April 2019

A really full session today for Salford Comics Club with a total of 18 kids attending! Thank you all for continuing to come to our little club – we love seeing it grow.

This month was all about our Mix-Up Mayhem Machine. You can download the printouts for this below – simply cut the sheet into four.

As a group, we came up with ten items for each of the following categories:

• animals
• vehicles
• mythological creatures and
• household items.

We then started off at the beginning of the machine by drawing one of the items from one of the categories. The kids could then choose to add to those items by adding a middle segment of the machine, and drawing something from a different category.

They could keep going for as long as they liked, using more middle segments, or choose the final piece to finish their machine. They then had to mash up or combine all of the previous segments into something, and use that to inspire a comic.

As always, we had some really great ideas – here are just some of them!

 

Advertisements

March 2019

We had fantastic fun finding out about alliteration at this month’s Comics Club session. We challenged ourselves to design some crazy characters for our comics, asking questions like:

• What is their name?
• What are they?
• Where did they come from?
• What can they do?

The catch? We had to do it with words beginning with the same letter!

Check out the worksheet below:

We had some incredibly inspired ideas, including Mark the Magnetic Monster from the Moon, Super Jones the Super Hero from Super World with Super Skills, Jumping James Bond the Jellyfish from Jupiter and Chris the Chrissyan from Planet Cucumber.

Have a look at some of the comics:

 

February 2019

A great session today at Salford Comics Club!

Inspired by a strip in the Phoenix Comic by Jess Bradley, we decided to put the kids imaginations to the test – but instead of Jess Bradley’s Flurn Powder, we developed our very own Magic Potion.

Children had to decide what happened when this Magic Potion was poured on various objects, including a cat, a toaster, and Height Library itself!

They then had to think about several questions around the potion’s origin, which helped them develop their stories for their comics:

• What it was called
• Where it came from
• Who made it 
• Who had it now and
• What if… (Children were challenged to fill this in with ‘what if’ questions, like ‘What if it fell into the wrong hands?’ ‘What if it was lost?’)

The results were some amazing magical things – from potions created by aliens on the Moon and given to a zombie to potions that turned a toaster into Freddie Mercury from the ‘I Want To Break Free’ music video.

Have a look at some of these awesome creations below:

January 2019

Happy New Year, everyone!

This month, we challenged the children to design their comics around narration.

For a simple starter activity, we got everyone to draw:

• something you play with
• something you wear and
• something you eat

They then had to use one or more of these things as inspiration for characters.

The children then had to design a story around these characters, using these blank comic templates with thought/narration bubbles on them to help guide their story and move the action forward.

We had some fantastic ideas, from a Super Elf to a Cabbage Patch kid who could shoot cabbages out of their hands, cat-dragons and computer monsters. Check some out:

December 2018

We’re feeling festive at Salford Comics Club!

For our starter activity this month, we asked everyone to imagine what could be in some oddly shaped presents from Father Christmas.

We then tried to re-imagine the Christmas story set in a different environment.

We saw Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus as they might have looked in space, in the jungle (arriving on a lion and zebra), in prehistoric times and even in a computer game!

November 2018

In commemoration of the centenary of the Armistice, this month’s Comics Club was all about history.

Kids were tasked with choosing periods from history and designing characters that would fit into that historical period.

As a prompt, they could then also choose a different period/character and try and think of a story where those two characters would meet. What would they be doing? What would they say to each other? How would they interact?

October 2018

This month’s starter activity, taken from ComicsClub.blog’s September Comics Challenge, was to draw yourself as random things!

Continuing with the theme of random things, we then asked the children to select and draw two random things from this list of random categories:

• Something light
• Something heavy
• Something spiky
• Something round
• Something that needs to be plugged in

The children then had to find a way to link those two things in a story/comic. Should they combine the two objects to create an interesting character? Or should the story revolve around those two objects? Or should one object be the character and the other a tool?