Helen Jones, Lecturer in Primary Education at UCL Institute of Education, told me all about the Kingswood Comicals comic club.
Name of your Comic Club: Kingswood Comicals
Where do you meet and how often? Once a week, after school.
Average number of members: There are about 20 of us.
How long have you been running? We’ve only been going a short while, since April 2019.
Tell us about your club: We are an after school club based in South London – our members are usually from Year 5, but occasionally a few other children from different year groups sneak in! We enjoy making our own comics, borrowing comics to read at home and working collaboratively to create shared publications.
Do you have a comic club activity you’d like to share: Our favourite thing we did was organise and run a comic fair – we worked together to make posters, advertise the fair and produced six different comics to sell. We invited parents, other children and teachers to come and purchase our publications, and all money raised has been invested back into new resources for the club.
We also loved being part of Comic Swap – we were thrilled when we received a comic from America, and all the other comics we received from other children taking part. Finally, our favourite activity from Comics Club Blog is the comic jam – we came up with some ridiculous storylines!
Which comics should we be reading right now? First and foremost – comics made by children! After that, we have a wide range of tastes… From our comic library at the club, some of the most borrowed authors are Raina Telgemeier and Vera Brosgol. We also enjoy Pokémon and The Phoenix. Finally, we like using books about Manga and Kawaii drawings to help develop out drawing styles.
What are your plans for the coming year? A new bunch of Year 5 children will be joining the club, with some of the old group (now in Year 6) coming to help as specialists. We plan to run another comic fair, and would love to be able to do this in conjunction with other schools or clubs in the London area!
Many thanks to Helen and the Kingswood Comicals for telling us about their club! Please get in touch if your comic club would like to take part in this feature.
Comics Club 