← Week Eleven

Thank you!

Thank you for joining me on this read-along of Making Comics by Lynda Barry. I really appreciated working alongside you, drawing monsters, making comics, and documenting life in panels. I know that I got a lot more out of the book this time because of all of you. Your enthusiasm and can-do approach to the book was awesome.

The final assignments are listed below for those who are tackling these more-involved final exercises.

I hope to continue to see comics from you in the future!

Amy

Week 13 Schedule — Final Week

For next week:

1. Exercise: Character Zine (p 176). This exercise is listed as two hours. This is a very involved exercise, eight “chapters,” and asks you to have clear memories of people and scenes. In the “Variations,” she does offer the option to do this with fictional characters. She notes that her students are asked to re-draw/re-write final versions. You obviously don’t need to worry about that.

2. Exercise: Nine Boxes (p 182). You’ve used this structure before in this book. This exercise involves brainstorming a story in nine boxes with words and then drawings from a story.

3. Exercise: Story House (p 184). This is a numbered sequence for pulling together part of a story in comics. You don’t necessarily need to do this, but this structure will be one you can try as you move forward with your own comics and sequential art storytelling.

4. Skipping the Interview Comic at this point in the read-along

5. Skipping Drawing Boss at this point in the read-along

You are welcome to share your work from this week or last week in the chat.

General info for anyone finding this read-along for the first time:

Read-Along Format

All posts can be found here.

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m running the weeks as Wednesday-Thursday, hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

Leave a comment

This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations are always appreciated.

Quoted sections with page numbers are by Lynda Barry from Making Comics unless otherwise noted.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

"Both autobiographical and fictional stories rely on the remembering of certain elements as they come to you. Drawing a place, a scene, or a character lets information arrive without words." (Lynda Barry, Making Comics)

← Week Ten

Reflections on Week Eleven

It was great to see your fairy tale comics and some of the other exercises from previous weeks. Feel free to share your Week Eleven comics in the chat.

There are only a few exercises left in the book. If it helps you to have things broken down, the Week 12 schedule is below.

Week 12 Schedule

1. Exercise: Point of View (p 162). This exercise involves an extended comic about a fire. It is listed as an hour.

2. Homework: The Story Filter (p 166). This combined exercise and homework is listed as 3-5 hours. This is a multi-part assignment that involves writing and drafting a variety of scenes, and then re-drawing a final set of panels using talking animals. Your best bet here is just to follow the numbered directions, step by step, and see what happens!

If you find that these exercises are too involved or not of interest, stick with your daily diary comics at least a few times.

General info for anyone finding this read-along for the first time:

Read-Along Format

All posts can be found here.

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m running the weeks as Wednesday-Thursday, hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

Leave a comment

This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations or wish list treats are always appreciated.

Quoted sections with page numbers are by Lynda Barry from Making Comics unless otherwise noted.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

"The past is in constant motion. Some say a memory changes each time we remember it—giving the impression that a memory degrades over time—but what exactly is degrading? ‘What really happened’ is never a fixed state. The significance of any element changes depending on when we’re recalling it, why we are recalling it, and who we are recounting it to. The past is in constant motion." (Lynda Barry, Making Comics)

← Week Nine

Reflections on Week Ten

Wow! It feels like it has been a long time since we’ve checked in! The chat has been pretty quiet. I get the sense that as we’ve reached this part of the book, nearing the end, most people have dropped off and out.

It’s okay. I know it’s hard to keep up the momentum. Maybe I could have done something better? I’m not sure.

I appreciate those of you who have been sharing your exercises, and I know I’ve seen at least one fairy tale in progress, which is fantastic. I know some of you really want sequential art, comics in some form, to be a part of your daily creative habit and a part of your storytelling.

I’m with you. Yes to both.

Even if that isn’t your ultimate goal, I hope that you have found yourself loosening up as you’ve explored making comics over the last few months with Making Comics as a framework.

Fairy Tale and Daily Diary

The fairy tale retelling was the longest thing we’ve done so far. I did Little Red Riding Hood, which is related to some other (non-comics) work I’ve been doing, so it was a nice story to focus on.

It was also a challenge!

I didn’t plot the panels the way I probably should have, and I ended up not fitting the whole story in twelve, but that’s okay. I was more interested in trying to both carry the narrative and shift the angle and perspective along the way. There’s obviously a lot more I could have done if I wanted to really do a finished comic art version of this story!

I hope you enjoyed working with a fairy tale, too.

I enjoyed being tasked with copying someone’s work to get a feel for their line. This can be such good practice, and I think I typically shy away from doing this because I don’t want to imitate someone’s style. I found it a good exercise and one I think we should do with a range of comic artists we enjoy to get a really wide feel for how lines and bodies work. I encourage you to do it again and again as you explore, especially if you find you are having trouble with bodies or even elements of the scene, like interiors or perspective. Look at how others do it and try drawing recreating some of their panels as a way of better understanding how things fit. Just be sure to note who you are modeling the work after so that it’s always clear.

For me, the practice of capturing panels each day and just settling into doing that and exploring how I do that (even if it means drawing the same thing each day) is really important right now. I am continuing to make that a priority. That wouldn’t have happened without this read-along group, so thank you. My sense of responsibility to “show up” each week with my notes and examples has been a motivating factor. It might also not have happened had I not gotten sick along the way and shifted to digital, which is the right fit for me right now.

(Depending on where you are in your art journey, you may have “feelings” about digital work. You may find your perspective changes somewhere along the way, or not. Just note that working on paper or digital is a choice everyone can make, and you can go back and forth throughout your journey with comics. Nothing is set in stone.)

Week 11 Schedule

For next week:

1. Exercise: Basic X-Page (p 144). You’ve used this structure already, but this is a “neighbors” example that she frequently has students do. (See the video below.) There is no “drawing” part to this exercise.

2. Exercise: Drawing a Life (p 152). We did a version of this earlier in the book with monsters. You can decide if you want to do it again. This exercise returns to the Character Jam exercise to choose a character to draw at the points in life indicated.

3. Exercise: The Walk (p 156). This is the biggest exercise for this week. You’ll do an X-page to gather details and then document a walk with a series of drawings. The examples are visually exciting. Follow the directions and have fun with it!

A note on the final weeks: The remainder of the book contains longish exercises. This section is, overall, a bit more disjointed than the rest of the book, but these exercises offer techniques, structures, and tools you can try. I’ve mapped out the assignments for weeks 11-13 to finish the book. That means there will be two more weekly schedules after this one to wrap up the book.

Given that many of these are exercises I expect people will choose not to do, I won’t be extending the timelines. I’ll just post each weekly schedule, and people are welcome to share what they do from each week.

If you started the book, I encourage you to at least read the rest of the book. I hope you might be drawing a panel or two during the week that you weren’t drawing before, too.

I might read through a Scott McCloud after this. I have at least one on my shelf that I have flipped through before but never read start-to-finish.

To Watch

From the Week(s)

A few examples of diary comics from recent weeks. This is just me being accountable to my own reading of the book and practice.

How did the week go for you?

If you would like to share any of your work from the last two weeks, head to the chat!

General info for anyone finding this read-along for the first time:

Read-Along Format

All posts can be found here.

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m running the weeks as Wednesday-Thursday, hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

Leave a comment

This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations are always appreciated.

Quoted sections are by Lynda Barry from Making Comics unless otherwise noted.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

← Week Eight

Reflections on Week Nine

Thank you to those of you who have been reading these posts and sharing your work in the chat. I am enjoying seeing your comics!

We are at a point in the book where I feel like some of you will begin to pick and choose what you do from the exercises and “how much” you do. There are not that many exercises or assignments left. They seem to be a bit more ad-hoc in terms of sequencing, and one of them is a repeat from earlier in the book.

I will break things up for probably the next three-four weeks (this one and two or three more) to wrap up the book.

This week, we were given a triangle format and a checker layout to try for daily diary entries. We also did the exercise with you looking at an object while it looks at you.

I’m not going to put most of my exercises, but here are a few: (For the most part, I don’t expect anyone to “understand” these. They are quick diary comics capturing elements from each day.)

I actually really liked the triangle format. The checker format was not my favorite. (I was tempted to block out my text. It is, after all, hasty “about-the-day” text — not polished text.)

Week 10 Schedule

We are moving into Section 3 this week!

I thought these three seemed reasonable for the week, but I won’t be surprised if this ends up too much. However, as I noted at the start, I think we are at a point where people will be choosing what they do.

For next week:

1. Exercise: Draw Me a Story (p 138) — This is a LONG one! This involves drawing a fairy tale in 12 frames (3 pages with 4 staggered frames on each). There is also a “review frame” page (step 3) to gather the material before drawing. This one seems like a huge jump in length from anything we’ve done so far. I worry this could be the whole week for some of us. (We also haven’t talked about “camera angles” in this book yet. I’m sure you have a sense of what she means. You can also find some suggestions on page 194. Do what you can.) If you end up doing a shorter comic, that’s up to you (and totally okay).

   What fairy tale should you do? You can choose anything. She notes: “Stories with classic elements like monsters, princesses, kings, witches, and shorter Grimm’s Tales work well.”

   Here are a few video options if you don’t have a book handy:

   • Goldilocks and the Three Bears (a storybook)

   • Rapunzel (audio only — which might be best; see the channel for other options)

   • Rapunzel

   • The Princess and the Pea (very stylized)

   • Hansel and Gretel (a storybook)

   • Snow White

   • The Three Little Pigs (a storybook)

   • The Three Billy Goats Gruff (a storybook)

   • Fable Cottage channel

   (I’ve been working on a written piece that is related to a fairy tale. I just have to say that here for my own reasons.)

2. Exercise: Instant Book Review (p 140) — You will need to choose a graphic novel you’ve recently read (or go read something) for this assignment. Don’t overthink the selection. There is a lot of writing for this exercise: a “review frame” and an “x page” and then five minutes of writing under the drawing (with no mention of what you thought about the book). (It sounds like a lot for what this is.)

3. Assignment: Copy Cat Book Review (p 143) — This involves imitating (copying) full panels (scenes and characters) from a book of comics by a single author. (This could be the same book you use for the book review.) You will be drawing six different kinds of images from the book, 10 minutes each. (75 minutes) — Try to time this one. You have a model you will be looking at. You will be redrawing what you see, leaving out all words. The goal is to see what can be done in 10 minutes. (If you really enjoy this process, do it again with another author.) We will assume this exercise will span two weeks, so if you get to it during Week 9, great. If not, it will be on the schedule for Week 10, too. (Note: The directions do say you need 12 index cards… but the written directions seem to only be for 6 drawings, unless I’ve missed something. If you love it, do it again.)

Again, this looks like a lot to me, especially if you are still trying to fit in some diary comics. We’ll adjust next week, as necessary.

How did the week go for you?

I hope you are enjoying the book. I know some of you are already working on in-depth comics, and some of you are newer to the format. I hope that everyone who is continuing to read along, whether you are joining in publicly or not, is finding the book useful.

Please take a minute and comment here — either about your own experience with the week or just noting you read, saw, or skimmed this post. As a free read-along, your comments, “likes,” and shares are helpful.

Then head to the chat to share your work! Sharing is optional, and you don’t have to show everything you did in the week, but when you share something, you will feel more involved in the group. There’s built-in motivation when you participate at that level.

General info for anyone finding this read-along for the first time:

Read-Along Format

All posts can be found here.

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m running the weeks as Wednesday-Thursday, hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

Leave a comment

This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations or wish list treats are always appreciated.

Quoted sections with page numbers are by Lynda Barry from Making Comics unless otherwise noted.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

← Week Seven

Reflections on Week Eight

Week 8 was mostly an extension of the previous week to give everyone some extra time. I’ve seen a few Animal Diary pages shared in the chat. We added the Animal Ad Lib for Week 8, which pulls the six animals to the same page with a line of text.

Beyond that, we’ve been continuing to work on the four-panel diary comics.

This coming week will have you try a few other daily diary formats as we finish up this section of the book.

We’re moving into the home stretch!

“If I don’t record the memories I have right now, they’ll probably never be recorded.” — Drewscape

A Few Panels from the Week

I’m continuing some of the things I talked about last week, including the character with the rabbit ears. Capturing four really simple panels (related or simply juxtaposed) from the day has become a routine part of my day, something I look forward to and have been making time for each evening. (For that alone, the read-along is already feeling like a success for me.)

Here are a few from the week. (These are 4-panel pages. They don’t read “across” the separate pages. I’ve just grouped them so that they aren’t huge on the page. I haven’t been consistent with how I am labeling them, and I haven’t added a few words when necessary. I value these for the daily documentation, so a note here and there helps.)

It has been disconcerting lately to run into multiple examples of rabbit ears in other comics and graphic novels. This is definitely the “seeing blue” effect, but it does make me a bit uncomfortable. I tend to steer well clear of things other people do, but I’m so attached to this character right now though that I’m just ignoring the rabbits that are popping up everywhere. There are a few other animals I might be curious about embodying, but there is something about this accidental rabbit. I’m willing to keep exploring. Plus, my animals from last week made painfully clear that my animal game is lacking!)

If you had asked me coming into this if I might end up with a hybrid animal-character as a result of this deep dive with Barry, I might have thought a monster was possible, or maybe at least the adoption of a unicorn horn.

I can’t say I would have ever predicted rabbit ears. Go figure.

Oh… animals…sort of. There were animals I wanted to draw. That’s partly how I ended up with two things that look like cats.

To Watch

In poking around for videos to share, I ran into this one, which does have rabbit ears:

Here’s a follow-up to a Drewscape video I shared in one of the earlier weeks.

I know you haven’t been working with text yet, but notice that both of these videos mention not simply repeating the same thing with the images and the text. They need to work together and should supplement and extend but not simply serve the same purpose.

There was a similar discussion of the way text and image work together in a live video this week with Kelcey Ervick, author and artist of the fantastic The Keeper graphic novel.

I had the ‘live’ up while I was working, and I snapped this screenshot when Kelcey was talking about the relationship between image and text:

(Note: The live was free at the time, but the replay is behind a paywall. You can watch a few minutes in this clip, and the mention of the words vs. images is at 1:54.)

Week 9 Schedule

As I mentioned last week, there are a few daily diary comic explorations to wrap up Section Two of Making Comics. Barry stresses that you need to try formats for several days (or a week or so) at a time to get a feel for them. So even though there are only two or three specific things mentioned for this week, the expectation is that you try the diary exercises multiple times.

For next week:

1. Exercise: “You See It When It Sees You” — This exercise uses an inanimate object (like a toy or something you have sitting around on a shelf). (You may have already done this one. I put it on last week’s schedule, too. If not, tackle it this week.) (p 130)

2. Diary Exercise: “Triangle Diary” — This is a two-part exercise. You’ll do the triangle page and then take one of those panels to do a full page. Pay attention to step 3 (if you are a stickler for the rules) because you are to draw the image from the triangle exactly the same into the full frame and then fill in around it. (40 minutes) (p 132)

3. Diary Exercise: “Checker Diary” — This one is eight panels over 2 pages. You’ll draw in four of them and write your notes in the others. There seem to be some missing directions for this one, but it seems clear that you should repeat steps 2-3 for panels 3-8. (30 minutes) (p 133)

4. Extra: “More Monsters” — I know some of you are struggling to make the jump between the fun, additive character and monster exercises in the early part of the book to the focus on more involved diary panels. There really is a big jump. If that’s you, you might want to make some more monsters this week. You could go all the way back and revisit early weeks, or you could do something similar to the “animal” panels from Week 7 (though you can skip the color if you want) and draw a set of monsters and pair them with first lines. You already know how this exercise works, so it will be impossible not to overthink it (e.g., impossible to keep it totally authentic), but a “Monster Ad Lib” would be a great way to bring monsters back in, see how you feel about them now, and use them to give voice to some words. You could even add different words….. so many ways to think about it.

Note

1. Upcoming exercises will require that you have a book of comics or a graphic novel on hand and that you have read it. You can easily check a graphic novel out from your library. If you need suggestions, let me know in the comments. I’ve always got a few checked out!

2. I read The Cartoonists Club by Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud recently. It was great, and I meant to mention it here at the time. I think you all would probably really enjoy it, given the context of our read-along. A very short write-up was part of this post. I am a fan of both Telgemeier and McCloud.

3. I’ve included reviews of a number of graphic novels in my weekly posts. I think about this one often and just put it on hold again. Some of you might be interested.

How did the week go for you?

Is anything changing in how you feel about your comics work? Are you approaching the daily diary (the panel part) differently? Maybe you are noticing a bit more fluidity or speed or “just do it” mentality than you did at the start?

Please take a minute and comment here — either about your own experience with the week or just noting you read, saw, or skimmed this post.

Then head to the chat to share your work! Sharing is optional, and you don’t have to show everything you did in the week, but when you share something, you will feel more involved in the group. There’s built-in motivation when you participate at that level.

General info for anyone finding this read-along for the first time:

Read-Along Format

All posts can be found here.

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m running the weeks as Wednesday-Thursday, hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

Leave a comment

This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations or wish list treats are always appreciated.

Quoted sections with page numbers are by Lynda Barry from Making Comics unless otherwise noted.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

← Week Six

Reflections on Week Seven

I don’t know that I have a lot to add this week. I don’t have much of a head for animals, so the “Animal Diary” animal panels were a bit on the wonky side. Her notes say “not” really knowing how to draw the animal is a fine approach, so I just went with it. But six of them was a lot since I wasn’t really “invested” in these animals.1 The “Animal Ad Lib” exercise (next week) uses the animals, so you do need six, but it feels like a minor exercise. (I’ve got the animals to do it.)

I really did enjoy the four-panel exercises in Week 6, and this week, we had the “Four Box Diary,” which is basically a four-panel diary comic. I didn’t do this daily, but I did it a few nights, capturing some random moments from the day. This is, really, sort of where I want to be, so this exercise was the biggest interest for me this week. I prefer this multi-panel approach to the single-panel daily diary, which feels like it has so much to carry. (I’m not sure I had articulated this to myself until just now. This is partly why I like reflecting on each week and writing up my notes.)

From the week: (Note — you aren’t expected to understand these.)

(Stairs? No clue. What’s up with the other person in panel 4? Lol.)

(Apparently, the couch fell over in panel four. I’m at a loss.)

(Lots of issues. Points for the attempt to capture something. Definitely this one isn’t clear if I don’t add text to explain. That’s okay. My goal is the attempt and a study of the juxtaposition of labels and what happens in between.)

We are only a few pages away from Section 3, which is the final section of the book. I asked in chat, trying to gauge where everyone is. (I know it’s been a busy week for me.) It initially sounded like even if a bit behind, people wanted to move ahead. I think I’m dragging my heels now because the end is coming into sight, and I’m really enjoying the weekly check-ins!

In the final pages of Section 2, she introduces a few diary formats and suggests that, really, you should experiment with new styles for a week each. I know some of you are missing the fun monster and character panels. The diary comics, I’m guessing, feel more involved and a bit less quirky for some of us. I encourage you to find ways to make the exercises work for you.

To Watch

Week 8 Schedule

My initial thought was to just add the “Animal Ad Lib” for this week and hold the three other exercises for Week 9. I’m sticking with a modified schedule, adding just two exercises. I propose the following for Week 8:

1. Continue working on Week 7, which includes doing a total of six “Animal Diary” pages. If you don’t want to color these, don’t. (Week 7 list of exercises and page numbers appears at the bottom of this post.)

2. Exercise: “Animal Ad Lib” (p 129) — This involves redrawing your six animals into one six-panel page. (This is just an exercise. Don’t let this or the animal diary pages bog you down.)

3. Exercise: “You See It When It Sees You” (p 130) — This exercise uses an inanimate object (like a toy or something you have sitting around on a shelf).

4. Extra time: Continue doing “Daily Diary” comics (any form) or using the “Four Box Diary” format from Week 7 to record your days.

It’s a light week, but there’s some built-in catchup time here. If you haven’t started the exercises for this week at all, this is still going to seem like a lot. There will be some leeway next week, too.

Fair warning: Week 9 will only be adding two additional diary formats, with the goal that you use the formats throughout the week. After that, we will be in the final section of the book.

Instagram example of “You See It When It Sees You”:

And another:

How did the week go for you?

How are things going? Are you seeing any changes in how you approach capturing a moment or a set of moments? Please take a minute and comment here.

Then head to the chat to share your work! Sharing is optional, and you don’t have to show everything you did in the week, but when you share something, you will feel more involved in the group. There’s built-in motivation when you participate at that level.

Leave a comment

General info for anyone finding this read-along for the first time:

Read-Along Format

All posts can be found here.

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m running the weeks as Wednesday-Thursday, hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations or wish list treats are always appreciated.

Quoted sections with page numbers are by Lynda Barry from Making Comics unless otherwise noted.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

← Week Five

Reflections on Week Six

We took an extra week for Week Six, and I hope that felt good and gave everyone a bit of a breather and some room to both catch up and settle into some longer and more involved sets of panels.

Deep breaths, people. You can do this!

I don’t know that I would’ve shifted into digital had I not gotten sick a few weeks ago, but it has ended up being the right combination for me right now. I have continued to do the exercises and assignments that way—and I’m okay with that. This has been the right move for me personally.

Four Panels

I think the jump to the four-panel comics was a big one given that mostly we’ve been drawing really quick characters (and monsters) without any context.

I really enjoyed the challenge of these four panel exercises.

These were a real stretch for me. I would say that I typically am not an imaginative writer. (At Illustrated Life, I write life-oriented pieces and creative nonfiction. My sequential art goals are in that space, too.) I don’t make up stories, and yet these exercises require that. They require you to just wing it and spitball a made-up scenario or narrative.

I really surprised myself, and I had fun giving into the process of the exercises and just seeing what happened.

Son of Character Jam

(Each of these panels starts with one character from the previous Character Jam exercise and then continues with a minor change in each panel. This is similar to the earlier Photo Booth, but this time, whole bodies were required. It’s a small space for whole bodies! We were told to leave the caption areas blank.)

Collage artist, key collector, “has a list” (bird watcher), and Ferris wheel attendant:

“The main thing is to let your hand respond to this question: ‘and then what happened?’ It can be very small, like a moth, or it can be big like a fire or it can be just four frames of not much going on at all.“ — Lynda Barry, Making Comics

I really like this approach of simply answering panel to panel, what next?

Make Something Happen + Basic 4 Panels

(The assignment was to use characters from the Character Jam exercise and create four-panel comics that included setting/context. The Basic 4 Panels “extended exercise” was to continue doing 4-panel sets. These are no-word/silent comics.)

Above: I used two of the original characters that I had drawn for Character Jam. I used two new characters, and I used a “unicorn wannabe” from Kuku’s Character Jam. (I had already done a variation on a unicorn wannabe, but I enjoyed taking another approach to a similar character and starting with a character I didn’t draw (which would be more similar to the round robin reality). It was definitely a different experience — harder for me. YMMV.1

The snow globe one was the last in this sequence, and I am glad I did it. It may be lacking in scene, but I think the story is there.

“The story may not go anywhere big. For now, just allow it to unfold in an unplanned way, sticking to the time limits and seeing what happens. If there is no ‘punchline’ don’t worry for now.” — Lynda Barry, Making Comics

Additional Panels

I also did some additional panels, sometimes one, sometimes two, and other practice related to my individual days (a la Daily Diary). I have really been pushing at working some things out (and practicing things I specifically struggle with) — and I made notes to myself in places about things that happened with the drawing. I’ve left the notes in. This is all basically just sketchbook (or journal) material.

Here are a few panels (not always related) from the last two weeks:

Some of the things I tried to capture really didn’t work, and that’s okay. I’m learning something even when it doesn’t work. (I’ve also been bouncing around with the appearance, which is something I’m thinking about.)

I got hooked on the idea of rabbit ears. In the panels below, I was also experimenting with moving a character. After I had added to this page over a period of days, I went and checked the chat to see if I could pinpoint anything. I found some rabbit ears on a character from Sea Cow, and there may be others. I don’t know if that was the seed or not, but it stuck. At any rate, I am really enjoying this exploration.

More Daily Diary:

From the “Fruit” comics session with K. Woodman-Maynard (drawn in an approximate 20-minute workshop and not refined after; text not really legible, but I know):

(There is a lot missing here. These four are disjointed, but it was good for me to do this, and I know our recent weeks with this book enabled what I got done.)

So anyway, there is a large assortment here. My goal in sharing these is not to have anyone read or analyze the story of them. My goal in sharing is basically accountability.

This is how I move myself forward. I do the work and show up and share. I encourage you to do the same.

Week 7 Schedule

As I mentioned last week, we are at a point in the book where the exercises are more involved, and in many cases that means multi-panel work related to the Daily Diary. I think this is a point where it potentially becomes harder to keep up because we’re not simply doing monsters or round robin drawings.

Kudos to those of you who are still engaged and doing the work.

I really hope that you stick with it and that you at least try the exercises this week. If you find that you are really stuck in terms of what to draw, then make something up.

I think some drawing in panels following whatever the concept she’s sharing is more important than no drawing.

I think the best way you can continue to advance your comfort level with the drawing is simply to keep doing it. I think that’s true with every kind of drawing, but I really feel like I can see some change (even in attitude) in the last two weeks in my own panels. I hope you see that in your comics, too.

For Week Seven:

1. Diary Variation: “Four Box Diary” — four panel daily diary - 20 minutes (p 125)

2. Diary Variation: “Sister Image” — two half-page panels. (This one seems conceptually hard since it requires certain types of memory. Work with it however you can.) - 20 minutes (p 126) (See video below)

3. Diary Variation: “Animal Diary” — 20 minutes (p 128) x 6!!! - You will need six Animal Diary days (drawings and text) to do the next exercise, which we will push to the following week. (Don’t manipulate this! Just follow the Animal Diary directions. Don’t look ahead!)

It sort of looks like only three things, but it’s really eight things. These are all ostensibly 20 minutes, so 20 minutes a day plus one extra session.

It may be a stretch. It may be that once again we will have to extend the time so that everyone can fit these in. I think we should go with what’s here and see what happens and how it goes. We can decide by next Monday if we want to take another week.

If we end up extending, and I’m not saying that we should, but if we do, then I would recommend filling in any extra time you have with additional four-panel comics using either your daily diary notes or a made up character.

To Watch

Here’s another video I thought you might enjoy — I like his format.

Cheers!

How did the week go for you?

Are you enjoying the book! Are you surprising yourself? What discoveries have you made about your relationship to the comic line? Please take a minute and comment here — either about your own experience with the week or just noting you read, saw, or skimmed this post.

I don’t know what a rain clap looks like in a comment, but let’s do that. In a Barry class, there wouldn’t be a lot of talk, just “seeing.”

Then head to the chat to share your work! Sharing is optional, and you don’t have to show everything you did in the week, but when you share something, you will feel more involved in the group. There’s built-in motivation when you participate at that level.

General info for anyone finding this read-along for the first time:

Read-Along Format

All posts can be found here.

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m running the weeks as Wednesday-Thursday, hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

Leave a comment

This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations or wish list treats are always appreciated.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

"Somehow these drawings carry emotion. My friend Dan Chaon told me he thinks images do this. They carry emotion the way the Earth carries its own weather patterns, always in motion, never fixed." (Lynda Barry, Making Comics)

← Week Four

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ It was great to see so many of your Face Jam and Photo Booth exercises in the chat! They are fantastic, and I really applaud everyone for working through these exercises, even when they feel awkward or silly or uncomfortable. You are building important skill and comfort and confidence with each panel!

Reflections on Week Five

This is going to be a relatively short write-up for Week 5. I may disappoint some of you because I have broken a few rules this week.

I have been sick with Covid. That matters in terms of the read-along only in that I was not able to keep up with all of the exercises, or with staying analog.

Before I started feeling sick, I did part of the Betty Boop exercise. What a bizarre (maybe disturbing) cartoon. I watched it a few times and tried to draw a few characters from it. I was particularly enamored with the little sailor guy who appears in the ink and, in terms of drawing, the bear-like monster with its willowy arms.

It was right after that that things went a bit downhill for me.

I legitimately could not fathom having what it would take to use pen and paper to do anything. I didn’t want to completely skip the exercises this week, so I decided to do the Character Jam and the "life" diary panel digitally.

I know that’s against the Barry rules. I know that the entire premise of Making Comics is very drop-your-phones-at-the-door-anti-technology, but I felt like I could hold the iPad and do quick sketches that way. I felt like I would get the benefit of doing the sketches rather than doing nothing. So that is what I did.

I had folded a piece of paper into the 16 panels already, so I just imported an image of that page and used the same boxes. The very, very, very small space of the 16 panel page is just so small (and it felt even smaller while sick).

I did my Character Jam sketches that way over a few days. (It was way beyond me to have done all 16 in a row this week.) Then I did the "Your Life Timeline" page using the Daily Diary format, the X page, and a half-page panel, just as I would have done on paper.

Even though I have read through Syllabus several times before and know I have seen the X page, I was thinking the X page was used as a Daily Diary variation, a different way to segment the page. I must have never fully paid attention.

In one of the videos I watched in preparing for this week of the read-along, it really clicked for me that the X is not a different way to quadrant the page, but is, instead, a way to say, "This is a scrap piece of paper. It has an X through it." (I don’t know, conceptually, if that changed anything for me or not, but it’s an interesting idea.)

For the exercise, I picked a moment that probably would never have come up outside of this exercise and decided to go with it. I only have a hair of a memory of this moment anyway. The drawing is pretty sparse, and it raises questions for me in terms of the things that I did and didn’t draw, but the idea of that memory is captured (for me) in this quick sketch. (Using words would help a lot.)

In terms of the exercise itself, I felt like this was a gateway to realizing that there are a number of memories that are clustered or localized in the same area. That was interesting just on a personal content level.

I think in words though, so the translation is still a challenge, but, overall, I felt good about giving it a go this week.

Feeling a bit more clearheaded today, I can see the effects of the week in my Character Jam people. I redid one. But I'll let the rest stand. There are a few here I am interested in playing with as part of next week’s exercises.

I'll admit that the more I worked with these characters, the more I started to feel myself loosening up and trying to solve some of the questions I have about shapes and bodies (things that are really instinctive for some, but I can't picture). I still had some backwards feet this week, some reversed hands, arms growing out of necks, and other oddities. I can laugh though. I can laugh.

Some of you saw that I shared this quote in Notes this week, too. I was really struck by this practice and the sanctity of the feeling:

"When someone reads their story, we draw a tight spiral slowly while we listen. We respond by drawing an image from what we heard, including the full body of at least one of the characters. These 'response drawings' are done in three minutes on index cards. They are silent drawings, and we give them to the reader after we all take a look at them. This is how we 'talk' about the story to the reader and our other classmates and also to ourselves." (Lynda Barry, Making Comics)

To Watch

There are other videos that demonstrate this, but here’s one that walks you through using an X page. In this video, she points out that the X is a reminder that it is a “thinking” page:

For those of you who loved the glass wall from a previous video, here’s one for this week that uses the X page. The X page videos all start with a spiral.

I watched the opening to this again today, and I really thought about the spiral she was drawing and was amazed. I’m a hand propper (terrible habit, I know), so as soon as a spiral requires me to lift my hand, it’s exponentially harder to keep a controlled and close line. That she drew such a close spiral in the air is impressive!

Week 6 Schedule

This is going to look like “not much,” but I’ve looked at this several times, and I think this is a lot for most of us. Given the pace I’m seeing in the group (and I know that four or five people are in sync and a few others may still be hoping to catch up), I think to do more than this will be too much for everyone.

For next week:

1. Assignment: “Son of Character Jam” (119) — This requires a 16-panel page and four of the characters from last week’s Character Jam. (I initially suggested you might want to pick up a character or two from work shared by others since, in person, this would have been round-robin. But you can totally work from your own characters. There are so few of us in the chat that you may find it more straightforward to use your own drawings. I’ll leave it up to each of you to work out how you want to approach that.) Note that the captions are left BLANK in this exercise. Just do the drawing portion. (30-45 minutes)

2. Assignment: “Make Something Happen” (121) This involves four 4-panel pages (horizontal panels). On each page, you will use one “Character Jam” character, but this time you will first fully flesh out the scene in panel one and then continue showing what happens “next” in the next three panels. She says 6 minutes for each of the three new panels (after the one with the full scene). Four multi-panel spreads, four characters, and sixteen much-larger panels in all—this one is going to feel different, and I think it’s going to feel like “a lot” for some of us. (~90 minutes)

3. Extended Exercise: “Basic 4 Panels” (124) Use the format from “Make Something Happen” to draw a simple, progressive (“what happened next?”) four-panel comic—12 minutes. No text. She’s suggesting you need to do this four-panel approach a number of times to get a feel for the timing and movement of it as a structure. You will be drawing four pages like this already in the assignment above, but use this extension as an added push if you have additional time. The character or subject matter here is free-form, real or imagined. It isn’t limited to anyone you’ve drawn or to the daily diary. (15 minutes a day)

The exercises and assignments coming up after these are similar, including variations on the daily diary panels. There is a clear leap from just “drawing a character” to more involved scenes. Buckle up!

How did the week go for you?

Are you enjoying the book!

• What are you enjoying most so far about what you are exploring with Making Comics?

• Any surprises about your own line, memory, resistance, inner voice?

Please take a minute and comment here — either about your own experience with the week or just noting you read, saw, or skimmed this post.

Then head to the chat to share your work! Sharing is optional, and you don’t have to show everything you did in the week, but when you share something, you will feel more involved in the group. There’s built-in motivation when you participate at that level.

General info for anyone finding this read-along for the first time:

Read-Along Format

All posts can be found here.

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m running the weeks as Wednesday-Thursday, hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

Leave a comment

This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations or wish list treats are always appreciated.

Quoted sections with page numbers are by Lynda Barry from Making Comics unless otherwise noted.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

"A drawing may come from you, but it exists apart from you in both matter and meaning to others. When I look at a drawing I’m not thinking about the person who made the picture. I’m meeting something." (Lynda Barry, Making Comics)

← Week Three

Reflections on Week Four

Overall, this felt like a lighter week in terms of the exercises and assignments. I will be interested in seeing everyone’s Face Jam pages.

Because the book has repeatedly had us in “monster mode,” I approached Face Jam with a hybrid-monster sensibility that resulted in characters that, predictably, don’t look like actual people. After I finished the nine-panel Face Jam, I wished I had actually created real characters that might come into play, family or people I know, for example. Wacky faces are what emerge when you use random shapes for heads and words for noses, of course.

“The kind of drawing we are doing is quick, crude, anonymous, and disposable. We draw a face to see who shows up.... We draw to activate our super-power: we find faces, people, creatures in a few scribbled lines. They arrive intact. We can answer questions about them.” (Lynda Barry, Making Comics)

The Photo Booth exercise was interesting. With just the face, and a face that might have wonky or whimsical elements to begin with, altering the face, even just a little bit in each panel and making it look somewhat different, was harder than I expected. I also felt like I kept getting my characters closer and closer to the camera, which was odd. I got off track at one point and gave my “word nose” to another character.

Nose job in panel 3!

These frames do all read differently and say something. Ultimately, I really enjoyed these exercises.

Note: Looking at the finished Photo Booth, I want to go back and look again at some really good exercises in the Brunetti book that explore expressions.

"Instead of looking at our page of characters as good or bad drawings, we use them as story activators." (Lynda Barry, Making Comics)

Daily Diary

I haven’t been as diligent with the Daily Diary as I should be. I work all day, and most days I don’t do anything else that puts me in action. (Boring, I know.) I find that to be a hurdle when trying to illustrate a Daily Diary scene every day. So much of my day-to-day existence is internal or involves small, micro movements of me sitting in the same place, that I struggle with how to translate anything to a comic.

• How do I draw myself with my feet propped up on the couch, laptop in lap, and working or staring out the window? (Okay, I tried a version of this, minus the window.)

• How do I draw myself with the iPad and working on my 100-day project or writing?

• How do I draw myself standing in front of shelves and trying to figure out what to get rid of? (This one doesn’t sound hard, but it will be from behind.)

• How do I draw myself thinking and not thinking about the coming week?

• How do I draw myself cleaning up puke from a sick person. (Okay. I did draw that one.)

(Or why? Why would I draw any of these things?)

I have continued to do a quick Daily Diary drawing in my planner each day, though I dropped the Batman mask this week.

Partly, I struggle with the logistics of how to represent the body in whatever positions I would like to show. I have a terrible time trying to see myself and draw from a “looking at me” perspective. It’s that “I’m stuck behind my eyeballs” thing. My tendency is always to draw myself from behind, which might be just a head visible above the chair, and draw whatever I see ahead of me. I’m not “in” the scene. I’m “looking at” the scene. I tried taking a few timer photos this week to get a sense of body position in some of the myriad sitting/working in the same chair moments. (I’ll continue to experiment.)

I’m feeling (a bit) self-critical, but I’m not giving up.

“Have mercy on the unspeakable monster who has no other way to tell you it’s you.” (Lynda Barry, Making Comics)

Subscribe now

For the Watchers

I have watched this video several times:

This one, too:

I shared this one in chat:

You all are awesome!

Seeing all of you jump in and tackle really challenging scenes has been awesome! It’s great seeing some of you continuing to share and interact in the chat. That enriches this read-along/draw-along for all of us. Kudos to those of you going out on a limb and sharing your work. You’re all doing a fantastic job, and it was a lot of fun to see all of the Batman drawings last week. I am looking forward to your faces from this week!

Week 5 Schedule

For next week:

1. Exercise: “Let’s Boop It!” (104) — Watch the cartoon. (It’s about 8 minutes.) After watching, draw four drawings from memory, one each of four different characters, 3 minutes each. Then draw yourself dancing with one of the characters.

   (Note: This is a round-robin exercise, so you draw yourself four times, dancing with a different character each time. You only have the four you drew, so you can draw yourself dancing with each, or modify the exercise however you would like. You could each share one character drawing in chat (not Boop) and then copy someone’s drawing and draw yourself dancing with it. Doing that is optional and requires early participation in chat for this exercise, so plan ahead. Save the rest of your characters to share at the end of the week.) (30 minutes — looks longer)

2. Exercise: “Whole Life Diary.” (107) This uses the Daily Diary format and adds an “X-page.” The drawing is 5 minutes followed by 7 minutes of writing. Her example is full-color, which skews what is likely possible in 5 minutes and with a black pen! These are no-words scenes — one panel. (45 minutes)

3. Exercise: “Character Jam” (114) — Again this is a round-robin. One portion of the round robin relates to the “caption,” which is a label for a character, like an occupation, name, title, fairy tale character, or descriptive phrase. (20 minutes — looks longer, but she says the 16 drawings are 1-minute each)

   I put out a call for “captions” in the chat, and here are some (below) that were submitted that you might choose from when you do the exercise. You’ll need to randomly pull 16 of them for the exercise. (You may find others added in chat, and you may want to mix in some of your own.) I’ve mixed up all the ones people shared so that they are randomized.

   There are 45 captions below. If you want to be really brave, make a list of 16 numbers (without looking at the list), and then grab the corresponding captions that match. (It’s also okay to pick and choose the ones that you want to do.)

1. Hot air balloon pilot

2. Frankenstein’s monster’s third cousin drinking coffee with their best friend

3. A deep thinker

4. A man with a bulky sweater digs a hole

5. Mr. Toodywampus

6. Wizard student

7. Anyone from Peter and the Wolf

8. Blue ribbon winner

9. A damsel in distress telling someone’s fortune

10. Tig the Twirler

11. A marionette puppeteer

12. Sailor Sam

13. Opera Annie

14. Pizza maker

15. Marble factory manager

16. Snake caretaker

17. Knitting champion

18. Needs sleep

19. Marine biologist

20. Roller coaster operator

21. A tennis player on the court

22. Mr. Rogers when he was a third grader

23. Tootsie

24. Shark trainer

25. Orchid grower

26. A jockey

27. Tired librarian

28. Talks to trees

29. Cigar smoker

30. Chemistry teacher

31. A 1880s suffragist at a rally

32. A seven year old accidentally locked in the zoo overnight

33. A man with a bulky sweater digs a hole

34. Hip Hop Henry

35. Lives in the past

36. Private eye

37. A woman cooking a big pot of something

38. Marie Antoinette baking a cake

39. Unicorn Wannabe

40. Babysitter

41. Recently ghosted

42. Working in a booth at a craft fair

43. Lumberjack

44. Key collector

45. Ham radio operator

Looking Ahead

Please plan to share at least a few of your characters in the chat at the end of the week (starting next Thursday). We will need to grab characters from each other for the following week to make things a bit more random (as if we had passed pages around and ended up with a sheet of characters drawn by many).

We will stop at page 118.

Note: I have two potentially complicated weeks in process/coming up. I will be doing what I can and looking for everyone in chat. I know these round-robin things could be handled in a more “real-time” way, but I hope some creative sharing in chat will allow us to work with drawings made by others without too much trouble.

Some of you have expressed an interest in drawing together or meeting via Zoom. Let me know if that is something you are interested in, and we’ll see what we can work out. I draw once a week with people via Zoom, and you are welcome to try that. But I’m happy to set up a separate session for those of us doing Making Comics. We’ll be working on some more involved comics in coming weeks, and it might be fun just to draw at the same time as others.

How did the week go for you?

How are you feeling about the work you are doing as part of this book? Are you surprising yourself? Have you made discoveries, had aha moments, or had small breakthroughs?

Please take a minute and comment here — either about your own experience with the week or just noting you read, saw, or skimmed this post.

Then head to the chat to share your work! Sharing is optional, but sharing is caring. We can all help each other by sharing and commenting.

Cheers!

Leave a comment

General info for anyone finding this read-along for the first time:

Read-Along Format

All posts can be found here.

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations or wish list treats are always appreciated.

Quoted sections with page numbers are by Lynda Barry from Making Comics unless otherwise noted.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

"No matter how rudimentary the drawing, whole bodies in a setting will give you the most information about your characters." (Lynda Barry, Making Comics)

← Week Two

Reflections on Week Three

I did not expect this week to catch my attention in the way it did. When I think of my prior experience with Making Comics, I think monsters and Batman. I know both of those were a mental roadblock for me before. I was a bit worried going into this week, but this was Batman week, and I kind of loved it.

Before I started any of the Batman drawings, I called up some images of Batman online to take a quick look so that my short-term memory had something concrete to pull from about Batman.1

There was a lot I didn't remember about what, at a glance, makes Batman Batman.

You probably knew all these things: half-face mask with pointed ears, costume with visible underwear, belt, bat logo on the chest, gloves, boots, and a cape. Simple things. But when it comes to a simplified drawing, simple things are the identifiers that help the viewer "read" the drawing. Simple things help us differentiate and recognize characters.

I took a quick look at Batman, and then I did the first set of Batman-me drawings. I was trying to maintain elements of my self-portrait, elements I used in my character in Week 1, and integrate those with the Batman elements.

The first drawings were silly, but I was intrigued enough by those first Batman-me drawings, that I did a few more.

"Drawing Batman is my favorite subject for this exercise. Most of my students are sure they can’t do it." (Lynda Barry, Making Comics)

I had a series of conversations happening. They went something like this:

• Why do the ears look like cat ears?

• How did that bat in the middle go again?

• Why is it so hard to make glasses work with a colored-in mask? What happens to the eyes underneath?

• What a cheesy belt. I guess it's a tool belt?

• No way am I doing the ridiculous underwear look.

The underwear was the thing that puzzled me most. (Captain Underpants was also in my head.)

With a hard pass on the visible underwear, the first several Batman drawings I did had the belt but no underwear. They also used a body that builds off of the Brunetti approach we used in the early chapters. (I need to start fleshing things out more, especially with the legs, something that really hit home because of the underwear (or lack of underwear).)

Then, on Sunday, I was doing a digital version of my Batman-me self-portrait as part of a digital comic list project I do each week. Not pressed by a three-minute clock, I made some more deliberate choices, like continuing the rainbow theme onto the tights. I was able to really look at how the parts were going together. As I looked at the finished Batman-me, still in black and white, it felt unbalanced in terms of lights and darks.

I reconsidered my position and decided to break things up by adding the underwear.

I already had the belt in place when I decided to add the underwear. I added in the underwear and dropped in the black.

I looked at it for a little while, thinking it looked really busy (see image on left below). Then I realized that the belt is supposed to connect to the underwear.

It was a funny moment, but it was really a lightbulb moment, too. I redid the belt and underwear, wondering why in the world the underwear are on the outside.

Curious, I poked around, and it turns out that there really is this whole thing about why comic book heroes wear their underwear on the outside. (A lot of people have this question!) In part, the underwear on the outside is used as a visible distinguishing factor that shows that superheroes are not just regular people. The video below offers some other reasons, too. (You may be young enough to not have this “underwear” thing as part of the costumes you associate with superheroes.)

I decided I kind of liked the underwear in my drawings — although I didn’t reach that conclusion until the week was almost over. Since these pieces still don’t really have regular pants (because I am still just using leg attachments), the underwear added something. I continued that for the next few.

The other thing I did is a bit of a divergence, but I decided to add a daily comic drawing to my (mostly unused this year) planner. So, instead of drawing the separate drawing in the Daily Diary, I've put it in the planner, something I would like to continue doing. (Sorry. I know I'm not 100% following the rules, but the spirit is the same.)

You can see a bit of my progression with Batman in these images. There are some really rough first ones (and some that didn't even get included), but there was some growth, and I made a real effort to play along. I've got some arms in the wrong place, some legs going wonky ways, some scale issues, and other things happening, but working directly in pen and in (typically) three minutes, the sequence of building up the overlapping elements often ends up visible (and way messier than I like). That's just part of it—and part of what the book challenges us to embrace right now.

All in all, this is good learning.

Playlists

Many of you have mentioned the music Barry uses. You might’ve noticed it if you watched the long video last week, too. I’m not sure this is my kind of drawing music, but here are a few playlists you can try, by Barry and by students. If you decide to make your own, send me the link, and I’ll share it.

• From Spring 2024 (DJ Hairball - Barry)

• From Fall 2024 (DJ Hairball - Barry)

• From 2022 (student)

• From 2023 (student)

• Three-Minute Songs

• A list for 4-5 year olds (DJ Hairball - Barry)

You all are awesome!

Working through this with all of you is fantastic. I am really enjoying seeing your work in the chat, and I love how engaged and supportive everyone is. Keep it up!

Week 4 Schedule

For next week:

1. Exercise: “Face Jam” (85) (15 minutes) —> This is a round robin of nine faces. You don’t “have” to fold your paper unless you want to. Replicate the drawing process as a solo exercise by doing each step and moving on to the next face and repeating for however many faces are noted. Then move on to the next step. Pay attention to how the exercise is constructed:

   1) Head shape, neck and shoulders (five seconds each)

   2) Three sets of ears in different styles (five seconds total)

   3) Three sets of hairdos (nine seconds total)

   4) Three sets of eyes (no eyebrows) (nine seconds total)

   5) Three noses (see specific requirements in the text)

   6) Three mouths (nine seconds total)

   7) Three sets of eyebrows (five seconds total)

   Repeat until all faces are complete.

2. Homework: “Pattern and Solid Black” (91) (for each of the nine faces from “Face Jam”) (90 minutes; use color)

3. Assignment: “Photo Booth” (92) (60 minutes) —> Use four of the faces from “Face Jam” as the basis for this exercise, which involves a grid of 16 squares (four versions of each face). Solid black only.

4. Daily Diary: Continue with this practice at least a few times a week. There are fewer “exercises” this week, but they take longer. View your Daily Diary as your standby when you want to do “more.” Depending on how much time you have, you may find using the modified format shown last week from Syllabus helpful.

5. Practice: Imitate 3-4 drawings between pages 94 and 102. Imitate these (a process Barry supports) but try to also find ways to make them your own.

Stop at Section 2 (103).

Cheers!

How did the week go for you?

Are you enjoying the book! Are you surprising yourself? What discoveries have you made about your relationship to the comic line? Please take a minute and comment here — either about your own experience with the week or just noting you read, saw, or skimmed this post.

Then head to the chat to share your work! Sharing is optional, and you don’t have to show everything you did in the week, but when you share something, you will feel more involved in the group. There’s built-in motivation when you participate at that level.

General info for anyone finding this read-along for the first time:

Read-Along Format

All posts can be found here.

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m running the weeks as Wednesday-Thursday, hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

Leave a comment

This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations or wish list treats are always appreciated.

Quoted sections with page numbers are by Lynda Barry from Making Comics unless otherwise noted.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

"I wish I could get out from behind my eyeballs and flip what I see around." (Episode 438, 13:14)

← Week One

A Wonderful Start in Chat!

Thank you to everyone who jumped in wholeheartedly in the comments and in chat to share thoughts and exercises from Week One. It has been great to see so many of you sharing your work, your class names, and your support for one another. Everyone played along with general rules of the exercises, which helps everyone feel comfortable with the reality of three-minute drawings. Your enthusiasm is a tidal wave of inspiration! It also helps create a welcome space for exploration. If you didn’t visit the chat last week, you might drop in this week and say hello!

As a reminder, the chat will be easier to follow if you use the “reply in a new sub-thread” option when commenting on what someone shares. This will create a system of shares by participants with comments about those shares stored in sub-threads under each one. You will then be able to scroll through the chat and easily see the “main” post (shared work) from each person and click to open it up and read the comments on that work.

Reflections on Week Two

This was a monster-heavy week in Making Comics. I mentioned my own mental block with the monsters last week, and I saw some of you make similar comments. Given that, this week may have required some extra lifting in terms of getting out of your own way.

We have to get out of our own way, and that is partly what you have to trust that this book can enable and unlock if you play along.

The week started with blind drawings: bacon/egg, mermaid, giraffe, and the statue of liberty. There’s not a lot to lose here. With your eyes closed, the drawings are what they are. I think one minute each felt long in most cases!

“Sometimes someone will be dismayed by their drawings. They take a little longer than others to make friends with the lines their hand naturally makes, but that friendship will come if they keep drawing.” (Making Comics, 55)

These quick blind drawings were followed with the skeleton in three colors, also eyes closed. As I told my group on Sunday, I took a good long look at a picture of a skeleton before I started. That was my only chance at even approximating a skeleton. I did use three different markers, but it turned out two were “mostly” dead, which I didn’t know because I had my eyes closed. (Totally okay!)

“I don’t believe the people who made these drawings were able to see these living lines once they opened their eyes. Maybe they could only see what was not there. How can a drawing survive that?” (Making Comics, 57)

Then we reached the monsters. There were a lot of monsters, well, four, but then there were parents and siblings and a whirl around the dance floor as an aging monster.

“An unintended character seems to arrive whole from a scribble. It has a mood and way of moving and a disposition toward the world around it.” (64)

I did the “Monster Jam” exercise twice, on two different days. The first time, I finished and felt like I had come closer to animals than monsters. (Yes, we could argue the semantics, but there was a different feeling, and that mattered to me. I wanted to push on that, on the letting go.)

More-animal-than-monster would have been okay, but I wanted to see what would happen with another batch on a different day. They were different, but they still felt stilted. It puzzles me because I don’t dislike monsters. I think most of Barry’s monsters are pretty compelling. Some of them are even charming. And they always feel fluid.

Maybe it’s time for a rewatch of Monsters, Inc. I can draw my way through it.

Following the Line

While things felt awkward, I noticed in one of the first “Monster Jam” panels that I reached a point where I thought something was going to be an arm, but it made more sense as a mouth, and so it became a mouth. I was still drawing as I recognized this disjunct and the change in the plan, and I just went with it.

I didn’t know what the “whole” monster was going to look like at the beginning, but looking at the shape, I had a few ideas. That in the drawing process, the line had an idea of its own, and I watched myself just go with it, felt liberating. This single moment felt like the point and the breakthrough, however small, for the week.

It felt like this was a good example of what she talks about in the opening pages, about the nature of image and how it appears on the page. (The comic example of the kids talking through their drawing as it unfolds, about the fire, is about this.)

Why Monsters? Because the improvisational mind is transferrable and the experience of creating characters without planning helps us remember how things can come about intuitively, how structure and plot have a spontaneous core that is too easily forgotten when we believe we must know what we are drawing before we can begin.

If you open the way for them monsters will surprise you and this is a reason to draw them. One of the hardest things to remember is to keep certain doors open to unknowns. When you are lost, there draw monsters.” (66)

The second half of the monster section is “Monster: This is Your Life,” which included six additional drawings, three minutes each, using the chosen “Monster Jam” monster.

I think I’ll probably continue to play with the monsters a bit. I quickly regretted that mine were amoeba-like. It’s worth another go.

🎧 This old Creativity Matters Podcast episode (377) is related. I thought this might have been from the last time I worked on this book with others, but it isn’t. I rarely listen back to old shows, but I turned this one on and the monster discussion still rings true:

“I think of fairy tales, the many stories of a misunderstood creature of hideous form that is chased away by those who encounter it. It’s true form remains unseen by rigid souls, which is the tragedy.” (Making Comics, 59)

Daily Diary

The “Daily Diary” format in Barry’s books has always been something I’ve enjoyed. I haven’t always done the comic (or drawn) part, but I find the simple list-making to be really good for gathering facts about the day in one place. (This is something I do in various ways, including in my illustrated journal. But when I return to doing Barry’s Daily Diary, I am always reminded of how powerful I think this format is for documentation.)

The format shared in Making Comics uses four sections of one page in the composition notebook, two taller sections for lists of details that indicate what you “did” (three minutes) and what you “saw” (three minutes). At the bottom, two smaller sections hold what you “heard someone say” (30 seconds) and a “question about the day” (30 seconds). (I’ve done this other ways and made longer lists for the “heard” section, too.)

Then, choosing one of the items from the “did” or “saw” lists, you draw a comic panel at the top of the facing page about whatever you selected and write about it (five minutes) at the bottom. For information-gathering and locking details of a day in place, this is a great approach, with or without the drawing. But if you are working through this book because you have an interest in making comics, then the panel step, obviously, is important practice.

With each daily diary panel, you will be putting yourself into a scene.

For me, that may mean making coffee or sitting in my chair with a computer in my lap every day. I’ll be looking for other ways to single out drawable moments. That’s part of the challenge.

The Syllabus Version

Syllabus also uses a Daily Diary assignment. It has a slightly more simplified shape and a much-smaller drawing requirement, which makes it a 7-Minute Diary. It looks similar to the left-hand page shown in Making Comics, but the bottom right box is for a drawing of something from the day instead of a question. When I have kept a Barry-style Daily Diary before, I used this format, with its low-bar drawing requirement.

The image below shows some of the Daily Diary explanatory info from Syllabus. I’m sharing this because you may find that sometimes doing this version fits your schedule and time. I encourage you to do the full version, too, but I thought this might be helpful.

🎧 I’ve talked about the Daily Diary format a number of times on the podcast. One example is Episode 264. (Warning: older shows may have lots of broken links because I lost my podcast site last year. All episodes from 200 on are on Substack, and searchable, but the links within show notes may be broken. The CMP dates back to 2006.)

Flipping Myself Around

Barry always insists on drawing the whole body. This is something I struggle with, not really because of feet or hands, which is why she says people often don’t include whole bodies. When I did my first daily diary this week and decided what I should draw in the panel, I had trouble sorting it out and sorting out the space and perspective. But I was also seen from behind, and seated, which meant, really, I was even less than a head. I was just a bit of hair above a chair. (The scene I was trying to capture was me talking to the person seated in front of me and the person seated to my left.)

I can’t flip myself around in my head and see myself.

This old Creativity Matters Podcast episode (438) is a super rambling episode, but about 13 minutes in, there is a related moment:

Draw Along

There are a number of videos online in which Barry walks people through a daily diary page, typically a 6- or 7-minute version. The video is a 6-Minute Diary using the format shown above with a small drawing in one of the bottom squares instead of a full panel on the facing page.

(The above video is timed. You might do it along with her and see how it feels. You may also find “Four Minute Diary” helpful (which is just the recording of the top two lists). Note: Not sure why that video doesn’t show up properly, but if you click it, it will take you to the video.)

In this video, which is close to two hours, Barry walks a group of people through a number of the exercises we have now done, including the blind drawings and Monster Jam:

Class Names

Thank you to those who shared your class name in the chat thread. I planned to put these into a handwritten PDF, but I don’t have that ready yet. I will work on it tonight and add it in tonight or tomorrow.

Playlists

Many of you have mentioned the music she uses (you’ll hear this in the long video above, too). I’ll add links next week to the playlists (both Barry’s and others at Spotify). If you decide to make your own, send me the link, and I’ll share them.

How did the week go for you?

Let us know here in the comments. Then, if you want to share your work (totally optional), you can share in the Week 2 thread of the chat. Share your work and please consider leaving a supportive comment for someone else. The chat is what we make of it.

Week 3 Schedule

For next week:

• Exercise: “Two Hands at Once” (69) (We skipped this one last week.) (10 minutes)

• Exercise: “Time” (76-77) This one involves drawing five things multiple times in increasingly shorter amounts of time. Play along with the time requirements! (20 minutes)

• Exercise: “Draw Yourself as Batman.” (79) This involves four drawings. (35 minutes)

• Daily Diary Assignment for the week: “Draw yourself as Batman in four scenes from your day, 5 minutes per frame. This is a ‘silent’ diary, no words (for now).” (79 and more context/info on 80)

• Exercise: “File Folder Animal Jam.” (82-83) I was going to skip this one because in the classroom setting, it is a “rotation” exercise where multiple people work add to each drawing, but I think it’s doable. There are several steps, including the animal, a companion (same type), vegetation, scenery, and then coloring it. (See the additional directions on page 84. The directions call for two of these—one the class added to and one you copy and do on your own. Feel free to only do one.) (I wouldn’t worry about the “file folder” substrate. You can do it in your composition book or on other paper. Similarly, this exercise does specify crayons, but you may decide that colored pencils are suitable and can take the same time to build up.)

Stopping at this point sets us up for faces in the week after. If you feel like you have way more time to devote, the Daily Diary is your gateway!

Reminder: You will want to be trying to fit the Daily Diary in (at least a few times a week). This week, one of the “assignments” is to use your Batman-you in four of your Daily Diary pages.

Let me know how this schedule feels.

Have fun!

General info for anyone finding this read-along for the first time:

Read-Along Format

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m running the weeks as Wednesday-Thursday, hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

Leave a comment

This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations or wish list treats are always appreciated.

Quoted sections with page numbers are by Lynda Barry from Making Comics unless otherwise noted.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

"Words and pictures together make something happen that is more than good or bad drawing. You don't have to have any artistic skill to do this. You just need to be brave and sincere." (18)

Previous post — Making Comics—Getting Started

Reflections on Week One

Last week we read the introductory pages of Making Comics by Lynda Barry. I am really happy that so many of you have decided to work through this book with me and with a small group! I think there can be real benefit in the small group work along format, especially in terms of keeping you moving forward and pushing through whatever resistance you have, if any.

Everything was going okay when I started (re)reading Making Comics again. I love Barry's voice and her awesome drawings, the way the pages are full and overflowing and sometimes chaotic. I love the way she talks about image and line and voice and her expectations for her class. I love the way she talks about writing and drawing and comics and memory.

"You'll sit in a different seat in a different part of the room next to a different classmate each time we meet. We get to know each other through our work." (29)

As much as I love Lynda Barry, I always think I would absolutely fail her class. (A few of you have taken classes or workshops with her, which is cool!) I tend to freeze and draw a total blank when presented with random challenges that are both playful and imaginative. My inability to visualize jumps up as a huge stumbling block (in my head). As soon as I hit the first exercises, seemingly simple exercises, no story required, I felt my resistance. I felt the wall.

The "Attendance Card" exercise is based on Ivan Brunetti's work. I love Brunetti's style. (I highly recommend looking at both Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice and Aesthetics: A Memoir at some point.) As charming as Brunetti’s style is, it feels so singular that trying to mimic it never looks like "my" style, and somehow always looks crazy awkward. (I'm not good with stick figures either. I think I've got a general "lack of understanding of body positions" problem!)

Draw my whole body for the attendance card? And in Brunetti's style? Well, I've got to be somehow gigantic. But, wait, where do the arms go? What the heck are they doing in this image that has to have the full body? Okay. That one has a coffee cup, but the other one has nothing to do. Do our arms really just hang there? Is this the hair I want to stick with? For some reason, I put a rainbow on the shirt. Okay, symbolically, that tracks.

“Kids speak image. They are fluent in a way that allows me new understanding about a certain state of mind that twins itself with certain activities. It’s something I can’t learn by talking about theory or by talking in general. This is a different sort of language. This language is what I’m trying to teach in my comics classes. This language moves up through your hand and into your head. Young children are native speakers.” (7-8)

Next up... "4 Drawings in 12 Minutes," the astronaut, the fruit, the monster, and the animal. Oh, yeah. I remember those. I remember having no freaking idea last time around about the fruit one. What’s an astronaut look like? And the animal. I get really literal about the "turning into an animal" thing and keep seeing myself literally morphing, and then I'm confused. How do I show that in a single image? I have some strange idea of me stepping out of my skin to reveal an animal, and then I'm lost. How do I combine the Brunetti me of the self-portrait/attendance card and an animal?

I looked at the "tiger" example and realized maybe I was overthinking it, but my attempts to keep the same figure I'd drawn initially and do it in these styles were painful, in a comical way.

“My way of teaching comics is not about developing characters. It’s about waiting to see who shows up in certain circumstances. Your hand needs time to wander enough to be able to find something you weren’t aware of, like an expedition partner who can see things you can’t. The hand is experiencing the same world in a different way. It’s you, but not you.” (13)

I am not sure three minutes is enough time for me to see who shows up!

Even so, I was glad I did these timed drawings for Week 1. I did use a timer. I set Alexa, and she turned on fine and then refused to turn off each time, which left me shouting at her to stop, which didn't add to the pleasure palace moment of having tried and failed to draw myself as a pear. It's the only fruit I could think of that fit with the huge body, although an apple would have had the same impact.

Does a pear have a stem? Maybe I don't know enough about fruit, I thought.
But then came the monster.
I'm really bad at monsters.

I'm here (in this read-along) because, metaphorically, there are monsters. There are monsters crawling all over the calendar and maybe in the walls and in the backyard. There are monsters, but I have no idea how to draw them.

The Ugly dolls leftover from the kids don't seem to help me understand how to make a monster that will look like me or that has my voice or that I will find workable as a bridge, an alter ego to some inner hybrid character. I do love sock creature-style monsters though. Let’s see what happens.

In all of the comics I've done before, I've been pretty much me, and in recent years, I've almost always only been just a head and torso. That's why I need this book, this challenge, and this group.

I have no idea what the arms do or how to rotate the figure in space. I need to do a thousand "bad" drawings with full bodies and crazy settings to try and get a better feel for what a body is and what a body can be.

If it takes monsters to get there, I’m in.

So, yeah, that was day one. It was midnight when I did the five drawings, all in a row. I decided to do them again (on another day) before wrapping up Week One. Except for the fruit, which I honestly can't bear to show the first one, I think the day 1 attempts worked out better than the redo. Ironic, right?

"In the same way you don't have to like the way your liver looks for it to be able to function, you don't have to like the way your drawings look for them to start to work." (40)

(The astronaut is an outlier. I should have tried it again and didn’t. The self-portrait element is lost.)

"Think of your comp book as a place rather than an object. It's where you go to practice the language of the image world." (37)

How did the week go for you?

Let us know here in the comments. Then, if you want to share your work (totally optional), you can share in the Week 1 thread of the chat. Share your work and please consider leaving a supportive comment for someone else. You will help make the chat a welcoming and supportive space.

Several of you have shared your "class name," which is great. If you put it on all of your work, people can address you by that. We all see our real names, too, when we post or comment, but we can play along with class names for those using them. It might help you work outside of yourself and free you up in new ways.

I labeled my cards this week with Astra, a preexisting name, but maybe I should have picked something fresh. Her directions to students say to "choose a name for yourself based on a character you are fond of." Hmmm.... Her examples for personas she has had are Professor Sasquatch (who appears in Syllabus), Professor Peanut, Professor Skeletor, Hot Stuff the Little Devil, Professor Mandrake Root, and Professor Hot Dog. All of these have lended themselves to drawings "of" the character.

Who could I be? A snail? A dragon? A griffin? A sphinx? A phoenix.
I might just be Astra.

"It's good to have someone to turn into when class begins. A different you becomes present."

Week 2 Schedule

For next week:

• Pages 53-66, 72-75 (skipping one small section that we'll loop in the following week)

• Exercise: "Close our Eyes and See Me" (four 1-minute drawings) (5-10 minutes)

• Exercise: "Blind Bones" (you'll need three colors of marker/pencil/pen) (5 minutes)

• Scribble: "Monster Jam" (20 minutes — 10 for the drawing and 10 for the dialogue step)

• Exercise: "Monster Draw Near Me" (this uses your "Monster Jam" drawings) (20 minutes)

• Lesson: "The Daily Diary" — skip ahead to read this and start integrating it into your practice. Try to do at least one for this week. (I'll talk a bit more about the "Daily Diary" next week.)

• Attendance Card: Do at least one using one of the prompts from page 47

It's not that many pages, but there are a number of exercises. This seems like a manageable amount for a week? (Some have more/less time available, and I want this to be relaxed enough to be sustainable for everyone.) If you are antsy to do more, do "Monster Draw Near Me" with another monster. Or repeat the "Monster Jam" and see who appears.

Tip: If you go ahead and start doing the daily diary daily, even if you are only doing the written part, you will be actively listening and observing. If you have plenty of time, this format will have you practicing every day.

If you have extra time, you might enjoy this exercise:

For a real throw-back, here’s Lynda Barry on David Letterman in 1988:

Read-Along Format

This is casual read-along, but some structure will keep us all moving forward together.

Each week we will have a set of pages to read and exercises from those pages to do. At the end of the week, I will post some form of reflection here on the week because that is how I will best work through this book. We can then discuss the week in the comments and share exercises/work in the chat (because the comments don’t allow attachments). I’m running the weeks as Wednesday-Thursday, hoping to post my reflections late Wednesday and have our discussion/chat start on Thursday. So every Thursday starts a new week of reading/exercises.

Leave a comment

This read-along is part of Illustrated Life. Thank you for reading. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations or wish list treats are always appreciated.

Quoted sections with page numbers are by Lynda Barry from Making Comics unless otherwise noted.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

“Words and pictures together make something happen that is more than good or bad drawing. You don’t have to have any artistic skill to do this. You just need to be brave and sincere.” — Lynda Barry, Making Comics

Hi! Several people have now expressed an interest in working through Lynda Barry’s Making Comics together. If you know others who want to join in, they are welcome.

Previous posts — 1 (floated the idea) and 2 (people jumping in)

It sounds like many of you have read Syllabus or Making Comics before but are interested in going through it again. That’s great! These are books you can return to for a refresh time and again. In addition to building and practicing your skill with sequential art, you will also find some techniques in these books that are useful for journaling even beyond comics.

As I have said to some of you, Syllabus is one of my favorite books. Making Comics is the newer one, and it builds upon and repeats some of the core ideas from Syllabus. I think of it as another semester of Barry’s class with a slightly tweaked syllabus.

You don’t need both books for this read-along. I may throw in some quotes and info from Syllabus, but we will be reading and working through the exercises for Making Comics.

Why Work Through Making Comics Together?

I think there is real benefit in going through a book like this with others. Depending on your background, experience with comics, interest in comics, life story, relationship with memory, and general personality, this book may challenge you in certain ways. You may be trying drawing or drawing comics for the first time. You may have a tough inner critic. You may be nervous sharing your 3-minute comics with others. You may have trouble visualizing the things you will be asked to draw. You may have trouble loosening up and letting yourself “play” on the page.

Doing this with a group of others might seem a bit scary, but I hope that by forming a small read-along community, we will create an easygoing, nurturing, and supportive environment. Within this community, we will be able to offer and find encouragement and accountability. Some of us know each other. (About half of you draw with me on Sundays and already read Illustrated Life.) I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone else.

When we see other people doing the same exercises or struggling with the same exercises or talking about the same exercises, we are more likely to jump in and do those as well.

You can leave your ego and your fear and your perfectionism at the door. This is not a competitive space. Some of you have more experience with drawing (or teaching) comics, and some of you are just interested in exploring this form of line, mark making, and storytelling. That’s totally okay and wonderful. We all start somewhere!

Some of us have a lot of experience with drawing but don’t necessarily excel at drawing the kinds of figures and animals and characters that are a big part of this book. The important thing to keep in mind is that it should be fun. It may feel playful or silly at times, and it may feel uncomfortable at times. I encourage you to just let yourself experiment. There are no grades here.

There are at least 100 ways you can gamify this process (like spending hours on something that is designed to take three minutes). But I hope you will play along as much as possible and see what happens. The more you give into the process, the more you will get out of it. I really believe that.

Depending on your background, experience with comics, interest in comics, and personality, this book will challenge you in certain ways.

Be All In

As we move through the book, we will try to do most of the exercises. (I’ll be posting a list and timeline to help keep us moving forward.) I suggest you think of the read-along as if you were taking a semester class or doing an extended workshop. So instead of sitting down and going through the whole book in a weekend, make this something that you work on over time. We’ll probably do a few exercises a week over the next month or so. (You’ll notice in the intro how much time she tells her students she expects them to spend a week!)

The pace of the read-along may end up feeling slow to you. You might want to just dive in and do that “in-a-weekend” thing. Be willing to let it simmer, to do the weekly exercises, and to keep building your practice. This is also probably not the only project you are working on. Taking into account that many of us have jobs and busy lives, I think breaking the book up so that you have things to work on each week but don’t necessarily have to do something an “exercise” every day makes sense. (There will be a point where you will start making daily diary entries, and those will typically have a drawing component.)

While we will act as if we are signed up for class, we really aren’t. We can take some liberties and work at a pace that builds habit and skill but that is also relaxed enough that you can stick with it.

Timeline

The timeline is a little bit fluid at the start because I didn’t give much lead time. I didn’t spend months planning this read-along. I’m diving in for my own calendar reasons. I didn’t really expect so many people to be interested (although I’m glad you are!). Some of you already have the book. Some of you are in the process of getting the book. I encourage you to check your library.

Week 1 will be focused on making sure you have a copy of Making Comics, gathering your baseline supplies, and reading the introductory pages.

The first part of the book is about fifty pages, and there are only a couple of drawing “exercises" in those pages. Because people will be in various stages of “getting the book” over the next few days, I think it makes sense to just go ahead and start reading this week and have our first check-in next week, maybe Thursday, May 8. I will plan to post my own “Week 1 Reflection” late Wednesday about this first section, and then we can meet in the comments and/or in chat to talk about what we read and share our work. (There are no fixed times for checking in, but I will plan to open a discussion once a week about whatever we did that week.)

Week 1 — Getting Ready

Read through the introductory section, which goes through page 52. There are two exercises: “4 Drawings in 12 Minutes” and the first “attendance card.”

In this first section, Barry outlines the supplies she requires students use. Because we are not in a classroom and not turning everything in, you should feel totally fine choosing whatever tools you want to use.

Here are some of the basics that she suggests:

• 4 x 6 index cards

• Regular 8 1/2 x 11 printer paper

• A composition book

• Black Bic Flair pens

• Uni-ball Vision Stick rollerball pens

(The full list is on page 28.)

(Note: I am someone who draws mostly with fountain pen. Chances are good I’ll use fountain pen for a lot of this, and that’s okay. But I do have a Uni-ball Vision pen on hand. I might also do “most” of my work in the composition book rather than on loose cards/pages. Again, we can take “some” liberties here since we aren’t subject to the class rubric. Do what works best for you.)

What to Do in Week 1

Because the first part of the book is “mostly” intro materials, I recommend you:

• Read through the first section and get a feel for her style and her voice

• Highlight, tab, or write a quote or idea from this section into your composition book (and plan to share that in the comments)

• Draw one or two (or more) of the comics or monsters you see on her pages in your composition book (this isn’t an assignment in the book, but this might be a fun way to warm up since there is a lot of reading in week one — but these pages are also full of playful drawings)

• Optional: Note on page 35 an exercise for prepping your composition book (draw your hand)

• Think about how you would feel on day 1 if you were in her class

• Draw your first attendance card (p 42-43)

• Do the “4 Drawings in 12 Minutes” exercise (p 44)

• Note: she mentions the “Daily Diary,” but she doesn’t give the format for it until later in the book. You can ignore that for now. (I will talk about it next week and share.)

• Think about your name (optional); it might be hard to pull off here, but you could use your class name on your attendance cards

• You will notice she talks about Ivan Brunetti’s style of drawing comic figures. Brunetti’s books are great. You don’t “need” Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice to work through Making Comics. (You might want to look at it later. It is a “workshop”-style book of its own.) If you want to see examples of his work, check your library for Aesthetics: A Memoir.

Stopping point: the page before Section 1: Are You My Monster (p 52)

(You will see that she has a system for labeling the exercises and assignments throughout the book. The “4 Drawings in 12 Minutes” is formally labeled as an exercise, and she says to spend about 15 to 20 minutes. She gives really clear time parameters. Use your phone. Use a timer. Play along. These aren’t supposed to yield “finished” pieces of art. These are three minute drawings of things that you may or may not have any idea how to draw out of your head. That’s okay. Just go with it. Don’t overthink it. Don’t spend an hour on each of them.

Have Fun!

So that’s it! This first week or two will be really fluid. So many of you are already “ready” to start that I think diving in makes sense. Next week, I’ll lay out the pages and exercises for the following week. After that, I’ll set up a timeline for the remainder of the book. (I want to see what pace feels right in this context before I put dates in place.)

The read-along will be most fun and successful if everyone participates, keeps up, and plays along.

Chat

We will use the chat feature here at Substack to share any exercises you want to share.

Given the number of people involved, is everyone okay with just using the public chat? It would be the same level of exposure as if you shared your sketches at Instagram, in Notes, or in comments (if images were allowed there). If that makes you uncomfortable, let me know. I still have the option of making it a private chat. (If I did that, it would be private to those doing this read-along and all of my paid subscribers.)

I will post in chat for the first time Sunday or early next week to kick it off. I need to first make sure my regular readers know how to turn chat notifications off.

Toggle On Email for the Read-Along

Tagging all of you in each post won’t be practical. I don’t know that I will send the post each week in email, but in case I do that, you may want to check your Illustrated Life settings and make sure that “Read-Along” is toggled on:

Here We Go

How does this sound? Any questions? Let me know.

I am looking forward to seeing your first attendance cards and getting to know you. Our first chat will give us a chance to introduce ourselves.

Final note:

I am not “teaching” this book. Instead, I am planning to work through the book because I continue to “want” to be doing more sequential art in my illustrated journal. I will be guiding us through the book, but many of you may have more experience than me with drawing comics. That’s okay!

[Tagging participants (so far): , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ]

[Note: If you are not tagged and commented on the last post, you have “mentions” disabled.]

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations or wish list treats are always appreciated.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

Update! We have moved forward and Week 1 is in progress (as of May 2, 2025). Find the info here. You are welcome to join us.

A few weeks ago, I talked about my on-again-off-again diary comics through the years, a persistent “want” that I often push aside because I really suck at it. In that post, I talked about maybe working through Making Comics (or Syllabus) again with a small group for a bit of peer support and accountability.

(Note: this is not a regular post. Illustrated Life has a mix of illustrated journaling, bookish things, and weekly “Sunday posts.” You’re probably here for those. I would start there. Thanks!)

Subscribe now

from the original post….

Not Good with Monsters… or Play

But then, I thought, “Oh, wouldn’t it be a good idea to go ahead and do Syllabus again with people, or Making Comics? Maybe Making Comics. The last time I tried to do Making Comics with a group, it fell off pretty quickly. Part of the problem for me is:

a) I don’t do great with following other people’s directions or doing workbooks of any kind.

b) I don’t really have any interest in drawing myself as a superhero or a monster. I remember really resisting (and sucking at) those exercises.

c) I have trouble at times seeing how exercises that are really left-field for me aren’t just a waste of time (for me). Maybe I’m too set in my ways.

I think that the reality is that I am just not very playful. I don’t think I was ever very playful, but it’s probably a matter of degrees. This year has sucked every bit of play from my soul.

A few (very few) people indicated they would be interested in this. I haven’t decided the best way to move forward. It’s a lot of work to do an orchestrated read-along for three or four people. On the other hand, I know that one of the best ways for me to really work through the book is to document the process and write about it.

I’ve done read-alongs here at Substack with weekly posts and community discussion, and I’ve done art challenges in the past in private Facebook groups. The sharing with an art challenge is different. That you can’t upload images in a comment at Substack means that even if I do some weekly or bi-weekly documentation posts, we will need a way to share.

If you are planning to be a part of this, I assume you want to share your work.

My current thought is to handle this with the Substack chat mechanism. I don’t use the chat feature for my publication, in general, but I can make threads limited to paid subscribers. (You won’t have to be a paid subscriber to take part in this read-along/draw-along. If I go the chat route, I will update your access.) This wouldn’t make our exchange totally private, but it would give us a convenient space to share glimpses of our comics as we work through the “exercises” in the book.

Thoughts?

For a group read-along like this, I would plan to work systematically through the book and expect that we plan to do or at least try each of the exercises. It won’t be a “read it in a weekend” book. The goal isn’t a speed read. Instead, we’ll work through slowly, with set exercises for each week, similar to how Barry runs her class.

I’ve got a list of the exercises and assignments in the book, and I will put together a timeline.

I know that Kristen ( ), Melissa ( ), and Laura ( ) have said they might be interested. Anyone else?

Those who are interested, can you let me know in the comments:

1. Have you read Syllabus or Making Comics before?

2. What is your level of interest in drawing comics?

3. Do you already have a copy of Making Comics? Check your library.

4. What’s your willingness, on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high), to play along with the exercises?

5. Does using the chat feature here sound like a reasonable plan? Better thoughts? (I could set up a Discord server, but I think that’s probably a bit too much for most of the people in my community.)

6. What’s your biggest fear about drawing comics?

7. Name a graphic novel you enjoyed.

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life, the podcast, and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations or wish list treats are always appreciated.

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.

“Kairos moments multiply when we are in motion.” — Robert Moss, Sidewalk Oracles

A Willingness to Walk the Path

Each week, I will post some general discussion, reflection, and thoughts on the chapter or “games" from the week. You are invited to share your experience with this book in the comments section.

Basic Information

📌 We are reading Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss.

📅 The reading timeline outlines a slow reading (with weekly discussion posts) for anyone who wants to read along.

📌 Weekly reading notes and discussion (the timeline links to the weekly posts)

🍥 I encourage you to go into this reading with an open mind and a willingness to consider what is being described/discussed.

🧵 I use the comment area for discussions rather than a chat thread. Neither would be private because this read-along is free to everyone. You are invited to comment on comments and interact with those reading together.

From Within the Fog, Final Chapters

We have reached the end of our shared reading of Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss. Thank you to those who read along. 

In the final chapters of the book, Moss shares more stories of his experience with moments of synchronicity and with the “trickster” (fox) archetype.

Chapter 5, “On Other Planes,” is a string of moments experienced in airports. For the most part, the encounters didn’t strike me as profoundly as I think they may seem to Moss. But, of course, symbol and synchronicity can be subtle, possibly details only we would notice individually and in our own context.

Airports. Planes, trains, and automobiles. Moving in the world. This is one of the things that I worried about from the beginning of this book, the sense that finding sign and symbol might require being constantly out and about, out of your element, or among new things. 

Realistically, this doesn’t make sense. If you are willing to believe the universe drops symbols and messages in your path, then you should assume that the universe will meet you where you are. Why would the universe make judgments about whether you have an “on the go” life or not? Why would symbols and messages only be left in places you are never going to look? (Part of me says there is a level of privilege to his emphasis on stories that all take place “as part of his nonstop travel.” These, however, happen to be where his stories are collected.)

It does seem much easier to look and see when you are out of the house, whether that means traveling (as in Moss’s stories) or simply going to the grocery, neighborhood park, pharmacy, coffee shop, library, riding the bus, or spending time in some other community or natural space. Being out in the world puts a new and varied tableaux in front of you at every turn and also puts you in a mix of sounds and, possibly, conversations. 

This doesn’t mean one can’t have a life rich in symbol (or kairomancy) when one is mostly at home, but I do think nurturing and cultivating that richness takes intentionality and the nurturing of concrete habits that invite seeing, an invitation to find symbol and synchronicity even in the familiar.

[This post is from a 2024 read-along. The remainder of the post has now been placed behind the paywall.]

Read more

A Willingness to Walk the Path

Each week, I will post some general discussion, reflection, and thoughts on the chapter or “games" from the week. You are invited to share your experience with this book in the comments section.

Basic Information

📌 We are reading Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss.

📅 The reading timeline outlines a slow reading (with weekly discussion posts) for anyone who wants to read along.

📌 Weekly reading notes and discussion (the timeline links to the weekly posts)

🍥 I encourage you to go into this reading with an open mind and a willingness to consider what is being described/discussed.

🧵 I use the comment area for discussions rather than a chat thread. Neither would be private because this read-along is free to everyone. You are invited to comment on comments and interact with those reading together.

From Within the Fog, Weeks 9 and 10

In weeks 9 and 10 of our Sidewalk Oracles read-along, we read about Games 13-17, the final games in Chapter 4.

I apologize for not posting last week. For the one or two people (maybe three) still reading and commenting, I appreciate that you tucked comments into earlier weeks.

I did snap a library photo for you last week (above). I don’t know that it’s a stunner, but I think we are to be taking from all of this that, sometimes, the clue is in the unexpected, not necessarily the exceptional. (Well, maybe that’s what I’m taking from all of this. I do think Moss looks for the exceptional. He’s not really all about the everyday.)

I think license plates are proving to be an odd form of symbol for me. I noticed a vanity plate in front of me last week, and while I don’t know how the owner “intends” it to be read, I read it as a specific word. It struck me enough that I snapped a photo so I wouldn’t forget. But then, a few days later, I was deleting photos from my phone, and I saw that I’d taken a screenshot of the same word several weeks ago when it was the Dictionary.com “Word of the Day.” It isn’t a new-to-me word, but for some reason, it struck me that day, and I took a screenshot, thinking I might letter it in my journal. I had forgotten that.

Seeing the screenshot again and thinking of the license plate made me stop and wonder…. what is this word for me right now?

[This post is from a 2024 read-along. The remainder of the post has now been placed behind the paywall.]

Read more

A Willingness to Walk the Path

Each week, I will post some general discussion, reflection, and thoughts on the chapter or “games" from the week. You are invited to share your experience with this book in the comments section.

Basic Information

📌 We are reading Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss.

📅 The reading timeline outlines a slow reading (with weekly discussion posts) for anyone who wants to read along.

📌 Weekly reading notes and discussion (the timeline links to the weekly posts)

🍥 I encourage you to go into this reading with an open mind and a willingness to consider what is being described/discussed.

🧵 I use the comment area for discussions rather than a chat thread. Neither would be private because this read-along is free to everyone. You are invited to comment on comments and interact with those reading together.

From Within the Fog, Week 8

In week 8 of our Sidewalk Oracles read-along, we read about Games 10-12 in Chapter 4.

If I had made a prediction at the start of the book about which direction my awareness might go, I might logically have said “up.” As someone already fairly attuned to looking, I expected I might really tap into something “extra” during this reading. In truth, I’m not being knocked over by symbols simply. I can’t say that I think I’ve experienced synchronicity so far while reading this book. But I do find the reading mostly interesting, and I appreciate the reminder to look and to notice. (It fits into things I already do and talk about.) I also appreciate the invitation to interpret symbols I encounter as having personal relevance in the moment.

I feel more mindful even if I’m not reaping the reward. That’s still a successful outcome.

[This post is from a 2024 read-along. The remainder of the post has now been placed behind the paywall.]

Read more

“Before you walk into a room or turn a corner, your attitude is there already. It is engaged in creating the situation you are about to encounter. Whether you are remotely conscious of this or not, you are constantly setting yourself up for what the world is going to give you.” Robert Moss, Sidewalk Oracles

A Willingness to Walk the Path

Each week, I will post some general discussion, reflection, and thoughts on the chapter or “games" from the week. You are invited to share your experience with this book in the comments section.

Basic Information

📌 We are reading Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss.

📅 The reading timeline outlines a slow reading (with weekly discussion posts) for anyone who wants to read along.

📌 Weekly reading notes and discussion (the timeline links to the weekly posts)

🍥 I encourage you to go into this reading with an open mind and a willingness to consider what is being described/discussed.

🧵 I use the comment area for discussions rather than a chat thread. Neither would be private because this read-along is free to everyone. You are invited to comment on comments and interact with those reading together.

From Within the Fog, Week 7

In week 7 of our Sidewalk Oracles read-along, we read about Games 7-9 in Chapter 4.

Week 7 felt a bit like a black box for me in terms of gathering symbols. Like some of you, reading this book makes me wonder if most of the time I am just too caught up in my head when I get in the car or go for a walk or enter a store. At the same time, part of me thinks that, rather than simply a factor of me not paying attention, we should not expect signs and symbols around every corner.

If it was always Christmas (or your birthday or Saturday or whatever day or event you enjoy), we would lose sight of it as special. The magic would wear off.

Several of us have expressed this fear, this niggling concern that if we overthink what we see, symbols may no longer be moored in ways that make them seem special and, possibly, instructional.

[This post is from a 2024 read-along. The remainder of the post has now been placed behind the paywall.]

Read more

A Willingness to Walk the Path

Each week, I will post some general discussion, reflection, and thoughts on the chapter or “games" from the week. You are invited to share your experience with this book in the comments section.

Basic Information

📌 We are reading Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss.

📅 The reading timeline outlines a slow reading (with weekly discussion posts) for anyone who wants to read along.

📌 Weekly reading notes and discussion (the timeline links to the weekly posts)

🍥 I encourage you to go into this reading with an open mind and a willingness to consider what is being described/discussed.

🧵 I use the comment area for discussions rather than a chat thread. Neither would be private because this read-along is free to everyone. You are invited to comment on comments and interact with those reading together.

Beware of Falling Books, Week 6

In week 6 of our Sidewalk Oracles read-along, we read about Games 4-6 in Chapter 4.

This was a light week. We covered another three games from the 17 games that Moss outlines. As we move through these games, of course, we are building a repository of frameworks for looking, seeing, and gathering symbols. Week to week, you may be adding new tools to your bag. You may find that some seem more relevant or applicable to you than others.

Two of the games this week involve books and finding meaning or intuiting a message from randomly selected words on a page. The other game involves gathering words or sounds that you hear.

I was only out one time this week in between writing my last set of notes and starting my notes for today. Before I even got to the library, which is where I had headed to work (and walk) in advance of a storm, I was at a traffic light, a very long intersection, and I noticed numbers on the concrete pillar of a street light in the median. Then I noticed three numbers on a license plate in front of me and then noticed the numbers on another nearby car, the same numbers in a different order. Looking around, I saw two of those three numbers on two other cars. I was so struck by this, by the oddity of these numbers being repeated, that I jotted them down on an index card that I had in the car. The light changed, and I went on. Five sets of three numbers, all similar enough to jump out at me.

After parking, I walked around the block. I had a notebook in my pocket, and I took a number of notes. There were hawks. There were crows. Some things seemed meaningful; others did not.

When I drove home later, I looked at license plates and didn’t see any of those numbers. I looked because I was curious to see if I would spot variations of the numbers again. How random was the experience? I have no idea what those numbers mean or what significance they might have. It was a really strong recurring pattern in the span of 2 to 3 minutes.

I’m left now with this scrawled index card with five three-digit numbers and a hazy feeling of being at the stop light and seeing the same numbers everywhere I looked.

[This post is from a 2024 read-along. The remainder of the post has now been placed behind the paywall.]

Read more

“Oracles will speak to you where you live, through the signs and symbols of the world around you.” Robert Moss, Sidewalk Oracles

A Willingness to Walk the Path

Each week, I will post some general discussion, reflection, and thoughts on the chapter or “games" from the week. You are invited to share your experience with this book in the comments section.

Basic Information

📌 We are reading Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols, and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss.

📅 The reading timeline outlines a slow reading (with weekly discussion posts) for anyone who wants to read along.

📌 Weekly reading notes and discussion (the timeline links to the weekly posts)

🍥 I encourage you to go into this reading with an open mind and a willingness to consider what is being described/discussed.

🧵 I use the comment area for discussions rather than a chat thread. Neither would be private because this read-along is free to everyone. You are invited to comment on comments and interact with those reading together.

Let the Games Begin!

I don’t know why writing that made me think of the Hunger Games. That is probably not the best lens on this foray into the symbolic? The Trickster may be at play here and there, but one of the things I enjoy about the line of thinking we are pursuing is that it is individual. We are paying attention and contemplating levels of symbol and synchronicity in our own lives. Our answers will be our own.

I have been looking forward to the games (or activities or exercises) in Sidewalk Oracles. I know some of you have already read ahead or finished the book, but I am going to maintain a really leisurely stroll here (following the established reading schedule). I don’t need to be trying 17 things at a time, and I didn’t want anyone to feel like the pace was so fast that there was no opportunity to engage with some of these games, put them in action, and record what happened.

I think the experience will be deeper and richer for the time we spend doing and thinking, letting things simmer and blossom a bit to see what settles and what rises for each of you. (Even if you’ve finished, I hope you revisit the few specific games included each week.)

Some of these games you may find you prefer to others, and some of them may be more applicable to your life (and the way you move through your world) than others. Some of them, you likely already play to some degree.

Limiting this week to just three games allowed me to really think about them.

[This post is from a 2024 read-along. The remainder of the post has now been placed behind the paywall.]

Read more