Guns Don't Kill People, Teachers Do - more comics by kids

A fabulous range of comic titles, dreamed up by kids in Nottingham, Oswaldtwistle and Belfast, rounding off a spree of two blogs worth of Comic Art Masterclasses, all done when I would usually have been at Edinburgh. And, going by the sounds of widespread mithering from acts whose last two weeks up there have been a lot harder going than the first, it sounds like I made a good decision to do half a dozen days of classes rather than another fortnight of shows.

This week of classes saw a few early starts, beginning with me setting the alarm for 4.30 on Monday morning, in order to leave the house by 6am and get to Nottingham in order to do a class at Clifton Library in the morning and Wollaton Library in the afternoon. This "dad getting the milk" thing is some sort of meme they've not been able to explain to me.

I then, rather than drive home inbetween, stayed two nights at a hotel in Bury and spent Tuesday working (emailing schools and Socks tour venues, and editing Socks videos for TikTok, one of which seems to be getting views, see earlier post). Then on Wednesday it was a day at Oswaldtwistle Civic Theatre doing two classes. The dad/milk memegave me the chance to do an homage to John Ford's The Searchers. Which, now I think about it, I don't think I've ever actually watched. It's basically a meme for old people like me.

Then on Saturday morning it was a case of setting the alarm for 3.30am in order to get to Bristol Airport, not as close as it used to be, to check in at 5am for my 7.05 flight to Belfast. Had my classes been on Saturday I'd have been in plenty of time. But sadly the flights weren't so obliging, and this was the flight I had to take to make my classes on Sunday. Meaning I had a day to fill in Belfast, which I did with a visit to the Ulster Museum followed by the Ron Mueck exhibition at The MAC, where my classes were to be, and a walk around the Titanic Quarter. Also quite a bit more Socks video editing. I've now finished putting as much of Eurovision Sock Contest up on Youtube as I intend to. The classes on Sunday were great fun, and were supposed to be themed around the Ron Mueck exhibition, something that was much easier to get the afternoon's 11-15 year olds to be, as opposed to the morning's 7-11 year olds, who preferred to do toilets, as is their wont.

The celebrities these six groups chose to appear in my demonstration strip were Dwayne The Rock Johnson (twice), Tom Holland, Ed Sheeran, The Queen, and Billie Eilish.

Graphic novels:

Comic Tales From The Bible - 90 pages, colour, only £8.99 paperback

Findlay Macbeth

Prince of Denmark Street

The Midsummer Nights Dream Team