A guide for families
Making your own comic after you've read them all
A child who has read every book in a series has studied hundreds of comic pages. The next step is making one. Print the four-panel sheet on this page, or tap your way to a moving cartoon in Peabody's Cartoons, where you pick a place, who is in it and what they say.
Start here: Cartoons · Checked
Four boxes is enough
Most newspaper comic strips are three or four panels long. Four boxes give a story a shape: in the first, we meet someone; in the second, something goes wrong; in the third, they try to fix it; in the fourth, there is a surprise or a joke. That is the whole plan. Write it in four words at the top of the sheet before drawing anything.
Stick figures are fine
Comics are about telling, not drawing well. A circle with dots for eyes can be happy, cross or scared with one line for a mouth. Draw the people big and the background small. Leave room at the top of each box for the bubbles, and write the words before drawing the bubble around them, so the words fit.
Draw in pencil first and go over the lines in pen at the end. A grown-up who wants to help can be the letterer: the child says the words, and the grown-up writes them in the bubble, small and neat.
Borrow the tricks from the books
Look back at a favourite page and borrow a trick: a spiky bubble for a shout, a sound word in big letters, a close-up of a face in the third panel when things go wrong, lines behind a running character. Every comic artist learned by copying the ones they loved. Borrow the tricks, but make up your own characters, so the comic is yours.
Some series on the shelf are about children who make comics, and they are full of ideas:
- Cat Kid Comic Club, ages 7+
- Captain Underpants, ages 6–10
- Big Nate, ages 8–12
- Berrybrook Middle School, ages 10+
- The Cardboard Kingdom, ages 9–12
Stuck for an idea?
Ask one of these questions, and the answer is the first panel:
- What if your pet could talk, just for one day?
- What is the worst thing that could happen at lunch?
- What would a monster be scared of?
- What if the school bus went the wrong way?
Then ask what goes wrong, how they fix it, and how it ends. Four answers, four boxes.
From paper to moving pictures
When the strip is done, try it as a cartoon. Start a new cartoon: tap a place, tap who is in it, tap what they do and say, then press play. Nothing is typed and nothing is recorded; the voices come from your own device. Four panels on paper become four scenes on screen.
Make a book of them
One sheet a week becomes a book by the end of term. Number the strips, staple them, and draw a cover. Then it is a series of its own, and it can go on the shelf in order beside the others. Keep the first one even if it looks rough: comparing it with the tenth is the best part.