Some photos from an all-afternoon visit to Avon Elementary School yesterday, where I spoke to all the students in Grades K-8 about making comics and The Fifth Quarter. Thank-you to the school for hosting me, thank-you to Thunder Road Books in Spring Lake for providing copies of my graphic novels for all the children, and a special thanks to my generous and talented photographer friend Jennifer Bennett for taking these great pictures of the event.
An interesting and fun challenge for these assemblies was tailoring my presentation to the different grades levels. My main presentation is generally aimed at 8-12 year olds, as they’re the intended audience for The Fifth Quarter, and they seem capable of handling a lot of slideshow content (fun content of course, it’s lots of comics!), but I wasn’t so sure about the little kids. So, I incorporated more live-drawing into their assembly, and it turns out… that was really fun! I’m gonna start doing more of that in all of my presentations and workshops, for all ages.
If you are an educator, librarian, media specialist or parent, and you would be interested in bringing my comics and graphic novels event to your school, please reach out directly or through the web-form on my Author Visits website. I would love to get something arranged.
Speaking of, here are my currently scheduled upcoming cartooning workshop events:
Tuesday, November 29th, 4:30PM - “Cartooning Lessons” presentation and workshop at The Long Branch Arts & Cultural Center. This event is free to participants, and includes a complimentary signed copy of The Fifth Quarter, but is limited to only 15 spots. Registration required.
Thursday, December 15th, 4PM - “Cartooning Lessons” at the South Orange Public Library.
I have additional workshop events getting added to the calendar for 2023, including stops at Woodbridge, Verona, Pennington and more. I’ll post those as we get closer to the time.