Independent 3-Person Collaborative Comics Making

A simple activity – and a blast do do with students. Here are the instructions: Person 1 draws a blank composition. Then passes it on to Person 2, who writes in the text, adds word balloons, caption boxes, sound effects – anything to do with words – but no drawing! Finally, it goes to Person 3, who draws the images in each panel and finished the page. First step maybe give about two to three minutes, step two maybe 5-7 minutes, and the final step, 15 if you have it, or often we do the final step as a take home. This is one of a typical sequence of activities I do for public workshops, you can see a list of activities for my comics workshops to try yourself here.

The example above was generated in this fashion – one of the most amazing single page comics I’ve seen! I posted more examples below that were pretty cool. The first time I tried this, we did the drawings second and the words third. That was ok, but not as quick and we found it to be less generative than with the drawing last, and I’ve continued to do it this way ever since. I did this once over social media in March of 2020 as #CollabComics and maybe will do again (see that here). But for now – here are some examples, give it a try with friends or family! – Nick