Some of my work from tonight. I didn't plan to but i ended up staying home instead of going to a fun party to do this....man i'm lame.


Came across this today.
The idea of there Being classes for comics at Colleges
& Universities...

I know this isn't the first one or anything, just one of the better accounts of one in the media so far - but the idea of being able to go to school for this stuff. To get a BA, or a PHD one day?

This stuff is something that I have worked at teaching myself for over 20 years now. That's something I'm fairly proud of - nothing changes that.

When I started there were NO schools, nothing that would teach you form & method over content and style, Nothing that wasn't laced with the dictates of so-called consumer demand and an air of self enforced conformity. Nowhere to discussed at length the subtext of the material, as you can for writing conventional literature at collage or university for years.

In some ways that was good, mainstream schools are full of as much BS as they are good stuff. And outsider status has allowed comics to maintain it's alter ego; comix. One of the still recognised cultural rebels in North America [just look at the hipster Prof for proof - all be it somewhat embarrassingly stereotypical].

But there still is the good stuff. I hope comics never stops being strong in the street - Still, there's a thing or two to be learned in some of the better classrooms out there. And soon there will be a school, just for us.

Once I had made the decision to pursue this genre as a career as well as craft, I looked into schools. I took school very seriously. My parents met at an alternative school, and education reform was something that I was aware of before I even found myself in the bowls of Scarborough's 'special-ed' system. I was all the more aware of as a purgatory of BS for it.

I had an ideal of what school should be held up to me since I was a baby, and the reality shoved down my neck every day for 8 years bracketed by hour long bus rides to and from my suburban nightmare.

So I new there was a system, and that there were routs through it, which could work for me, if I fit the mould dictated for them.

But none really fit me. I quickly learned that there was no direct root to my goal or my 'type' through school. I could take a lot of related classes an a broad range of programs, to get into all of which I would have to qualify at levels that excided my abilities being 'learning disabled'. I was generally encouraged to learn a trade, maybe car painting?

I was on my way out already but this certainly didn't help to keep me in school any longer than I stayed in the end. By mid gr 11 I was officially retired from the Scarborough school system, forced out by my VP personally, seen as a trouble maker and "ringleader". Never even got a dammed watch.

I have no complaints to day, or use for schools myself, though I could see teaching funnily enough. There is that ideal that I still believe in, about what school should be.

But now there are classes of people coming out of universities & colleges in The US and here. Some will be no better for it.

Others will come out potentially having hot-housed and sucking up the equivalent of what takes an Autodidact like myself considerably longer to learn with limited resources. And with the social advantages of coming from a system, with all the connections as associations that grants. Knowing a few of the right people in the right places right from the start.

Most, like in other fields will probably fall by the wayside. But even if every class puts out only one moderately productive and skilled creator a year who goes onto bigger and better things, that's a lot more bigger and better things to look forward to.


Take a moment to think about that.

Now who was saying that comics are a dead or dieing medium?

Makes me shiver just the think about it :)