On Saturday, Nov. 7, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., the Watauga County Public Library will host a comics-making workshop for teens and tweens. The event will be held in the Library’s meeting room and is free and open to the public.
The workshop will be taught by two nationally-known artists. Alec Longstreth is an award-winning cartoonist best known for his self-published comic Phase 7 (2002- ), and for his fantasy graphic novel Basewood (2014). Alec’s stories, illustration, and coloring have been published by Dark Horse Press, Little, Brown, and Company, Highlights magazine, National Geographic for Kids, and Hyperion Books. He also teaches online for the Center for Cartoon Studies.
Jen Vaughn is a graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies who worked for the alt-comics publisher Fantagraphics for three years. Jen writes and draws Avery Fatbottom, Renaissance Fair Detective (2013- ) while freelancing other jobs in the comics industry: currently she contributes a story to each issue of the anthology Cartozia Tales (2013- ), colors a new Archie comic and shares a studio in Seattle with cartoonists Moritat, Brian Thies, and Stefano Guarino.
Longstreth and Vaughn have ambitious plans for the event. According to Longstreth, the workshop will start off “start them off with a jam comic with a beginning, middle and end. Then each workshopper will design two characters with very different designs. We’re then going to talk a bit about how backgrounds work in comics and then we will wrap up with the ‘one-sheet workshop,’ which leads participants through the process of creating an 8-page minicomic out of a single sheet of paper!”
Please note that the workshop is limited to 30 participants, and registration is required. Phone Youth Services Librarian Judith Winecoff at (828) 264-8784, extension 3 to register.
For older audiences, Longstreth and Vaughn will be participating in the First Friday festivities at the Turchin Center for the Visual Art on Friday, Nov. 6, as part of the exhibit At the Junction of Words & Pictures: The 10th Anniversary of the Center for Cartoon Studies. Visit the Turchin website at tcva.org for more information.
The Library workshop is sponsored by Libby Boone Enterprises and the Friends of the Watauga County Public Library, with support from the High Country Watermedia Society Endowment, a component fund of the NC Community Foundation.