Launching Comics Youth Scotland!

Who are Comics Youth SCIO?

(This post has been written by Rebecca Horner, Trustee and Art Director of Comics Youth SCIO).

Comics Youth SCIO is an offshoot of Comics Youth CIC, who I have been working for since the beginning of 2021! I previously worked for Dundee Comics Creative Space (DCCS), and in 2018 was funded by The Rank Foundation's Time To Shine programme to be their Workshop Coordinator. The Rank Foundation funded both DCCS and Comics Youth at that time and purposely grouped our intern/manager teams together to be able to meet because we had aligned goals and interests (for example - comics are the best! Duh!). It’s surreal for me to think back to who I was when I went to the Rank conferences, ‘cause while I felt I knew deep down I was in the right place, I also felt like I hadn’t quite proved myself worthy of being there.

The years passed and my confidence in what I was doing grew very gradually, and I really loved running the Comics Clubs (10-13s on a Tuesday, 14-17s on a Wednesday), doing outreach at schools and recruiting anyone and everyone with the slightest interest in comics or drawing – the ones who were maybe quieter and needed a bit more encouragement (not to say that all our attendees were quiet – all volumes were welcome!). Not long before the unthinkable COVID-19 happened, I had more than doubled our regular numbers for the older group and was beginning to realise how important the clubs were as a safe weekly space for our young people.

Cut to March 2020 – my manager Damon was leaving DCCS for pastures new, and I was being left in charge in a freelance capacity. Again I wasn’t sure that I was worthy, but there was this cloud of doom looming globally so I pressed on.

We had Damon's leaving do on the Friday of that week, and by Sunday everything was shutting down, so my first act as the one in charge was to cancel the Comic Clubs until further notice. They never resumed.

Now! Further back into my past – I didn’t go to high school. There are a variety of reasons for this which I don’t need to go into here, but it is the core motivator behind the kind of work that I do. With Lockdown looming I was very aware of what millions (billions?) of young people were about to experience - suddenly being at home and trying to deal with a new and very strange routine, so I made the actually very simple decision to move the Comic Clubs activities online. In the regular Comic Clubs I would make prompt cards (which one very dedicated attendee collected, colour coded, and kept in a nice box!), and that would be the activity/challenge for that particular session. I also liked to plan out my activities months in advance so I already had a schedule of prompts for the next 2-3 months, and during my Time To Shine year I had also made a comics workbook called Let’s Make Comics!, so the next step seemed obvious – put it all online!

I simply reformatted what I was doing to be a bit more web/social media friendly, and each week I posted a comics prompt plus a lesson from Let’s Make Comics!, which I was able to expand on on our website’s blog format. At first Comics Club regulars’ parents would send me drawings their kids had done that particular week, teachers we’d worked with would tell me they’d shared them with their online classes, and over time engagement spread further across the UK, the US, and even Australia?! At its height the website was getting hundreds of visitors per week - we weren’t viral by any means, but were having a far wider reach than the same 30-40 kids who attended the in-person clubs.

Once I’d run out of Let’s Make Comics! pages, I kept going with the comics prompts, and the pandemic seemed like it would never end, but in November 2020 a certain Rhiannon Mair Griffiths MBE from Comics Youth got in touch and asked if I would like to work remotely with Comics Youth CIC, and I jumped at the chance. I’ve been a big fan of Comics Youth since we first met back at the Rank Conferences, and I never could have imagined that all it would take was the world shutting down to get to work with them! There was a bit of crossover in job roles because I stubbornly believed I could keep working for DCCS and Comics Youth at the same time  (as both roles were part-time), but I ultimately left DCCS in March 2021 and was never replaced. My beloved Comics Clubs were no more (but all of the materials are still up on the website!).

From the beginning of my time at Comics Youth we had discussed the possibility of starting something similar in Dundee - there was definitely a need for it, especially in the absence of DCCS, and we’ve been working behind the scenes for a long time now to make it happen. I recruited my Comics Masters pal Hailey Austin, and we even got Damon on board (in that he is literally on our board, but not on LinkedIn!), and the four of us have managed to get Comics Youth SCIO up and running! Rhiannon’s guidance has been invaluable, and I’ve (and am continuing to learn) so much about how to develop a charity.

What does Comics Youth SCIO do?

Much like Comics Youth CIC, our focus is to improve the wellbeing for young people aged 8-25 through visual literacy and comic making. Our first project has been Building Stories: A Summer of Comics - a free two-week comics summer school delivered in collaboration with The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery & Museum, kindly funded by The National Lottery Community Fund. Partnering with The McManus was a no-brainer because I’ve been freelancing on their Creative Learning Team since 2018, and they were very excited that we were setting up the SCIO and wanted to do something together!

The summer school consisted of two age groups – 8-13s and 14-18s, and each group spent a week in the museum learning about all things comics! Each day had a specific focus, and the young people explored different ways of telling stories and creating characters, collaborated on comics as a group, and toured the galleries gathering inspiration in their sketchbooks. We also had our own gallery wall within the Creative Learning Studio which evolved day by day as the young people created more and more amazing comics.

The young people also reflected on what’s important to them in their own lives through a zine-making task called Museum of Me – where they imagined themselves as a museum or gallery and illustrated what would be displayed. We also used story prompts to get them to think about their lived experiences and hopes for the future, which they developed into short comics. 

Each group was absolutely fantastic, and we were blown by how many amazing drawings and stories everyone came up with. Seeing them proudly sharing their work with each other and becoming more talkative as the weeks went on was a joy, and overall the project was a great success! I worked away furiously behind the scenes scanning the artwork and putting the zines together in between delivering sessions, and I’m so proud of what all of the young people achieved.

We are now delighted to present Building Stories: A Summer of Comics Volumes 1 and 2! We successfully launched the zines on the 19th of August, and everyone is very eager to participate in future comics projects. Comics is a core part of Dundee’s culture, and we have lots of plans for getting young people back involved with comics activities in the future!