Thanks to September being a particularly quiet month for Comic Art Masterclasses, this montage takes in comics drawn by me, from ideas from kids, ranging from St Ives Library in August to Chiswick Book Festival in September, and schools in Cardiff and The Isle Of Wight in October.
St Ives in August seems such a long time ago, and here are the kids comics looking as fresh as a daisy. Luckily this year I'd done the class on a fixed fee rather than a doorsplit, as we weren't very well attended. Somehow we'd managed to book the classes on a day which wasn't part of the Book Festival, as had been planned, so it hadn't really been publicised. These things can be harder than you think.
Chiswick Book Festival, by contrast, was a pair of classes that I'd agreed to do on a doorsplit, and this time it worked very much in my favour as, somehow, the word hadn't got through that my class is limited to 30 participants. The afternoon had 45 booked in it! I got away with it, and had the bonus that not only did I get a greater doorsplit than if numbers had been as low as I can normally handle, but also that amount of parents of that amount of kids meant I signed and sold loads of books at the end. As
you can see here, I sold five quid's worth more books in two short bursts after these classes than I did in a whole day at The Lakes Festival later that month. And that's 5 times as many as I sold in a whole day at TBC in Bedford. Selling books to parents after public classes is my best market at the moment.
My first actual classes in an actual school since the end of the last school year didn't take place till Herbert Thompson Primary in Cardiff had me in at the start of October. And what a smashing pair of comics they dreamed up.
To round off this batch of comics we have a pair from the Isle Of Wight, where I was brought over courtesy of the IOW Literary Festival. The festival paid for the classes and paid the extra for the ferry as well, which was marvellous, because otherwise these classes would have been prohibitively expensive. It's great to be able to reach schools who might otherwise not be able to afford a visiting author/artist like my humble self. That said, we suffered a bit of communication breakdown. My morning school was in Sandown, which was a 40 minute drive from my afternoon school. But the message hadn't got to the morning school that they needed to leave me time to get to the next place. So I turn up at 8.30 ready to start, only to find that they've scheduled my class to start at 10, so it doesn't finish till 12.20. So it's a bit of a rush to get to my afternoon school in Ryde.
The afternoon school suffered an even worse communication cock up, for which I have to responsibility because i accidentally agreed to it in an email, not realising what I was agreeing to. They wanted two 1hour sessions. I explained my workshop takes two hours, so couldn't I do that instead? We agree on that. And what I don't realise that I've agreed to teach both classes at once. So I arrive, late, in the hall instead of a classroom, and there's 60 kids waiting for me to try and be heard. I give it a go. Then, worse, I see more kids are joining the group, but I have to rattle on without time to question it all.
By the time I'm halfway through the class, struggling to be heard over the brouhaha, I discover that, as well as the Year 3 and Year 4 I'd (accidentally) agreed to teach, someone's brought in a bloody Year 5 group as well. It's impossible and unmanageable and, by the end, I feel has made me come across as some kind of bad supply teacher who can't deliver a comic art workshop to 90 kids, rather than the education-and-entertainment genius that I usually give the impression of being. It also takes over half an hour on the photocopier at the end cos I have to produce a different version of the comic for each one of the three classes that had been bundled in there.
So, the reminder to myself is: read your emails properly and make sure you never agree to teach a class bigger than the manageable number of 30. Unless it's a book festival class where you're on a doorsplit, and the parents are there watching and waiting to buy heaps of your books afterwards!
The celebrities these eight groups chose to appear in my demonstration strip were Michael Jackson, Jackie Chan, Merlin (yes, the magician), David Attenborough, Ronaldo, Billie Eilish, Mr Beast, and Kendrick Lamar.
My Books and where to get them:
Shakespeare Omnibus Collection (all 3 books) - Paperback
Sweet Smell Of Sockcess - Putting A Show On At The Edinburgh Fringe -
Amazon -
ebook
Joseph, Ruth & Other Stories - Amazon
Colouring Books: Hollywood Legends, Punk, Cult TV, Eurovision Vol 1, Eurovision Vol 2, Eurovision Best Of British & Irish, 1960s Pop, 1970s Pop, 1980s Pop, 1990s Pop, 2020s Pop, Bowie, Scottish Pop, Doctors Who, Royalty, Rom Coms
