Make Your Own Comic Strip
Half a day of comic-making built on the folded-booklet format and three teachable tricks. Story first in thumbnails, then pencils, inks and the cover. Ends with a reading and the founding of a comics label, because one issue always becomes a run.
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Before you start
Comics are the friendliest way into storytelling on paper — the pictures carry kids who find writing heavy, the words carry kids who find drawing scary, and the panel grid carries everyone. One sheet of A4, folded twice and slit, makes the classic eight-page mini-comic; the format's limits are the lesson, because eight small pages force choices that a blank sheet never does.
Teach exactly three tricks and no more: panels are moments, bubbles point at speakers, and motion lines make anything move. That's the entire grammar. A stick figure with motion lines and a bubble saying "NO." is already a comic; polish is optional forever.
How it goes
Reading like thieves
Pile up whatever comics the house owns and read a few pages as makers — how big are the bubbles, what happens between panels, how does the artist show running? Stealing techniques from real comics is the honest tradition of the medium and instantly raises everyone's game.
The thumbnail plot
Each artist plots their eight pages as tiny scribbled rectangles on scrap — the whole story visible on one sheet. Enforce the only structural rule — something goes wrong by page three, gets worse by page five, resolves by page eight. Thumbnails take ten minutes and save forty minutes of page-four despair.
Pencils and inks
Fold and slit the booklets, rule the panels lightly, and draw the story in pencil first, inks over the top once each page survives review (their review, not yours). Bubbles get drawn BEFORE the art inside each panel — the classic beginner disaster is a beautiful drawing with nowhere for the words. Stick figures are legal tender; motion lines are free.
Publication day
Covers — title, issue number ("No. 1" does something chemical to a child), artist credit, a price. Then the reading, each comic aloud with the artist doing voices, followed by the founding of the family label — a name, a logo, and the archive box where issues accumulate. Photocopies for grandparents turn a craft into a circulation.
Make it fit your kids
They dictate a story while you draw it badly under instruction ("no, the cat is BIGGER") — a collaboration that produces the label's strangest and best issue. They ink nothing and approve everything.
The eight-page format fits them exactly — stick figures, huge bubbles, plots that swerve wildly at page five. Do not correct the spelling in the bubbles; it's part of the voice.
They'll want craft — panel variety, close-ups, a cliffhanger for issue two. Show them one page of a real comic drawn rough (search any artist's pencils) so they see the pros start scruffy too.
Zine territory — longer stories, proper inking, maybe digital lettering. Commission them for the label's flagship title and give them full creative control and a deadline; the deadline is the gift.
Paper and the pens already in the drawer — free by any accounting. The photocopied grandparent circulation is the only pence in the operation.
If it’s going really well
- The shared-universe crossover — everyone's characters in one jam comic, one page each, chaos canonised.
- A subscription service — grandparents receive each issue by post with an invoice for one hug.
- The adaptation pipeline — the best issue becomes the next film-day script or puppet-show libretto.