The year has begun and I've been into schools and taught kids comics. I shall rinse and repeat this process for the next twelve months, all going well and, if the past two decades are anything to go by, I'll end up having spent between 80 and 120 days teaching kids how to do what I do. The first comics of the year involve a fair bit of travelling, of which there may also be more to come. Who knows?
These are the final two comics of 2025, from the only classes I did in the whole of December, at Heron Hall in Enfield, or Potters Bar. I've referred to it being in both places whenever I've been there and no one seems to either correct me or care. So let's assume Potters Bar and Enfield are interchangeable. (I've just looked on the map and they're 17 bloody miles apart. Heron Hall is in Enfield, in Middlesex, or the other side of the M25 from Potters Bar which is in Hertfordshire. Why has no one ever noticed what I write on the front of these comics I give them to take home?)
First school of 2026 and, hopefully not starting out as I mean to go on, I agreed to do half a day (so for half the money) at a school, on a Saturday morning, in Sussex. Near Ipswich. That's three and a half hours there and three and a half hours back, for just two hours of teaching. Am I mad? Clearly. Anyway, it was obviously great fun cos I'm going back again next month like a masochistic idiot. Being topical, I drew Homer Simpson being arrested by ICE agents on the cover. When I asked the kids if they knew what ICE stood for, someone guessed Ipswich Council. I just said yeah, that's what it is.
I was delighted to be invited back for a two day stint at Cheshire College in Chester, where I've been three or four times now. These two groups were delightful, and gave us the first fun title of the year. I struggled for a while to work out why they were all in stitches when I read out the title Gabe Itches, but then it dawned on me and ho ho how satirical. I had fun drawing the cover, based on a Dutch renaissance painting, and I think the colouring's come out particularly nicely.
Day two at Cheshire College included an ESOL class. That's pupils who have English as a second language. In principle at least. In practice most of these students, who were supposed to be teenagers but, by dint of their moustaches and facial hair, all seemed to be much older, spoke no English whatsoever. And, you may be surprised to hear, I speak no Kurdish, Pashtun, or whatever language is spoken in South Sudan, so we had quite a struggle trying to make my very word-heavy class make any sense whatsoever. Amazingly I think we may have got away with it, and they certainly seemed very appreciative at the end, when they left with their caricatures and various other things I'd drawn. I did a lot more drawing on the board than usual, having dispensed with much of the content of my usual class. A two hour session driven by me getting laughs from the funny things I say very quickly stops working when nobody can understand a word of it.
The celebrities five of these groups chose to appear in my demonstration strip (I won't count the last two groups of last year, as they've already been totted up and added to that year's Most Popular Celebrities chart) were Ronaldo, Ariana Grande, Al Pacino, Bob Marley, and Donald Trump.
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