hill 

Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.

The Lovely Teachers - kids comics Brum & Wilts

A few interesting syndromes have come out in this busy week of Comic Art Masterclasses in primary schools. The big one was caricatures on the front covers. One class per school every day this week came up with a comic title featuring either their teacher or one of the class. In Winterbourne Earls Wilts it was Mrs Rawnson herself, who apparently has done cartwheels in the class before now.

In Grove Primary, also in Wiltshire, the class chose The Lovely Mrs McPherson as their title, these covers also showing us a couple of eternal recurring popular features. The kids still love Adventure Time (which is good, being able to draw something simple that they respond to), and they are mad for pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows (it is, I am told, a meme. Like I'd know).

I do two days every year teaching the year 5s at Colmore Juniors in Kings Heath, I must have been doing so for 6 or 7 years now. And here we see something I try and ensure I do, reflecting the ethnicity of my pupils in their comic book covers. I know I'm a bit self-conscious about it, but for me nothing would be worse than leaving a group of kids with a Beano world of caucasian faces in the work we'd produced together, which would leave most of them unrepresented on the page. So, although we have a Johnny Depp-alike on that first cover, we have a representative selection of grannies in the background. The second cover made the job easier, since it was Kayla (on the left) who'd come up with the title, name-dropping and mis-spelling Qaailah (on the right).

Okay, okay, I then went and gave them a Beano world of white faces on this next cover, but to be fair that reflected a third of the class, so is totally justifiable. And although I've coloured the Mrs Mallard cover in green (completing the set of autobiographical class comic titles), the kids depicted are fair reflections of the kids themselves. Not, of course, that they're aware of any ethnic differences between each other at all. Let's keep our fingers crossed that that never changes.

The celebrities these 8 classes chose for my demonstration strip were David Walliams, Donald Trump (twice), Declan Donnelly, Boris Johnson, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and (most originally, and it was because they'd genuinely been studying him in year 5, not because he was on Bigheads or anything) Andy Warhol.

Comic Art Masterclasses coming up in 2017:

Jun 4 - Martlets Hall Burgess Hill 

Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.

Awesome Sauce - kids comics from Guernsey to MK

And suddenly I found myself in Guernsey, courtesy of the Guernsey Literary Festival, doing not one, not two, but three Comic Art Masterclasses in one day, in two schools and the Guiles-Ailes Library (try and guess how you pronounce Guiles-Ailes, and indeed most Guernsian place names. You'll be wrong). As ever, the groups produced an A5 comic to take away, and I did a caricature of every single one of them. Along with the caricatures I did the previous night at a book launch at the library, that's well over 100 faces drawn during the visit. A greatly enjoyable trip it was too.

The colour on these front covers is just a little something I do afterwards, for fun, and to add to the quality of the kids' end product. I'm worried I may now be taking a little bit longer than necessary colouring these covers, but somehow once you've popped you can't stop. The photo on the right is me in the library, with odd lighting that makes me look like I'm in Christopher Eccleston's Tardis (in reality the lights merely made all the colours of the comicbooks look wrong, like you'd added too much blue or something, most unusual).

The third and final day of the MK50 project in Milton Keynes produced these two front covers and, more importantly, many pages of strips and drawings by the pupils, which I must now stitch together into an 8 page full colour magazine by the end of the month. No pressure.

I've done my classes at the Dorchester Literary Festival in Oxfordshire every other year since 2011 and it's lovely to be invited back. The classes take place in a gorgeous vaulted hall, the old Priory I think, which dates back a few years (though I got great mileage teasing the kids with fact that the only date shown on its walls is the date of restoration. They now think all buildings from 1994 look like this). Check it out:

The celebrities these seven groups chose for my demonstration strip were Peter Kay, Donald Trump (twice), Benedict Cumberbatch, David Walliams, Michael Jackson, and Emma Watson.

Comic Art Masterclasses coming up in 2017:

Jun 4 - Martlets Hall Burgess Hill 

Kev F Sutherland, as well as writing and drawing for The Beano, Marvel, Doctor Who et al, runs Comic Art Masterclasses in schools, libraries and art centres - email for details, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter. View the promo video here.