Most people don”t realize that my junior high school educators were a cadre of highly-trained, elite crime fighters. In a series of hand-drawn comic books, I documented their legendary exploits by recreating scenes and dialogue that I”d observed on television.
Occasional “guest villains” made special appearances with the permission of their creators.
I also tried taking on more “realistic” subject matter. In a series of cartoons that were patterned after newspaper comics, I documented the (still largely made-up) travails of my computer science teacher.
The high school newsletter printed my first attempt at serial cartooning — except that, for some reason, its editors released my entire cache in a single edition of the newsletter. They also printed the strips out of sequence.
I continued drawing comic books and strips well into young adulthood and gradually changed my focus from fighters-of-crime to quasi-autobiography. The female lead in my comic strip had a slogan: “Conformity is death!”
I proffered a selection of these later comics to my college”s newspaper but its editors assumed that the main character”s ambivalence about social expectations would translate to its creator being unreliable at meeting deadlines.
And so, my would-be career as a professional cartoonist came to an ignominious conclusion — save for contributing occasional drawings to Bay Area “zines” or to a monthly newsletter for the Society for Creative Anachronism.
Even today, there is something aesthetically pleasing about the crisp black-and-white of a newspaper comic strip. I read “Doonesbury” faithfully, even revisiting the “Flashbacks” while its author is on vacation.
An e-mail bulletin sent to me this week by the Autism Society of America pointed me in the direction of a unique Web site that allows its users to build their own cartoons. Created by Bill Zimmerman with artwork by Tom Bloom, MakeBeliefsComix.com allows its users to choose from a series of characters, each of whom comes with a range of facial expressions and body language. Additional controls create thought and speaking balloons as well as story prompts.
I spent an enjoyable few hours making comic strips and e-mailing them to myself and others.
The online controls are much easier to use than the “Comic Life” computer program, which features a board mind-boggling in complexity that additionally indulges in whooshing sound effects.
Zimmerman envisioned MakeBeliefsComix.com as an opportunity for users to tap into their creativity. A series of story ideas encourage imaginative thinking.
The Web site also recommends that the human and animal characters can serve as user surrogates for working out stories about their lives. My first strip recreated an exchange between myself and another person that completely baffled me. She flagged me down while I was walking on my lunch break at work and asked if I “lived in” Lakeport. I truthfully answered “No” and she went completely ballistic — accused me of “messing with” her.
The woman eventually calmed down and then asked if I knew where a local landmark was — maybe the DMV — and I was able to offer directions.
To this day, I don”t understand why the woman didn”t just ask in the first place if I knew where the DMV was and why she would get so angry at receiving a truthful answer to the question that she chose to ask instead of asking a question that would have elicited a useful response.
Recreating the exchange through a comic strip didn”t offer additional insights into the woman”s behavior, but it did help by allowing me to view both parties as an objective observer; maybe insight will come with time.
The ASA bulletin wasn”t my first exposure to the idea that comic strips can help teach social and non-verbal complexities.
Jeannette Darlington drew comics for years, featuring her sons as characters. As she and her sons explain in “Our Journey Through High Functioning Autism & Asperger Syndrome” (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2001), the cartoon illustrations of Evan and Glen illustrated “right” and “wrong” ways of doing things. Other cartoons also modeled “how-to”s of imaginative play. Evan and Glen loved these cartoons that featured themselves as characters; the book reproduces several.
I”ve seen another example in a very common-place setting: a doctor”s examination room. A series of illustrations are numbered 1 to 10 and depict increasing levels of discomfort. The viewer is invited to choose the number with an illustration that corresponds to his or her level of pain. That, to me, is another form of teaching through visual means.
I don”t necessarily want to treat the comics as just a learning tool, however. Yes, it felt therapeutic to recreate a traumatic encounter but documenting pleasant or fanciful exchanges also have their delights. The times that I spent drawing comic books about my crime-fighting teachers were among my happiest at that period of my life.
To learn more about MakeBeliefsComix.com and make use of additional resources, you can visit Zimmerman”s online blog at www.billztreasurechest.com/blog/.
Cynthia Parkhill is the interim managing editor of the Record-Bee and the editor of the Clear Lake Observer-American. She can be reached at observeramerican@gmail.com.
