If you need a little deadline action and feedback, this Summer I will be teaching a couple classes, one at SVA and one at Parsons. I am also expecting a baby girl in September, so this will be my last teaching stint for a little while. Here's the info about the SVA class that I am team teaching with the great Tom Hart:

"Intended for artists who are currently working on their own material, this intensive course will begin with a review of thumbnails and story notes. We will help you in determining objectives, creative goals and choosing a project, as well as refining skills and fine-tuning your visual storytelling. You may work on new projects or sections of larger works such as graphic novels, serialized comics and webcomics. Guest lecturers will discuss their work practices, including time management, budgeting and publishing. The course will conclude with a group critique, and will focus on narrative structure, pacing and rhythm, choices in style and technique, and practical suggestions for working more efficiently. There are no course prerequisites; students are expected to have a working knowledge of the techniques, materials and language of comics. NOTE: This class meets for 3 sessions: Sat., June 13, July 18, and August 29."

Here's the Parsons info. This class now has 12 sessions.

Cartooning PCFA1041 A 12 session(s). Tues & Thurs, 6:00 PM-8:30 PM, beg. June 9.

"Limited to 16. Cartooning is an often overlooked art form. It combines drawing, graphic art, and writing to create completely unique narratives on any imaginable theme. In this course you study and create all forms of cartooning, from the single-panel gag to the graphic novel. You read work from Charles Addams to Osamu Tezuka to Robert Crumb to Chris Ware. Learn how to develop, pencil, design, and ink your stories. Use computer programs to lay out, color, and edit your work for printing. Students with ambitious longer projects receive technical assistance and guidance. No previous experience required. (2 credits)"

And here's some websites and work of some of my old students:

Lydia Conklin:

lipthing

Also here's Michael Paige Glover:

db-7

Hi again. I should really blog more frequently, but right now I am in non-stop teaching mode. I'm teaching high school students at the amazing revolutionary SVA pre-college program. We get forty students from around the world who are the best cartooning kids in the country. Then we force them to do 10 pages in three weeks. And the results are amazing! Keith Mayerson, who designed the program and sets up this totally positive learning environment says they always succeed because they don't know it's hard. And it's true, I hem and haw and try to perfect things, but all of this fear keeps the work from flowing. These students don't have any time to be fearful, and their minds are like sponges, so they suck up knowledge, and spit out cool comics.It's always a thrill to be able to hand a kid who comes from somewhere in Kentucky a brush or a g-pen or a crowquill, and two seconds later they are going to town. And you can see that super satisfied smile that learning a new tool always provides. It's also cool to be a supporter of a student's deep cosmology that's been growing inside their brains since they were in fourth grade.

Some nights I teach adult ed too, and I like those classes, because I always feel I am touching base with that optimistic high schooler that has remained semi-dormant inside the adult needing an outlet.

Some days I'll be teaching 9.5 hours a day. So I haven't had much time to make comics but my mind is very creatively restless. I keep thinking of stuff for Calamity, the sequel to Girl Stories that I'm working on, but I gotta put the pedal to the metal on that comic. I wake up each morning with a sense of anxiety about getting work done, all day it hangs in the background.

While all this was going on I forgot to pay the heating bill and our heat got shut off, that meant no hot showers or really clean dishes. So then I paid the heating bill and the guys came to turn the heat back on, but then they turned our gas stove off because my landlord was paying for our cooking gas on a separate line, and had it shut off not knowing our gas line was attached (we didn't know it either). So now we have to get a new gas line. The guys left, assuring us the heat had been turned back on, but actually, in real life it had not. So we're taking cold showers, which is invigorating, and Tim's grilling delicious things like corn and tuna. Did you know that grilled corn is the best food?