CBR Lab took the Petting Zoo (our rolling bag full of comics supplies) on the road for a special workshop with UVM’s Anthropology Club. (“On the road” might be a tad exaggerated…we met just down the hall from my office…). Our task was to create a four-panel comic from a short 1887 newspaper article about an idyllic picnic along the shores of Lake Champlain interrupted by a sighting of the “Lake Champlain Sea Serpent” (who today we could call “Champ”). Here is my effort:
It’s a really simple exercise, taking a short newspaper article and converting it into a four-panel comic. The text can become captions, or phrases from the text can become word bubbles–or both. There are no rules here! It really gets you thinking visually and in terms of sequential narrative. And it’s fun to do in a group, especially when the language or theme of the article itself invites humor or things-out-of-the-ordinary. In this article, we all got a kick out of its description of the witnesses, emphasizing that they were all “reputable” individuals who had “had no beverages stronger than milk and lemonade.”