At the beginning of August, I got to spend an entire week in the Cartooning Studio, an intensive workshop for adults at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. What fun!
My goal was to further develop the graphic novel that my daughter Yunhee and I have been creating, a fictionalization of her middle school experience – being teased, loving to read and draw manga (Japanese comics), and learning to stand firm in her identity, including being Korean and adopted. It’s called Manga Girl.
Here’s one of the images I went in with:
and here’s what I came out with, after the inspired teaching of the young, phenomenally talented staff (biggest change was switching from marker to brush line):
I also completed the outline of the story and 13 spreads of thumbnails (small sketched layouts of double pages). Now it’s in my daughter’s hands for scripting.
Some of the interns posted an account of the entire workshop on the CCS Schulz Library blog, from Day 1, through Day 5 (my project is mentioned – and that’s me in the turquoise shirt).
Your page looked really good. I'm a fan of comics and if this was a graphic novel I'd pick it up in a heartbeat.
Thanks, Cacy! That's so good to hear. There's going to be a lot in the book about the comics world, so we hope it will really appeal to fans both in style and in content.
We have a long way to go before the book's completed, but we're very excited about it. It's been getting deeper and more substantive, and it's so much fun to work as a mother-daughter team.