Elementary students fold and read example zines made by Red Wizard.
Comics are magical things (I mean that literally) and needless to say movies based on comic book heroes are all the rage with kids. This is one of the reasons that I agree with Alan Moore that art is very similar to magic. Stan Lee's characters like Spider Man and The Avengers are bigger than the influence of Roman gods… maybe even Abraham's. Over the summer of 2021, I started collecting and making zines. I am still learning how to make them myself, but I love the process and I want to share it with my students.
If you don't know what a zine is, they are small, self-published magazines that can be made quickly with a single piece of paper. Zines can be about anything, and that is the beauty of it. Comic zines are a common type of zine people make.
I have decided to teach a mini-zine unit to some of my elementary art students. My hope is that after this unit, I will have around a hundred students that enjoy making comics, become more literate, and also enjoy reading sharing stories with other people. If everything goes well, I will make copies of each students' zine and let them trade zines with each other. I will also save a copy of each zine and put them into a classroom zine library.
Since I am experimenting and this is the first year I am teaching this unit, I am trying it out with three grades: 3rd, fourth, and 5th. Fifth grade has shown itself to be ideal so far. The folding of the zines has been challenging for the 3rd graders. If you have ever taught students how to make paper snowflakes, it is a very similar experience. It is simple, but if students don’t follow your instructions verbatim, they will wind up with confetti.
I started the unit by giving each student a flat sheet copy of a simple comic zine I created in about 30 minutes called “The Lonely Bumble Bee”. NYS learning standards recommend that students learn about narrative in art, so I wanted my students to be exposed to a simple story early in the unit. This was also valuable because it shows how a zine functions once it is created.
The first lesson was about how to fold the Lonley Bumble Bee zine.
The next week I handed out a “Zine Cheat Sheet Template”. This is a zine that functions as an additional folding practice as well as a reference for the rest of the unit.
Creating a simple zine cheat sheets helps both adults and children learn a basic mini zine template.
The goal of this unit is for students to create a small cartoon zine that tells a short story about themselves. For my cartooning portion of the unit, I am using an awesome book by Linda Barry called “Making Comics (link). In the book, Barry has a great cartoon figure drawing exercise by Ivan Brunetti. The figures are not much more complicated than drawing stick figures. Each grade is excelling at drawing these characters.
Drawing comics is totally new to me, so it has been an excellent practice to add to my daily routine. (if I can learn, while I teach my productivity skyrockets.) I don’t have time to commit a half-hour a day to my sketchbook, so I am really happy to be learning along with the students. For my comic drawing instruction, I am using the whiteboard and encouraging students to draw themselves as they are that day (the clothes and hairstyles they are currently wearing minus face masks).
After we learn how to draw ourselves in the Brunetti style, we will learn how to tell a story in eight frames.
Stay Tuned and thanks for reading my thoughts.
-Red Wizard
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About Me
Red Wizard is a contemporary collage artist and NYS certified teacher from Buffalo, New York. His past clients include Mountain Dew, OLFA, and Liten Buffel Winery.