Webinar Transcript

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Erin Bailey: If you've joined us before, welcome back, and if this is your first time or you're watching the recording, we're thrilled to have you. You can visit the session and past webinars in the archive. We will share the link in the chat later this evening. Closed captioning is available. We encourage you to use the chat box and Q&A throughout the webinar to share questions and reflections. You'll also receive a follow-up email after the session.

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Erin Bailey: With a link to the recording for your certificate of completion.

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Erin Bailey: Tonight, we are exploring how comics can serve as a powerful entry point for writing development. Graphic storytelling provides a structured yet creative format that helps students think intentionally about character, plot, pacing, and resolution, while also fostering collaboration and authentic voice.

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Erin Bailey: We'll look at practical, research-based ways to guide students through the comic writing process, from planning to publication.

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Erin Bailey: And here's a little bit about us. We are Reading is Fundamental. This year, we are celebrating our 60th anniversary. We're excited. We are about fostering the joy of reading in children, and to date, we've been able to put

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Erin Bailey: books in the hands of 430 million… we have distributed 430 million, books and resources.

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Erin Bailey: And that's a little bit about us.

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Erin Bailey: And I am super honored that we are joined tonight by Miss Shannon Live. She is the president and co-founder of Bat City Comic Professionals. They are a non-profit comic book store dedicated to cultivating creativity, literacy, and imagination in young people. Shannon's career blends advocacy, education, and creativity. After studying English literature and public relations at Howard Payne University.

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Erin Bailey: She worked across marketing, retail leadership, and literacy intervention, all while continuing her own creative pursuits, including writing young adult novels and comics.

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Erin Bailey: Professional Cosplay modeling, and digital storytelling projects.

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Erin Bailey: In 2018, she co-founded Bat City Comic Professionals, where she now partners with schools, libraries, the Girl Scouts of America, the Boys and Girls Club, and other organizations to design programming that uses comics as a powerful tool for reading, writing, and artistic expression. Through student workshops and educator webinars.

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Erin Bailey: Shannon helps young people harness storytelling as a meaningful outlet for voice and identity. I'm so excited. This is one of my absolute favorite topics, and I actually connected with Shannon last year at Comic-Con here where I live in San Diego, and welcome, Shannon. I'm excited to get started.

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Erin Bailey: And I will… Flip it over to you so you can share.

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Shannon Live: Yes, okay.

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Shannon Live: You did. That was an incredible introduction. I feel so cool. I'm like, thank you, that was so nice. Yes, so, I'm just gonna jump right in, because there is so much information that we are going to go over today. And so, first of all, I just wanna… she or DA… Erin gave a way better introduction than I was gonna give to my… for myself, but a little bit more about us is through our reading and writing

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Shannon Live: programs at Bat City, we are trying to not only facilitate the learning of education and the skills, but also just to get kids excited about wanting to learn. In the last three years, three and a half now, I can't believe it's 2026, but since 2022, we've had 5,000 students go through our comic writing program, which has been extraordinary to see some of those students grow over the course of those years and come back

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Shannon Live: and do the programs again and again. And I also used to work as a reading and writing specialist, developing pop culture-focused curriculum for Title I schools, and we're going to talk a little bit about some of the things I've done through that, as well as some of the things we do in our programming. And I've also done a TED talk about using comic writing to help advance

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Shannon Live: student learning, and so I will include that resource at the end as well.

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Shannon Live: But tonight, we are going to talk about comic creation and how it can help improve students' understanding and mastery of writing. We're going to also get to have a little bit of hands-on building our own comic-style journeys to develop a better understanding of how we can show this process to our students. But before we dive in to how we're going to do that, it's important to understand who this process works for, and the truth is that it works for every age group of writers that

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Shannon Live: you may work with. A quick look at some of the required standards for grades K-12 will help us have a better grasp on what we're working towards as we develop the tools we need to teach writing through comics. In our programs, we start at third grade. However, we have worked with younger students, either in small groups or with the help of parents and other assistants. From there, we work with students as old as adults to help them better build necessary skills and become better writers.

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Shannon Live: These are just some of the Common Core skills that we develop by helping our writers through comic books. Engaging readers. This is through character growth, problems, experiences, using dialogue in specific language to create pacing, varying plot lines, and strong descriptions of events, creating a story in sequential format, and understanding how one event leads to the next towards an end goal.

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Shannon Live: Using transitions to create cohesion in the story and to clarify relationships and ideas. Understanding character development and how to express the growth and changes that the character has experienced.

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Shannon Live: Having a strong conclusion that flows naturally from the narrative and reflects on the actions and experiences of the character, and editing and rewriting, which is one of my favorite parts. Writing is rewriting, and students need to have a firm grasp on planning and revising in connection with the story that they're creating.

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Shannon Live: We're going to explore all of these and the different ways you can teach them as… to your students as we go on.

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Shannon Live: But before we get too far into that, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the educational philosophies that really support comic learning, and why it's so valuable to use comics in your initiatives. And we're gonna start with the dual coding theory.

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Shannon Live: In 1971, Dr. Alan Piavio hypothesized that our brains were wired to think in terms of both verbal and visual elements at the same time.

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Shannon Live: He called this dual-coding theory, and he believed that we are able to communicate and understand information better when words and images were presented in tandem. His hypothesis argued that if we presented that verbal information, and in this case, any form of sequential language, of language in a sequential format, our brains were actually more readily able to process this information.

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Shannon Live: So, this is why we use part of this in our comics when… or this is why we part of… wow, part of why we use comics when teaching students. By coding their writing lessons to feature a sequential formatted medium that combines verbal and visual elements, we're giving them a stronger chance of retaining the information they learn. Not to mention that dual-coding their writing activities allows students to feel stronger in visualizing their ideas as a chance to start there, and we're

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Shannon Live: work towards understanding the writing process. In our comic writing workshops, every step of the process is broken down in both verbal and visual formats. We encourage students to choose the pathway that feels more comfortable to them to start with, and then we help them work towards clear and well-thought-out writing process from the chosen start point.

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Shannon Live: It…

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Shannon Live: It's really great to have that little extra bits of visual information that helps a kid feel like I can come at this from the side that I find fun and enjoyable as well. Because it's not just about retention and understanding. If a student is disinterested or facing barriers caused by fear or anxiety, learning becomes a struggle in ways they can't overcome.

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Shannon Live: This was explored in 1982 when Steven Krashen developed his theories with the effective filter hypothesis. Now, his theory was focused more on how students learn other languages.

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Shannon Live: But I think at this point, we can take a step back and apply it to how students learn and interact with their own language. Especially in a time period where most students' language comes from text-speak and internet speak. Our language is almost like learning a second language for a lot of students.

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Shannon Live: And this is something that we can really apply to how we focus on writing in our learning environments. Crashan believed that our brains had a funnel that closed and opened based on difficult… different obstacles such as anxiety, self-doubt, even boredom. He proposed that reducing anxiety promoted learning and improved engagement with the input students were interacting with.

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Shannon Live: He argued that we could reduce blockage just by sparking interest, which is something we see success of on the reading side when students tear through books like Dogman, Diary of Wicked, and many more.

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Shannon Live: When I was working as a reading and writing specialist, I was asked to evaluate the 6th through 8th grade classes to find out why the students were not learning the information presented to them. When I interviewed the students one-on-one, almost all of them said the same thing. Miss, I'm bored!

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Shannon Live: So I developed a 6-week writing workshop that took everything they needed to know for their tests, and taught it almost exclusively with pop culture items, using standard materials for just that, testing. By the end of the program, students not only displayed an understanding for the information, but a broader desire to participate in class.

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Shannon Live: So, how do we build learning initiatives in a similar way to spark joy and cultivate understanding for our students?

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Shannon Live: We start with the basics. The hero's journey. When teaching students of any age the essentials of writing, they need to understand a basic character arc. And while we often spend loads of time exploring the classic story arcs approach to exposition, inciting incident climaxes, and resolutions.

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Shannon Live: Comic writing allows us to take the process and break it down a little deeper, focusing on the development of our character, our conflict, and our resolution in a way that young readers and writers find engaging.

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Shannon Live: For comics, it all begins with characters. Iconic characters like Batman, Wonder Woman, Superman, Spider-Man, even Little Orphan Annie, Garfield, and Charlie Brown have lived for nearly a century, inspiring readers for generations.

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Shannon Live: Proving not only the strength and longevity of comic characters, but their ability to be adapted and explored in new ways by writers over the years.

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Shannon Live: When creating a comic character, writers focus on developing as many attributes of their physical, mental, and emotional nature as they can before they even get started. Oftentimes, they will create a character sheet that houses all this information so that everyone working on a project knows what information is key when using the character.

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Shannon Live: Think about an iconic character you know. Can you think of what colors they tend to wear, what their abilities are? What catchphrases and attributes have become a part of their persona?

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Shannon Live: Many of those elements were created before the character even hit the page, and as their characters go through big changes and small key aspects of them are redeveloped, those will be added to character sheets for future use.

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Shannon Live: This is a great way to teach students how character development works. In our workshops, we start out with designing their characters by asking them to answer the following questions, which, if you have a piece of paper in front of you, I'd love for you to try now. The first thing we ask is, what is your character's name?

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Shannon Live: It's important to pause here and ask them, what type of character do they have? Because this often lends itself to what type of name works best. Is it a dog, a human, a talking rock? Have them make a note here as well, what kind of character they're working with, so that they know how to build from there.

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Shannon Live: How old is the character? I always make sure they clarify if this is in human age or something else, because after all, rocks age differently than people do.

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Shannon Live: What is their favorite color?

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Shannon Live: This is important not just because it gives us a chance to think in terms of what kind of outfits they might wear, but because it gives us a chance to remind students that seemingly menial personality traits are just as important as the basics that we are building from. For those of you old enough to remember, I suggest going so far as to giving your students a MySpace survey to fill out to really help them understand how their characters would react to things.

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Shannon Live: Have them fill it out in the character's voice, too, because there's nothing like, what is your favorite drink, Coke or Pepsi, and your villain saying, the blood of my enemies, as an answer.

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Shannon Live: Then from there, ask, do they have any powers? What about habits? What can we count on seeing your character do at some point during this story?

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Shannon Live: Where are they from? Whether they name it or not, ask students to define whether this is a small town.

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Shannon Live: big city, somewhere in space, etc. Because where a person from directly influences their dialect, the way they relate to people, and the things they understand from the world at large. We make the joke in our workshops all the time that everybody in this town of 50,000 people that we live in now thinks that traffic is really bad.

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Shannon Live: But I'm from Austin, Texas, where traffic is much, much worse than a town of 50,000 people, and my husband is from Chicago. So all of us have varying ideas of what massive traffic jams look like, and so where you're from completely impacts every little thing that you believe.

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Shannon Live: We talk about what we're afraid of, and in addition to that, what is your character's weakness? Something that stops their powers from working, or just completely kills their confidence.

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Shannon Live: And do they have a sidekick? Let your writers create a friend that their character relies on, and help them determine and explore relationship status and interpersonal skills for that character. This is helpful when building out their story and how their character's going to relate to anybody they interact with.

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Shannon Live: It's easy to create a character sheet like this one using the superhero genre, but it's important to remind students that not every comic character has to be a powered character.

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Shannon Live: Let them know that they can create a comic about anything, even sitting in a classroom learning how to make comics. Because after all, comics are a medium, not a genre, and every genre that exists in writing, and in reading, and anything else exists in comics just the same.

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Shannon Live: We know the next part of the hero's journey is creating a problem for them to solve, and sending them climbing up the high-angled cliff of the story arc.

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Shannon Live: But how do you develop that problem in an easy, explainable way?

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Shannon Live: We like to talk about creating problems in terms of the five W's. As I tell you what they are, try writing them down next to the hero you're creating and see what the journey might look like. So, what is the problem? Start with a large idea. Like, my character has to save the world from evil cows who are determined to steal all of the milk on Earth.

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Shannon Live: We'll use the other W's to break that down a little further as we go, but at least it gives us an idea of what is our major problem.

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Shannon Live: From there, ask, who is causing the problem? This is where you're going to define your villain or villains, and develop a quick outline of what kind of antagonist would exist in a world with your hero and the problem they're facing. For fun, we'll stick with the problem being caused by evil cows from space, but let's make it specifically that these evil cows are from the Ring of Saturn, because…

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Shannon Live: Why not?

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Shannon Live: Where are they causing the problem? I like to encourage students to get specific here. Sure, the cows are from the outer rings of Saturn, but is there a secret base on Earth as well?

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Shannon Live: Do they actually have a base on a spaceship, or out on the moon, to give them a good vantage point, but not be in any real danger?

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Shannon Live: Where the base is adds to the plot because it keeps the story moving from physical destinations and not just emotional ones. Are we gonna see their home operations on the Ring of Saturn? Maybe just their spaceship?

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Shannon Live: All of these different locations are things we want to think of in our where categories, so they help us develop the problem and the settings, because the setting does become a part of the problem when we have to travel there and figure out how we're going to get to all these different places.

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Shannon Live: When? When does the conflict have to be solved by? Students will automatically jump to 2 seconds from whatever time the story starts. Every time, they always do, they think it's funny, but the purpose of establishing a timeframe is so it creates a natural timeline and intensity for the story.

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Shannon Live: This is great for action-packed books where things happen quickly, like a bomb needing to be diffused, or epic fantasies where they need to travel a long way and go through different realms before they can actually solve the problem.

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Shannon Live: Then we ask about the why. Why is the villain causing the problem? Why are evil cows so bent on stealing all of the Earth milk? Why can't they just produce their own? What do they get by stealing our milk versus their milk? And why does it have to be Earth milk specifically?

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Shannon Live: Make students really dive into these questions, and keep asking them why until they get to a point that the story feels solid.

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Shannon Live: For us, the evil cows may be stealing our milk, because all of Saturn's technology runs on milk. But they've run out of milk on their planet, and Saturn cows obviously don't produce milk, so they have to find a place to steal it from. Gives us something to work with for our story.

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Shannon Live: It's great at this point, though, to also go in and ask them why their character has to be the one to solve the conflict.

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Shannon Live: This is helpful to teach the understanding that character choices shape not just their personal arc, but the story at large, and that if the problem isn't relevant to the character, then the story needs to be adapted or changed to make the character central to it so that it's their growth arc and their plot that overlap, giving us internal and external struggles.

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Shannon Live: Perhaps we create a character that is lactose intolerant and is trying to convince humans that cow milk is bad, so he's actually going to help the aliens take the cow milk without a battle for the earth in the end.

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Shannon Live: Or maybe our main character was an Earth cow, who hated their job at the local dairy farm, but leads a rebellion against the alien cows to ensure that they don't get abducted. And maybe they'll get equal rights for cows on Earth after that for saving the day.

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Shannon Live: Finding the relevance to the character created… helps tie the story together and helps students see how to navigate the journey as they move through it.

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Shannon Live: Looking at what you wrote down, or what you might write down with your students, you can take your information and organize it into a problem that actually demonstrates an inciting incident and rising conflict, while still having a grasp on what the characters' relationship to their antagonist and the situation are.

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Shannon Live: This helps students see the sequential process of putting the story together as they walk through their five W's. Lastly, a hero's journey must have a conclusion, which also happens to be a skill that writers of every age need to have. We like to work this out by talking about the how.

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Shannon Live: How did your character get where they needed to go to solve the problem? How did they connect with their villain and confront them? How did they actually stop the problem from happening? And how did they change over the course of the story? I always ask students to think of the idea, where do I want my character to be when they get to the other side of the adventure?

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Shannon Live: Comics are a great opportunity, on top of that, to talk about open endings, because, well, quite honestly, we thrive on cliffhangers in this industry.

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Shannon Live: Single-issue comics come out once a month, which is a lot of time to wait in between issues, wondering what's gonna happen next. And it leaves readers pondering, what could possibly be so big on the other side of that next issue that I need to come back to the store in a month.

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Shannon Live: We also work on trying to leave people buzzing about our stories. We want them talking about it on the internet for that whole month so that they come back to the store and they bring their friends with them.

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Shannon Live: This is a great way to bring this skill to life for students. Using cliffhangers as a writing tool helps students learn to be in control of where they're going with their story at all times. If you want to leave readers guessing what comes next while still feeling satisfied with the story you're writing in the moment, you have to learn to balance closing off portions of your story while building meaningful openings that can be added to another one.

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Shannon Live: It's also important to remind students that a surprise ending should only be a surprise to the reader. So while they're planning out their story, they should be thinking of how they want to wrap it up, and what that big aha moment is going to be, so that they aren't surprised when they get to the end.

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Shannon Live: After you've taken your students through the basic journey, you can take it a little bit deeper by having them actually create a comic from what they've developed.

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Shannon Live: Comics are a medium… as a medium, are known as the art of sequential storytelling, which is why they work so well for teaching students the art of writing.

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Shannon Live: comic writing helps students focus on organizing their events into a logical order, because they can clearly see and visually see the progression of things happening. This is helpful for helping students understand the idea of cause and effect in writing.

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Shannon Live: Because this happened, we will now see that this other thing happens. Breaking the story down scene by scene and panel by panel helps students to conceptualize the process of putting a story together. It also allows their brain to explore linear storytelling in a creative way, understanding logical progression through time and meaning.

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Shannon Live: I love both of these panels that are on… or stories that are on the screen for that reason. You can see the one on the left shows that the… the…

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Shannon Live: building of a town from a peaceful meadow into an over-bustling city, and without any words, we see the entire journey of that town over time, and we can see the horse-drawn carriages and the cars and things, and so we know that time has passed without ever needing to say that.

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Shannon Live: We can also see in Cicero's cat the experience of this cat trying to catch this mouse that is hiding in this space and the way that he's able to move through the house. Again, no words needed to show that one thing leads to another, and this adventure keeps growing from that.

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Shannon Live: In the comic industry, writers go through several steps before they even begin writing their script. The first is the concept breakdown. This is where they have to discuss what the story is about, how the character changes over time, and how many different books and arcs they intend to go through.

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Shannon Live: When working with students, I usually have them break their story down by writing down who their character is, three key events they want to happen in the story, and how the character will be changed by the end. This helps them figure out what the major plot points of the story are, and how they would explain it to somebody for easy understanding.

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Shannon Live: From there, comic writers are expected to go book by book and create a page breakdown and an outline on what happens on each page of the story, highlighting all of the key events.

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Shannon Live: This helps editors understand the basics of the story and recognize holes early on. It also helps writers get a full grasp on the chronological elements of the story to make sure that they aren't missing things, or that the overarching events aren't happening out of order for what makes sense in the story.

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Shannon Live: This is really helpful for students because they want to bounce from one fun moment to the next, and sometimes forget that key elements need to be added in between those. And so, when they are making their story flow smoothly and efficiently, a page map and a page breakdown helps them feel out where they need to put those different little things happening along the way.

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Shannon Live: Finally, comic writers will submit a panel breakdown that literally focuses on laying out the step-by-step action of the story into panel design to ensure that the path that they've developed from scene to scene makes sense visually for pacing and timing.

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Shannon Live: With comics, we are writing entire scenes in one to two pages, but that's only anywhere from 8 to 16 panels, so writers have to understand how to convey the details of the story in pointed and specific storytelling. Because of this, transitions become a huge part of the comic flow. Transitions between panels and between pages are meant to guide readers from one scene to the next.

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Shannon Live: This is… this… without the use of words, we have to build that transition, which means writers have to learn to tell their story through that clear dialogue and action before they even get to the gutter. It also means that students have to focus on clearly communicating what would have happened in that gutter.

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Shannon Live: Or, the gap between the panels, to ensure that the reader is able to follow along.

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Shannon Live: This can be a helpful tool to teach how to separate two events from each other, and how they relate back to one another. Often this is done with a hanging phraser word that lingers between panels, and it also helps communicate the passage of time.

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Shannon Live: The panels that are on the screen right here are a great example of that, because these two students are being told, be prepared to come… become a part of history, and then suddenly find themselves back in time in different outfits. There is no panel in between those, so we have to infer what happened between panel 1 and Panel 2 in this scene to know that they've traveled back in time and what might be going on.

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Shannon Live: Another way we see that is, if a character is worried about waking up on time for work the next day before they go to sleep, a writer can show them setting an alarm before they doze off. The next panel could show them waking up and seeing the clock only to realize it's an hour later than anticipated.

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Shannon Live: They can then show the character looking at their alarm and seeing that they set it for PM instead of AM. It didn't require us seeing the character sleeping for 9 panels to show the passing of the hours that happened, or to convey that they overslept. We just needed to see them set their alarm before falling asleep, and then waking up late.

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Shannon Live: This use of the in-between helps students learn what is important to the narrative and what can be inferred by a reader.

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Shannon Live: When setting up activities for your students to do, there are a lot of great options for using comics in your classroom or learning environment.

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Shannon Live: We're gonna break those down in a little bit more detail. The first and obvious one is creative writing.

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Shannon Live: Comics are built on creativity, and students of all ages love to explore how far they can take their creativity when creating comics.

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Shannon Live: Trust me, I have had students create some of the wildest stories. Everything from aliens stealing everyone on Earth's underwear out of the laundry bins so that they can build a new planet comprised entirely of dirty socks, to a cucumber that became a detective after his family was pickled and he doesn't know how to save them.

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Shannon Live: There are no limits to what kids can create.

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Shannon Live: If you want to use comic writing… comics for creative writing, try having students create an original concept for their comic. A great way to do this is to walk the group of students through the process of character development.

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Shannon Live: problem and solution that we all just went through just a few minutes ago, and create the concept all together to get the juices flowing. After you've done this, have them attempt to do… to create their story on their own.

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Shannon Live: I like to have them attempt each step of the process after… as we go along the way, and see how students are doing with it. If we do it all at one time at the end, a lot of times students get overwhelmed at having to create everything from scratch and feel stressed out, and it causes that filter to close again, and so doing it step-by-step kind of makes it a fun, exciting thing that we're all doing together.

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Shannon Live: I also allow students to use what we come up with together as an outline, in case they aren't feeling inspired to come up with something on their own.

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Shannon Live: You can see in this image the… this screen that we… or the dry erase board that we use as we work through this project. We also, to keep it collaborative, have each student take a turn. We don't let one person kind of railroad through the creation process, so when we're working on it as a group, if somebody gives us a character, the next person can give us an age, and then the next person can give us the where they're from and the power, so that we keep it rotating to give everybody a chance to be able

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Shannon Live: part of the process.

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Shannon Live: And really just make it a group activity that's so much more fun. It's almost like improv comic creation at that point.

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Shannon Live: Have your students create a one-page story in the moment, after you've done all of that process, and put it all together, and then consider offering them a chance to create a full story from there. But giving them the chance to just make that one-page comic in the moment showcases their ability to take what they've created and put it into story format.

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Shannon Live: Plus, it also helps us see if they can understand the proper use of dialogue, as the story should be primarily told in this way.

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Shannon Live: Like, comics often do use narration to help guide through some of the more intense or complicated transitions.

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Shannon Live: The majority of the story will be communicated through the words the characters are saying. That means each character has to have a unique voice and a personality that translates through that, so that as you're reading, you can tell who is speaking and how that bit of speech impacts their personal journey.

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Shannon Live: We're balancing a lot of characters a lot of the time in comics, and so having that tone of voice that fits just one particular character is really quintessential to how that story's gonna go, especially when you get into dialogue-heavy moments like this, and you want to make sure you know who's talking about what.

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Shannon Live: Since comics are also the balance of verbal and visual elements, we in the modern tribes at least, try to limit the amount of words per speech balloon, and even the panels, something that we didn't see a lot in the old days with Stanley writing on these stories.

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Shannon Live: But even then, we try to keep it to around 21 words in a speech balloon or a panel, so that we can leave room for that art. Which means that writers have to be very specific about the choice of language that they use in those panels, because they don't have as many options of what they can fit into there.

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Shannon Live: A great exercise for this is to use that classic Marvel way. In the Marvel method, the artist would take the outline that they created for the idea of the story, and they would draw the art just from the outline. From there, the writer would get the script with the art already completed, and have to make up the story from the outline and the art. This is a great way to do this in a class, because you can actually have your students

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Shannon Live: Get a page that has art on it, with maybe just the word balloons already filled in, so you know that somebody is speaking in there, and then have them actually infer from the story

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Shannon Live: from the art they're viewing what the story is about, and then deliver that story with nothing but the added narrative through dialogue. We can actually see, then, how well the student's understanding what is happening in the story when they do that.

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Shannon Live: For middle school or high school students, you can expand on that comic writing process by understanding the process of script writing, as comics are written in script format, with art direction being conveyed in the same way that a movie or script would be.

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Shannon Live: This is a great way to teach students to understand how scripts are made, and where and when art direction should be used, without forcing them to read old texts that they're not interested in.

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Shannon Live: It also helps them understand that art, much like stage direction, doesn't get read out loud, and so they're going to have to make sure the elements in their story work in tandem with the dialogue to truly understand what that art direction was supposed to convey.

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Shannon Live: A great way to use this is to have them create a script and then pass it to someone else to create a comic out of. This will help them see if their art direction was clear and well-developed by what the artist is able to determine from their included direction.

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Shannon Live: As a comic writer, trust me, there are many times where you write something that you think made a lot of sense in your art direction, and your artist does not quite get what you're trying to convey.

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Shannon Live: If you're in a reading class, a great way you can also use this is to give them a prose story, and have them read the story, and then see if they can turn it into a script. And then you can determine from there what part of the story they would need direction on versus what would be spoken out loud, and you can see whether or not they were able to understand that process of, this is action versus this is spoken dialogue.

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Shannon Live: When teaching writing, we often tend to focus on the major elements of writing, plot, character setting, conflict, theme, point of view, tone, and language and style. Each of these serves a huge role for us in the comic media. For plot.

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Shannon Live: Our sequence of events is vital to the idea of sequential story. What happens first, then second, and so on, works our way towards our conclusion.

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Shannon Live: Comics are often driven by characters because we are able to see their actions and reactions, helping students easily pinpoint change along the way.

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Shannon Live: A great way to have students use comics to understand plot is to ask them to develop a two-page story to see if they can give you a solid beginning, middle, and end.

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Shannon Live: Then have them cut that same story down to a one-page story, followed lastly by a 3-4 panel story. Each step will have them understand how to balance those same important details from the story as it gets smaller and smaller.

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Shannon Live: Setting is usually easily defined in comics, as it also serves as its own character. Think of how Superman is impacted by the power of the yellow sun of Earth in a way that he wasn't on his home planet. Nobody on Krypton has superpowers, but when they come here, they suddenly do.

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Shannon Live: Not only that, taking away the super-poweredness of it all, Kansas has an impact on his personality that the big city doesn't, and that makes him stand out in Metropolis in a way that he doesn't stand out in Kansas. A great exercise for this is to have students take a classic comic character and give them a different setting to live in.

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Shannon Live: What would happen if Batman had lived on a bright island full of tourists, and everybody was happy?

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Shannon Live: Conflict is usually conveyed through big action sequences or other massive events in comics. One of the great things about the medium, though, is that the way page layouts are set up naturally speeds up or slow down a reader's pace, which makes conflict stand out and flow uniquely.

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Shannon Live: Have students create a silent comic where they have to communicate the conflict without explaining it in words, much like the comics we saw earlier.

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Shannon Live: Themes in comics have always been central to the way the stories are told. After all, I think we all know at this point that with great power must also come great responsibility. And for the last 60 years, Spider-Man stories have found a thousand different ways to teach us that through guilt and responsibility.

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Shannon Live: One of the activities I have found really fun is, for this exact approach, is to take the classic first appearance of Spider-Man, Amazing Fantasy XV. Please don't actually give a physical copy to your students, as it's worth millions of dollars. But I take that in a format, and then I give them a modern retelling from 2022, and I have the students break down which version better conveys the theme of the story.

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Shannon Live: Do you understand it better in 1962 when we first introduced the concept of great power versus great responsibility? Or in 2022, where things seem a little bit more relevant to you? Do you feel like that story is more able to convey that theme?

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Shannon Live: Point of view is a fun one for comics because we have the ability to easily shift point of view throughout the story with the use of visuals. This makes for a great writing exercise when asking students to change the character's voice from one page of writing to the next. How would each character respond to the same event that is happening around them? Give your students one central activity that is happening in a story, and then tell them to have five different characters respond to that.

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Shannon Live: It's a great way to see if they can actually differentiate the different tones of voice for each person, the different point of view, and also just to understand that everybody brings something different to the table, so the way they interact with that activity is going to change by who they are.

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Shannon Live: Tone is fun when creating projects, since you're exploring the language the writer uses to create the story. It's fun to put out… to point out two characters and the creator's description of them, and have students determine who they think is the hero and who is the villain, just based on the tone of voice that the creator uses to describe them. Have them create a one-page story based on what they decide, and then reveal at the end who was actually the good guy.

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Shannon Live: Lastly, take a look at style. Comics are told and designed in so many different ways. How does it impact the way the story moves? What happens when there's one panel on a page versus 12?

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Shannon Live: How can you use that style in your own storytelling? Have students pick a comic creator from the suggestions you have, or people that they admire, and try to tell a story in a similar style and layout. Ask them to explain the choices they made to show that they really understood the assignment, and see if it actually flows in the same way.

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Shannon Live: While comic creation can be a solo project, comics are generally created by multiple people. This is great if you are trying to teach collaboration with your students. When writing comics with the intent to collaborate, students must learn to clearly communicate art, direction, and script needs to the artists and letterers so that they can do their part of the project with minimal confusion.

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Shannon Live: Pairing students who don't normally work together on a comic project becomes a great way for them to not only meet others in class, but also to learn to communicate with someone they may not normally spend time with.

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Shannon Live: It also teaches them that you cannot always use slowly your own idea to make a project work, and that balancing working with a group often means ceding to someone else's insight. It's also really great, at least for the next 6 months, to be able to tell your students that comics are made by 6, 7 people, and so they get excited about the fact that they get to also memeify the idea that they need to work with teams.

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Shannon Live: Collaboration can be taught with that technical writing, and all, like, and the fact that we are convincing people to learn to work together. And so, clear direction, technical writing, and understanding becomes huge for the collaboration process as they start to develop their scripts.

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Shannon Live: Comics are also geared around the concept of editing, and collaboration can be taught through that editing process as well.

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Shannon Live: All comics have a minimum of one editor on them, while some can have anywhere up to 12 to 13, checking everything from grammar, art, to story continuity when a series gets really large. When using comic writing in the classroom, build in some time for edits. Give students a proofreading sheet and have them perform line edits on their own drafts, focusing on grammar and stylistic choices.

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Shannon Live: Then pair them with someone else in the class who can perform the same edits on the draft, so they can see how easy it is to miss common errors when it's our own work, and how valuable it is to have a second set of eyes to check the details.

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Shannon Live: I know I've had beta readers call me out for the fact that suddenly my characters have three arms by all the different things that I'm having them do, and the fact that we only have two hands to hold things with, how can we hold 3 things at the same time, and then still wave to other people?

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Shannon Live: This is really useful to having students see those little holes that they wouldn't normally catch.

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Shannon Live: In addition to that, script doctoring or story editing is also a huge part of the comic writing process. There are several ways that you can use that in the classroom. In comics, editors will use beat sheets to break the story down and mark big and small changes. You can mimic this process in the classroom with peer reviews. When we are evaluating projects, we will put post-it notes on the table, giving each student a different color.

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Shannon Live: A lot of times we'll break them into groups of four, and then we'll have the students each take turns making notes about the script on their post-it note, and they attach the post-it note to the story where they see the problem. In the end, the student writer gets a chance to see what someone else is viewing when they present their work, and helps them catch not just grammar errors, but plot holes along the way. Things that we really didn't see, because in our eyes, it made sense when we made it up.

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Shannon Live: For those who want to apply these kinds of tools beyond the writing world, using comics as a way to ensure that students are mastering their reading principles is also a fun way to engage students. One way we do that is we have students create comics based on what they read in prose format. This helps them learn how to summarize and retell a story. It also helps them see… you see where they might have misunderstood the story they read.

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Shannon Live: In our workshops, one of the ways we do that is we read the same story aloud, and then have students work individually to come up with the summary of the story.

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Shannon Live: They have the option of either using key events overall, or simply making a chronological order. Students then create a 1-2 page comic using only the summaries.

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Shannon Live: We once had students do this with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Saturday Morning Adventure comic, which they then got to show their comic story to the cover artist of the comic and explain why they made the choices they made. Which is really great because the cover artist gets the book to read and has to do the same thing when they choose what to put on the cover.

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Shannon Live: It really gave them ownership of their own comic and helped them want to understand the story better before they actually presented it.

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Shannon Live: Comic writing lessons can stretch even further. They make a great way to study historical events when you give students a chance to visualize what happened or even imagine themselves in the moment. You can do this by assigning students different moments throughout history and asking them to create a comic that showcases the people and actions of the time.

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Shannon Live: Take it a step further by asking them to put themselves into the story. We recently created a comic series for the National Park Service that explores the history of enslaved people who escaped and created a community in our very neighborhood that our shop is located in.

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Shannon Live: Over 200 years ago. In the story, two young kids are swept back in time and get to experience the events firsthand.

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Shannon Live: At a workshop with students, we shared that we wanted them to imagine what it might be like to visit a moment in history that they would want to go back to, and experience what they would learn from that if they got a first-hand chance to be there.

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Shannon Live: But it doesn't have to just be history. Ask students to verify they understand math concepts, science concepts, any other concept by creating a comic to showcase what they learned. In fact, we use the same concept of creating a comic to tell us what you learned for our training to ensure our employees understand what they've read before they have to put it into practice. And you can see a little tiny bit of that on the bottom. It's great to see how they

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Shannon Live: Make the humor out of what they learned, and then they never forget it again, because they've made a comic about it.

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Shannon Live: There are so many ways you can benefit from using comics in your learning initiatives. To reiterate some of them, comics break down barriers, making learning fun for kids. Dual-coded learning helps students find understanding in what they are learning, and able to communicate and retain that information longer.

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Shannon Live: Comics can be used to teach character and conflict development, as well as the key elements of writing, a hero's journey, and so much more.

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Shannon Live: Collaboration is a huge part of comics, making them an excellent group project for any learning environment. And lastly, while comics are great for creative writing, they're also helpful for building understanding of topics learned in other subjects as well.

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Shannon Live: Comics as a medium can expose your students to a new way of learning and a deeper understanding.

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Shannon Live: So open your students' mind and watch their imaginations soar, leading them to stronger writing skills through every panel and new adventure. And there are tons of resources you can find along the way, including some that we have available ourselves. And since I brought up math, I did also add in Jean Lewin Yang did a TED talk on how he taught his students math through comic creation as well. And so those are active links, so if you're watching this, you can actually click on any

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Shannon Live: of those to go to them. But…

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Shannon Live: That's what I would love to answer your questions. Are there any questions? Do you have any questions, Erin, that I can add in?

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Erin Bailey: This was incredible, Shannon. Thank you so much. I feel like I… I mean, I know comics very well, but I feel like I learned so much from you. The way you phrased what's happening in between the gutters, I'm going to use that. It's such an excellent way to teach inferencing, so thank you.

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Shannon Live: Yeah, I go in a lot of times, and when I give the blank sheets, like, the blank comic panel pages to students, sometimes I'll even write, meanwhile, or the words, like, and then.

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Erin Bailey: Mmm.

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Shannon Live: gutter so that they understand that they're supposed to flow from this to either something completely different that's happening at the same time, or this happened and now this must happen.

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Erin Bailey: Yeah, such great examples that you shared as well. I mean, your job sounds so fun. Who wouldn't love to work… be with children creating comics every day? Amazing.

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Shannon Live: It is… it's absolutely fine. I think we created, there's 24 Hour Comic Day in the fall, and every year, I just use prompts for each hour from stories that the kids made up, and they… I… the adults are like, what is this wild thing? And I'm like, you have no idea, a 12-year-old came up with that.

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Erin Bailey: Yeah, the cucumber and the pickles, that's… that's gonna be my favorite from today. And if you're watching, definitely click on Shannon's TED Talk, it's amazing. You'll learn a lot from that, too.

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Erin Bailey: I don't see any questions in the Q&A box, so we can, wrap unless anyone wants to slide one in the chat really quickly.

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Erin Bailey: I don't see any. I'm gonna switch it to my screen to give a little shout-out. Obviously, you were here today with us for Kapow Building Writers Through Comics. We have a few more webinars coming up, so…

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Erin Bailey: If you're interested, please check out Every Book is a Life Histories book. We also have

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Erin Bailey: our educator series, on handwriting, syntax, and the secret sauce of Strong Writers, and our next Every Family Counts will focus on early childhood. That's those 3, 4, and 5-year-olds.

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Erin Bailey: And then, as well, please check out Reading Inspire's podcast hosted by me. It is now not only on Apple, but on every single podcast platform. So, hope you enjoy, and thank you for joining us this evening.

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Shannon Live: Thank you!

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Erin Bailey: care.