Regular readers of this blog will recall that in early October I was part-way through How to Make a Comic Book, made by the High Tech High Graduate School of Education and available on the Coursera platform.
Despite some annoyances in the final week of this course, I found this one of the more rewarding courses that I have completed. The final week ended up taking about a month. My initial review of this course was written after I finished the planning stage.
In the last half of the course we learned how to make and assemble our comic book, ready for mass production.
I generally enjoyed this course, spending a lot of time on it. The drawings in particular took plenty of time. Pinterest and other sites were helpful for learning how to draw.
I found drawing the pictures was the biggest challenge, because I am not very good at art. I wanted a simplistic style, partly because it would be more suited to my limited skills, and partly because I prefer uncluttered comic book illustrations. As a youngster, one of my favourite cartoons was “Peanuts” by Charles Schultz. Its simple portrayal of characters, facial expressions and situations always appealed to me.
The Final Three Weeks of the Course
We had to pencil-draw our comic book on the provided template in Week 4. Week 5 was Inking and Lettering. In Week 6 we cleaned up our scanned Week 5 pages and compiled our little four-page booklet.
The course included instructions for using Photoshop to tidy up our drawn pages in Week 6. It also gave instructions for downloading a free trial version of Photoshop. Because I own Corel Paintshop Pro, I used that program for finishing up the images. I didn’t want to download Photoshop. Some of the Photoshop instructions were difficult to interpret for my program, but I eventually managed to produce clean pages.
A cover for our comic book was optional. I created a cover which was partially hand-drawn, then finished off, coloured, and tidied up using Paint software. It took weeks to print the final copy of my comic book. First my printer ran out of ink, and subsequently I ran out of momentum. Eventually, though, I returned to and finished the project.
In one of the final videos of the course, the Lead Instructor, Patrick Yurick, acknowledged that ”finishing things is hard. It’s the hardest thing artists do. They have this really great idea in the beginning of their process. And then they’ll like go through the entire process and realize that it’s not as good as they thought it was so they just stop in the middle.” Yes, there were a few occasions during this course when I thought, “This comic book is rubbish! Why am I bothering to make it?”
The final assignment of the course asked students to reflect on the course and the learning process as we created our comic book. We also had to submit a selfie with our final product. Take a look at the PDF: TimeIsRunningOutPDF1
Peer Reviews
Although the official assignments were behind a paywall, this course allowed students to submit a practice assignment each week. We were expected to assess at least three of our peers’ practice assignments before receiving feedback on our own work. I enjoyed reviewing comics made by my peers. As with many courses with multiple runs, there seemed to be few participants and I was interested to see the work of some of my fellow students as their comic book took shape from week to week.
Most peer comments on my own work were generous and positive, although I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when in Week 5 one of my peers described my story as “boring”.
Reddit Group
There was a Reddit group where we were encouraged to post our assignments if we wanted feedback without paying for a certificate. I didn’t join the group, but browsed the threads occasionally. The Reddit group was also designed for creators to keep in touch with the comic book community after finishing the course. I am unlikely to make another comic book, so joining the Reddit group was not a priority for me.
Another feature of this course was the Final Course Survey link embedded in a video at the end of the course. As well as the usual Agree/Neutral/Disagree responses, we had the opportunity to say what we particularly liked and disliked, as well as a general comments section. We could also view previous survey responses after submitting our own.
A Final Thought
The many links and resources were very helpful at every stage of the course. Thank you, course creators!
By Pat Bowden, published December 4, 2018.
