Everybody’s a comic book artist
- Share via
At Sonora Elementary, students create their very own superheroes. ‘Meat Loaf Massacre vs. Wiener Man,’ anyone?Comic book heroes, it could be argued, have grown more original since the heyday of Superman. Among the unlikely defenders of justice in the last few decades are the Tick, Swamp Thing and, of course, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
However, Sam Bunker, a third-grader at Sonora Elementary School, may have set the bar higher with his new creation. In Donna Robb’s after-school art class Thursday, he penciled the opening pages of a story that he recently conceived with his older brother.
The title: “Meat Loaf Massacre vs. Wiener Man.”
“He has wiener vision,” Sam said of his hero, who looks like a giant hot dog in a bun with stick arms and legs. “Hot dogs shoot out of his eyes and they’re poisoned, so if the criminals eat them, they get killed.”
Wiener Man was born when a chef created an experimental sausage and then left it in the oven to overbake. His nemesis, Meat Loaf Massacre, came into being the same way -- except that the evil chef who created him used “devil juice” among the ingredients.
Illogical? Perhaps, but no more so than Spider-Man.
Robb’s class, held every Thursday, invites students to tap into their imaginations even as they learn the fundamentals of art. A professional freelance artist and former comic book inker, Robb takes art seriously; among the items on her lesson plan are Picasso, Dali and impressionism. While the first- through third-graders in her class sketched out their fantasies Thursday, Robb gave them handouts on shading, light sources and other essentials of drawing comics.
“I don’t want just to go into cute little paintings,” she explained. “I want to show them what it’s like to be a working artist.”
The two dozen students in the class had little experience doing comic book art, although stories came easily to most of them. On the two long tables in the Sonora multipurpose room, the young artists started their work in pencil and later added Sharpie pen and color.
Kindergartener Ben Swanson, 5, had conceived a comic entitled “The House of Doom” and set to work populating it with creatures -- including a one-eyed spider that shot lasers out of its eyes, a skeleton that shot bones out of its stomach and a “girl Frankenstein” with a retractable, poison-tipped bellybutton.
“It’s like a yo-yo, but it shoots out really long,” Ben said.
His third-grade brother Sam, 7, also tackled the horror genre by adapting the children’s book “Frankenstein Doesn’t Slam Hockey Pucks” into comic format.
Amid all the stories of superhero carnage, at least one student thought of a pacifist tale. Third-grader Jasmine Wesley, 8, concocted a story in which giants invade a city and the Army comes in to fight them off. In the end, the city gets the worst of it, but there’s hope nevertheless.
“The city gets destroyed, but the giants end up helping to put it back together,” Jasmine said.
* IN THE CLASSROOM is a weekly feature in which Daily Pilot education writer Michael Miller visits a campus in the Newport-Mesa area and writes about his experience.
20051115ipyqknknPHOTOS BY KENT TREPTOW / DAILY PILOT(LA)Evan Larsen, 7, traces a character from a book for use in his comic. 20051115ipyql4kn(LA)Max Remington, 6, left, and Ben Swanson, 5, work on their comic books at an after-school fine arts class at Sonora Elementary School on Thursday.
All the latest on Orange County from Orange County.
Get our free TimesOC newsletter.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Daily Pilot.