The Sequential Artists Workshop

YES! We are celebrating the amazing win of Angeli Rafer, whose book, GHOSTS DON’T EAT POTATO CHIPS is arriving from Scholastic Sept 2023!

Take a peek and order here: https://shop.wordbookstores.com/book/9781338881660

Don't forget to let us know about your comics wins in the big, bad world outside the network! We want to hear about it!

Read Angeli’s testimonial about SAW below, written before she even got the book deal!

THANKS SO MUCH ANGELI for being out there! Keep making amazing comics!

I WANT TO MAKE AND READ MORE COMICS!

Do you have a story inside you that’s just itching to come out, but want some guidance to help push it out?

Learn more about intensive comics learning with teachers at SAW by checking out SAW’s Year-Long Intensive Program and our Six-Month Graphic Novel Intensive.

Be sure to also check out our Online Courses, since some courses are offered year-round and are always enrolling!

Our Graphic Memoir Intensive runs year round and is always enrolling.  It includes access to a vibrant working community, twice-monthly live online check-ins, weekly prompts, and access to SAW’s Monthly Pro Calls!

Our Comics Flow Group, or SAW FLOW MEMBERSHIP, is also year-round and always enrolling and is SAW's MOST AFFORDABLE course option with access to Monthly Pro-Calls!

For those who don't know, Sally Cantirino was our original, first student. I call her Student Zero. I built the school for her!

She was a teenager in New Jersey and I taught her in the pre-college classes at SVA in NYC. She was so dedicated and great, but when college age came, SVA, her preferred school, was out of reach, which to me was nuts.

I had been thinking of starting this school anyway, and I told her she could come, for free in exchange for work study, and she did. Actually, I sorta begged her, I was like Sally, I am making this school for you and people like you. Please drop everything and dedicate yourself to comics.

And now here she is on the SIMON+ SCHUSTER webpage, thank you very much!

And here's her website full of all the stuff she's been up to. 

And meditating on this for a couple more paragraphs, I want to say what Sally did. 

She did the assignments, but she did them her way. 

She argued with her instructors, but that was a form of listening. 

And she took advantage of every tool around her at SAW, whether it was the pens, brushes, ink, and Bristol board, or our Risograph machines with the weird colors, and the goodwill around the school (and the frequent parties and art shows we would hold) and she made lots of STUFF with what she had, and made herself VISIBLE.

I saw her work through rejections and invisibility and life curveballs but she just kept making things and here she still is, more vibrant, and more her than ever before. 

Ok, we’ve posted, and we’ve listened!

You can buy our Nancy Cards here!

We have never offered these for sale because they were never perfect. Still aren’t. In fact, we are calling these version 1.0.

The printing is good, but some of the scans are junk. Some are literally scans of photocopies from 1993.

But… they are still awesome and we’ve had loads of fun with them.

There are FOUR different decks…

purchasable from 2 different locations (part of the to-do list for version 2.0!)

You have to order direct from the two printers—->

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The cards above are

Nancy Deck 2 - 108 cards of mixed narrative use. Few silent or dreaming. Those are below. Nancy Dreams A - 72 cards. All dreaming and sleeping. Good for, you know, dream logic. Nancy Silent Draft A - 126 cards with some duplication. Lots of running, staring, walking, mugging, etc. Good for narrative transitions.

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Nancy Grab Bag Deck

The deck above is another mixed use deck of various narrative panels. 234 panels! We don’t think there is any duplication between deck 1 + 2, but there might be some we missed. We prefer deck 1, but they’re both good!

Needless to say, these wouldn’t be a thing without ERNIE BUSHMILLER, creator of NANCY, or SCOTT MCCLOUD, creator of 5-Card Nancy.

When I was a young cartoonist in about 1994, Scott took a bunch of us youngsters into a San Diego hotel hallway and played this game with us. It blew my mind, I cannot overemphasize. It rewired how I thought about comics. I have been seeking out that feeling again and again.

I am lately confounded by the question of “who am I doing this for?” 

Who will read my comic? Why am I doing this? Who am I making this for? How do I get in? How do I reach people? Does anyone care?

The media world has changed so much in my lifetime, as maybe it has in yours. The top down world of media (pre-2000s or so) made it so that your “audience” was prescribed. You aimed towards the gatekeepers now matter how misaligned you were with them. Or you went for the margins. 

Now that binary is no longer so simple. Now you just find some people and show up for them. That’s what we’ve done in the Graphic Novel program, we showed up. We cheered each other on, but mostly we noticed each other, we saw the work let us see. 

We didn’t see the resistance, we didn’t see the despair, we saw the story, the light shining through the drama, we saw the life in a single drawing, we saw each other’s true self.

That’s why the images we use for the Graphic Novel Program are ancient eyes, looking out.

We’re here to see you, and we’re here to be seen.

We’re about to start another round of the Graphic Novel Development Program, it runs once a year. We’d love to have you be in it.

Thanks for being a part of the cycle.

Tom

Special thanks to the participants of the additional SAW programs, Storytelling Vinyasa and Going in for the Snakes, winter/spring 2021. Important revelations and key moments in this book first appeared in those courses. 

WANT TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT YOUR OWN COMIC CREATION?

Do you have a story inside you that’s just itching to come out, but want some guidance to help push it out?

Learn more about intensive comics learning with teachers at SAW by checking out SAW’s Year-Long Intensive Program and our Six-Month Graphic Novel Intensive.

Be sure to also check out our Online Courses, since some courses are offered year-round and are always enrolling!

Our Comics Flow Group, for example, is year-round and always enrolling and is SAW's MOST AFFORDABLE course option with access to Monthly Pro-Calls!

The 1-Hour Coloring Book

Like all of us, I need to get through the resistance some times. I over-think everything. I don't know my own voice. I'm adhering to someone else's standards. And I'm afraid of what everyone will think if I fail, and I know I will fail.

One way out of this is to produce work, lots of work, and to damn the torpedoes as far as the critical voice goes. (We can use our critical voice later, when we need a dialogue about who we are, what our style is, what we want to say...)

How to do this? 

One way is deadlines. Work fast. One way is to work extremely fast. 

Also, we have to remove the worry that what we do matters. Can we work with effort, and be care free and confident? I think so.

One game I create as an exercise, was to color a whole coloring book in 1 hour. Coloring books don't matter! You can't fail at coloring! (I know, you're all saying "I can!" but really, just roll with this one, ok?)

So, I did this exercise on New Years Eve, the last hour of 2020 (good riddance!)

Click above for the video compressing 1 hour in 28 seconds.

That damned critical mind.

We have to give the critical mind something to chew on. Give it a ***#! PROJECT! Give it 42 pages of art to look at, and to try to piece some patterns out of. 

Part of the exercise was to reflect LATER, on what it was I did. 

Try to figure out what is going on. True, the critical mind will hate some of it, fine. You don't have to go along with it, or you can, but let's be a little more objective and see what was going on. What did YOU do? What did you feel? What did you RESORT to? What came out? How can you refine it?

Another part of the exercise was to TRY. Try to make something nice. Be fast, but don't settle. There were times I took an extra few seconds to add sparkles or one last color, stuff like that. 

I started at about 11:01 or 11:02 pm. My goal was to finish exactly at midnight (and I did!)

Here’s a glimpse of some of the pages. I wrote a lot about it here: https://members.sawcomics.org/posts/giving-ourselves-gifts-in-2021

At that link you’ll see my full 42 pages of coloring, and reflection on what I remember, what I felt, what I was going for, and what I wanted to do, had to do, or did!

In 2021, let's be GENTLE to ourselves, and look at our own work and answer a few questions:

What did we do?

What could we have done more of? (And what should we do next time?)

What ones worked?

What work would be good candidates for revision?

What else?

In 2021, let's give ourselves gifts. The gifts of knowing that art making makes ourselves, and opens ourselves. We deserve that this year. We've been closed off for too long.

Check out my whole post here: https://members.sawcomics.org/posts/giving-ourselves-gifts-in-2021

Not long ago in our Graphic Memoir Intensive, group members shared videos and thoughts about the places where we do our most productive thinking.

Pages might not get drawn in these spaces, but percolation occurs. Ideas are born.

These are the places where our minds can slow down, can open up.

We explored spaces of all kinds, including bike rides through urban landscapes, roads over mountains, wooded hiking trails, kitchen tables, home studios, neighborhoods.

For many of us, getting outdoors and moving helps our minds get moving too! And now, in the time of COVID-19, more than ever, we stretch our bodies and imaginations outside of our homes when we can.

If you are working on a graphic memoir, or any comics project (especially a long one!) ask yourself not only where you need to be to get the most work done, but where you need to be so you can do your most productive, imaginative, and authentic thinking!