Bill Zimmerman and Your Life in Comics
Through his interactive website (see www.billztreasurechest.com) and his multiple books, author Bill Zimmerman has tried to reach out to kids and inspire them to write, draw, and get creative. His latest, Your Life in Comics, is an incredibly timely book that integrates comics and learning in an exciting way. Through the book, which is aimed at young guys, kids are able to draw and write scenes based on the questions and prompts they’ll find inside. We talked to Zimmerman about the book and his ongoing work.
Let’s start with the basics about Your Life in Comics. How do you want readers to interact with it and use it?
Your Life in Comics: 100 Things for Guys to Write and Draw is an interactive comic book for reluctant boy readers/writers where they have a say about what happens in the book. It’s a do-it-yourself comic book where boys can tell stories from their lives. There are cartoons showing kids in different situations and by filling in the blank thought or talk balloons, readers get to say what happens to the characters. They’ll also find pages where, with the help of short word of picture prompts, they can draw comic strips of their own.
The book is geared for boys ages 9-13, but like all my interactive books, older people also can use it, too The book gets boys thinking about important things in their lives, including family, friends, school, peer pressure, bullying, health, and the future and it becomes a journal of their ‘’take’’ on the issues that are on their minds. At the same time, the book helps them tap into their own creativity and explore what is within them. There also are many fun pages that help boys express their humor and joy.
The book is also an Internet-connected one in that on the bottoms of many pages are links to websites that complement the subjects featured on the pages. There also are many blank comic templates in the book for boys to draw whatever they want.
What made you decide to do this book?
I had trouble learning how to read when I was a child, but comic books helped me immensely. In deciphering what was in the talk balloons and looking at the pictures, I began to understand what was being depicted, and where I didn’t understand, my imagination allowed me to make connections. In my new do-it-yourself comic book, I wanted to help boys capture the joy of expressing all the humor and good stuff that is within them and also think more about their lives.
All my work, both as an author of 18 interactive books and as a newspaper editor who created a nationally syndicated page for kids, has been geared to helping people find their writers’ voices. As a kid growing up, I never felt people had time for listening or talking to me or answering my questions. That’s the reason why, I guess, I became a journalist who got paid to ask questions and find answers.
With Your Life in Comics, I tried to create an interactive comic book that would encourage boys who normally don’t write or draw to do so with the help of different word or picture prompts. I remembered many times when reading comic books that I wished I could continue a story or substitute different dialogue and pictures for what was offered. Your Life in Comics gives guys a way of doing so and creating their own comic worlds. Imagine having a book where you create much of the content and pictures. And this, I think, led me to create books that use questions and writing prompts to help young people express thoughts through writing and drawing that might be difficult to verbalize. There are not really many books out there to help boys express themselves.
Why did you see a need for it at this point in time?
Everyone is searching for ways to encourage boys to write and read more, and I thought that a comic book with an interactive format would encourage them in these areas. Comics provide a finite, accessible world in which funny, interesting looking characters live and go about their lives—and the best educators understand that playing encourages learning. Students with limited reading or writing skills are not as overwhelmed in dealing with comic panels as they may be with a book of many pages. Comics don’t require long sentences or paragraphs to tell a good story. Only a few words are required for a character to go about her life and reveal her stories. And who can resist seeing a blank talk or thought balloon floating over the head of a character and not want immediately to fill it in with words and thoughts? Doing so is the beginning step to telling a story.
My own love of comics and understanding of their value as a learning tool began when I was a child. Back then, the very best day of the week was Sunday morning, when my dad left home early to bring back an armload of newspapers, all with their glorious color comic sections. The funnies were my paradise—I’d spend the morning going over each strip, following the adventures of my favorite characters, even flying in the sky with them. I’d look at the dazzling illustrations and be drawn into their colorful worlds, and be challenged to decipher the letters in the white balloons coming from the characters’ mouths. And with help from my father, I’d try my best to sound out the words in the talk balloons and make sense of the stories they told. I grew up in a very chaotic, dysfunctional family and the comics provided a safe haven for me where I could escape and enter the world of my imagination as I gazed on the beautiful pictures and put myself into them.
Why angle it just toward guys?
A few years ago, I had written a book for the same publisher, Free Spirit Publishing, to help boys navigate adolescence—it is called 100 Things Guys Need to Know. When I originally proposed Your Life in Comics, I saw it as a book for boys and girls, but the publisher wanted instead a companion book to the original 100 Things. The subjects covered in the book should appeal, too, to girls since there are a number of boy-girl situations, but I am now working on a similar book for girls that hopefully will join the boys book.
You’re going to the Miami International Book Fair this week. What do you plan to do there?
In addressing teachers and librarians I’ll be talking about how comics have influenced my life as a boy, as a newspaper editor, as an author of interactive books that use cartoons, as the creator of a popular online comic strip generator called MakeBeliefsComix.com, and as a teacher who uses comics in literacy and English-as-Second Language programs. I’ll be demonstrating MakeBeliefsComix, which is now used by educators in more than 180 countries to teach writing and reading. It offers users more than 80 characters with different emotions to choose from, blank talk and thought balloons to fill in, story prompts and printables, and users can print and email the comics they create.
I’ll also be throwing out a challenge to the teachers to experiment and set aside a 20-minute period at the end of each school day when kids are encouraged to create a daily comic or comic strip of something they learned or read or experienced or imagined that day. Maybe their comic is a new ending for a book they read, or an exploration of a character in the book. Maybe it’s a concept they learned in science or in social studies. Maybe their comic depicts a conversation they overheard or a joke their father said to them recently. Maybe it’s a comic strip in which they utilize new vocabulary they learned that day or even about a problem they are trying to work out, such as how to deal with a bully. So over the course of a school year students build up an art portfolio or book of the many things they learned and experienced—something they can keep all their lives.
Have you seen Your Life in Comics being used in classrooms, libraries, and elsewhere already?
It’s been too early to see it used in the classroom, but the anecdotal information I received from some parents is that their sons couldn’t put it down and continued to write and draw—it seems to speak to them. It is my hope that educators will discover the book and use it in the classroom to encourage writing and reading. The book also can be used with older students who are learning English as a second language.
Why is it helpful and useful to learn to write and draw comics in this way?
By creating comics, boys develop a variety of skills. They use their thinking and imaginative skills; they practice writing; they are organizing information to present a story; they are developing a sense of aesthetics—you look at things differently if you draw them. They begin to appreciate art and learn about what it is to get an image down on paper. But, perhaps most important, they are learning something about the wonders of their own creative imaginations. They learn they can create things of their own, and that builds confidence. They also learn that no matter what problems they may be having in school or home, they have the ability to transcend these problems by creating something special through words and pictures that came from within them.
How can readers best use the book and get the most out of it?
It’s best if readers turn the pages with an open mind. Some people are intimidated by the idea of having to draw something or think of clever words to fill in balloons. But anything goes in this book. You can use stick pictures to depict a story; you can write whatever silliness is inside you waiting to come out. Many of the pages have journaling-type questions, and a reader hopefully will be encouraged by them to explore what is hiding within them. Readers entering this book will need to have a sense of adventure about them that they are going to write and draw things they never did before. They will need to be read to explore both serious and fun things.
What has the response been to the book so far?
The book just came out and the publisher seems happy with sales so far. Your Life in Comics has been getting very positive reviews and the publisher said in showing it at the recent National Middle School Conference, attendees were thrilled to find a resource like this just for guys. One said it’s perfect for the boys reading group she’s trying to start and another said she works with a student who doodles all day and plans to use the book as a way of communicating with him. John Shabeleski of Diamond Book Distributors,said, “Your Life in Comics is a fantastic tool for engaging kids in the writing process. With the panel structure and the placement of word balloons, it puts the writing process into a more precise context which can allow the reader (and now writer) the opportunity to develop his storytelling voice.”
What are you working on next?
With my daughter and wife, I am now working on a Your Life in Comics for girls geared to deal with the many issue specific to their own lives. In addition, I also have completed work on a book to encourage parents and grandparents to send laptop letters and text messages to the children in their lives to convey both loving, encouraging words as well as the wisdom they have learned in their own lives. It follows a bestselling book I coauthored some years ago called Lunch Box Letters. I came from a broken home and I try in some of my books to find ways to bring families closer.
And in September a second book of mine was published entitled Pocket Doodles for Young Artists, a book that encourages young people (and older ones) to write and draw, too. It is the second in my Pocket Doodles series, the first one being Pocket Doodles for Kids, which is sold at museum gift shops throughout the country.
-- John Hogan
