July Comics Challenge: Make Your Own Superhero!

Superheroes are fun, right? Everyone loves superheroes? Well they are the focus of this month’s COMICS CHALLENGE, where we’re all going to be having a go at making our own. That’s the challenge, nice and simple: Make Up A New Superhero. And here are some handy Templates We Prepared Earlier, to help you do just that!

Download the templates as a PDF!

Here’s a suggested ‘lesson plan’ / way to use these templates as the basis of a session with your group! This is based on the assumption that you have a whiteboard / flipchart / other flat and writeable-on surface to hand…

• Start by thinking about Famous Superheroes. How many Superheroes can the group name? Try writing all the answers up on the board as you go. Bonus Discussion Points: Who is the coolest? Who would win in a fight?
• Pick a couple of the suggested characters and see how much the group know about them. What is their secret identity? What superpowers do they have? Do they have any weaknesses? Who is their best friend? Who is their arch-nemesis?
• Using the suggested characters as a basis, make a list on the board of superhero THEMES (e.g. Bats, Spiders, Cats – lots of animal-themed ones) and SUPERPOWERS (e.g. flight, super strength, stretchiness – see how many you can think of).
• Get the group to come up with ideas for either the THEME or SUPERPOWER for a new hero. Try and get as many suggestions as possible on the board.
• Pick one and have a go at creating a new Superhero!  Have a go at drawing them on the board! Don’t worry if you think you’re not good at drawing, try and give it a go anyway. If it really *is* rubbish, it just works as an encouragement to the kids to try and do better!
• Okay, now everyone have a go! Confident artists can just dive straight in and start drawing; younger or less confident artists might want to use one of the worksheets provided above; just start designing a costume straight onto the template!
• Once everyone’s had long enough to draw, take a look at everyone’s new heroes. Get each artist to tell you about their character!
• FINAL STEP: everyone draw a comic about their superhero! You can use some of our handy comics page templates, to help you get started!

We’d love to see some of the results! You can tweet pictures at us at @ComicsClubBLOG, and we’d love to feature them here on the blog!