Seven Stories Comics Anthology

Way back in June, we ran a four-day-long workshop for two groups of young, aspiring comic book creators at the Seven Stories Centre for Children's Books. We covered everything from characters to page layouts, themes to plot points and pencils to inks. When the sessions were finished, each participant had written, designed and illustrated a two-page strip which we scanned, collated and printed into an anthology aptly named '14 Tales, 4 Days, Seven Stories'

The sessions were a big success, so much so that they led to an even bigger course of sessions at Holystone Primary School that will see the creation of a second anthology of incredible work. So what better way to motivate ourselves and our pupils than to look back on the crowning achievement that led us here?


These are the pencils I created for the front cover. The characters are my own renditions of some of the amazing designs the young people came up with, including Cupcake Girl, Bed Woman, Captain Wonderpants and Sushi Dude. Check out a few snippets below:


Once everything was scanned and I had inked the designs for the cover, Daniel wrote a foreword and created a crossword to go inside and we took it to the printers. Then, every participant received one of these lovely publications in the mail:



Everything is still in development over at Holystone, but we'll be updating the blog with our progress when we reach certain milestones so check back soon to see what we've been up to. A big thanks again to Seven Stories for having us in June and to the young people for their excellent work!

Welcome to Our Blog!

We decided it would be fun to keep a blog of all the awesome creative things we get up to as Jack & Daniel's Comic Book Workshops, so to kick things off here's a little bit of news that relates to a bigger bit of news - we printed up some shiny new business cards today and they turned out great:



The reason we did this was because A) It's much fancier than writing our contact details down on paper and B) We'll be at the EGO Festival in Durham this weekend (Sun 27th Jun) and we're hoping to make some friends and do a bit of networking. If you happen to be in the area - or even if you're miles away! - please come by and say hello. We'll be very eager to put one of them in your hand.

If the promise of a business card isn't enough, we'll also be running a drop-in session for most of the day so you can try your hand at some of our exciting workshop activities. Plus, there will be performances from Lunatics Youth Theatre, an 'alternative' fashion show, dance and live music as well as stalls displaying artists work and selling homemade clothing and accessories.

See you there!