On June 24, 2008, the Create a Comic Project (CCP) was awarded a Small Neighborhood Grant from the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven (CFGNH). The award will go toward sponsoring the Comic Making Tournament III, the CCP's major annual event where children wield their imaginations to make sequential art masterpieces.

In a stunning move, 2008 Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul has endorsed the Create a Comic Project (CCP). "The CCP is an excellent institution," said the Texas Congressman and OBGYN. "Great for parties! In fact, I'd join any party that had the CCP involved!"

The recent discussion at Fleen on the topic of offline and online cartooning has provoked some contemplation about what paradigm the next generation of cartoonists will have regarding their approach to comics and the potential influence comic-oriented community service projects like the Create a Comic Project (CCP) can have.

On February 22, 2008, the Create a Comic Project and the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) were awarded a $2,000 grant from the Association of Schools of Public Health to help celebrate National Public Health Week.

The Create a Comic Project is in search of artists willing to contribute to a non-profit guide that will help others teach children about creating comics. The guide is being done in comic book form to make it accessible to all ages.

The guide needs artists willing to donate comic pages that can be used as teaching materials or draw instructional pages from scripts. A cover artist is also needed. The deadline for submitting art is mid-to-late February.

Once the decision is made to commit to a service project and the type of project is chosen, the next step is to organize it. This means finding a location, choosing a schedule, and advertising. There is no way to describe in detail every possible scenario that can be encountered at this stage - this is meant as a general guide so that others can fashion their own comic service program, like the Create a Comic Project.

(Continued from Part 1.)

Increasing the involvement of webcomic creators with community service projects will serve to increase positive public perception of the medium. There are many things that go into planning a successful community service project. The first thing to consider is the type of activity.

Something that has always impressed me from organizing the Create a Comic Project (CCP) is the level of support it's received from the general webcomic community. I've contacted dozens of creators, asking them permission to use their comics to teach urban youths, and received overwhelmingly positive replies.

This reflects well on the attitudes underlying today's webcomic culture: the "me first" attitude prevalent in many parts of the entertainment industry have not yet become widespread among webcomic creators. This is likely due to what Ryan North said was the "humbling" experience of being a star in the Internet, but being a regular guy in the real world.

This also indicates an as yet untapped potential among creators: a move towards greater real world visibility through community outreach by volunteering. As Scott McCloud noted in Reinventing Comics: "public perception matters." And there are few things that can create a positive public perception better than community service.

One question some people ask me: what do you teach kids in the Create a Comic Project? On November 20, 2007, I'll be celebrating the upcoming one-year anniversary of the Create a Comic Project with a workshop at the Human Services Center. The preparations for this workshop allow me to give an example of my teaching method.

For the past couple weeks, I've been working on the lesson plan for the 2 hour workshop. I start with the basics: how to read the comic, panel order, not cramming too many words into dialogue bubbles, etc. These are easy to illustrate, though critical for a child to follow along with later lessons.

A more complex point I like to make is connecting words to images. While it seems obvious that words and images would go hand-in-hand with children, many kids don't bridge the two by default. This is often because they focus so intently on what to write, they forget the broader context.

One way to remind them is to go through an example of exactly how what they write can affect the whole mood of a scene. I find when it's made clear, the students will pay more attention to both halves of comic composition.

To illustrate how I approach this topic, here's a example using the template (from Jellaby by Kean Soo) above:

Welcome to the Create a Comic Project blog on Comixtalk. Material here is largely reprinted from the original CCP Blog, though summarized to focus less on minutia and more on general points.