 I'm really excited to be here and thank you all for having me, and I'm going to talk about comics, how I got into the comics business, talk about the process of making them and discuss how comics can be used to educate through my group reading with pictures. But I also don't want to monopolize this. I want this to be more of a conversation and a discussion, rather than just me standing here, well, not here, but back in the States and being projected there. But I want this to be a conversation and not just a lecture. So I want you guys involved in this as well. So I guess we'll sort of start with what reading with pictures is and sort of my secret origin and how I got into comics and how I ended up founding reading pictures, sort of why I'm here with you guys today. So I'm going to try a screen share and so bear with me and we'll hope it goes well. Get the right file up here. Oh sure, I said we're going to try a screen share so I can show some slides and I just have to sort of get everything right here so just give me one moment. I think. And is that coming through alright? Yes. Alright, so like I said my group is called Reading with Pictures and we're a non-profit that was founded in 2009 and we're based here in the United States. And we promote the use of comics in the classroom and we do that because we believe that comics have a unique power and ability to improve educational outcomes in every subject. So the story of Reading with Pictures is also sort of my story and so let me tell you my secret origin. And you can see up there that's little Josh and he's loved comics for as long as he can remember. Now his mother who is a school librarian she taught him to value reading but it was comics that taught him to love it. And also I would like to introduce you to my mother who is currently working as a school librarian who actually taught me how to value reading. And there are also his scholastic secret weapons. There are his sort of special tools in school. And she also taught me how to love reading using some secret weapons. So my mother would read to me every night before putting me to bed and occasionally she'd let me pick the book and I always picked a comic. And there's mom. I can probably tell from the Michael Jackson shirt you know when that picture was taken. So she would always you know read to me she'd let me pick the book and one day I picked this comic in particular. And obviously the Transformers were pretty awesome. Robots very cool. Cars and planes very cool. Robots that were also cars and planes very very cool. So mom was reading the story to me and things were going great. You can see how excited I was. But then tragedy struck because about halfway through mom lost her voice and she couldn't finish the story. This was completely unacceptable. Optimus Prime here was in a lot of danger. And I had to make sure that he was going to be okay. And so with mom out of the picture the only person left to finish the story was me. And so I had to use the comic to teach myself how to read the comic. I was able to follow the narrative all the story through the images alone and use that visual context to sort of figure out all the words that I didn't already know. And pretty quickly you know really just like that I was reading. And pretty quickly you know really just like that I was reading. And so mom got retired. She got full pension and benefits of course. We took care of her. Oh sorry go ahead. But I started reading everything and get my hands on. Comics books magazines newspapers everything. And this is actually my graduation photo from when I graduated high school. By the time I was in the fifth grade I was already reading at the college level because of comics. By the time I was in the seventh grade by the time I was 12 years old I was taking college courses. And it's because comics made reading easy and it made reading fun. And once reading is easy and reading is fun then learning anything becomes easy and becomes fun. So you could say that comics made me a super student. So after I graduated college I went on to work in the comics business myself. Here are some of the things that I've worked on. Mail order ninja iron man starcraft the scribble knots. I've been very very fortunate that I get to play with all of my favorite toys. This is a museum exhibit in the states that was dedicated to Mail Order Ninja and that was pretty darn amazing. And it's always fun when you get to kind of force teenagers to do silly poses and photographs with you. I always I enjoy that I don't know I'm weird. I mean in the end I guess you could say that comics made me the man that I am today. Here you can see a picture of one of the cosplay events and you can also see that we did a great job. Is it good or bad? So that's sort of my story. And reading with pictures. Turn the screen share off I hope. There I'm back. So that's sort of my story and how I got into comics. How I learned to love them and reading with pictures grew out of that experience where if comics could make me a great student and make me love learning then maybe they could do that for everyone. So what I'd like to do is see if we can get some sort of conversation stuff going now. You know anything about the creation of comics anything about working in that business or anything about reading with pictures. I'm happy to address any and all. I have a question about the project reading with pictures. How do you work in in in this project? How do you publish some comics where there are pictures about some math or some other topics like physics? Or do you introduce some extracurricular activities in schools? So I guess kind of all of the above. We try to create material. We have a book coming out called comics that make kids smarter that's coming out in just a few months that have stories about every subject that you can think of. And you know we also have we're developing after school programs and summer reading programs. In fact we're partnering with the international school in Minsk to develop what we hope will be a summer reading program that can go all over the world. We also organize post-school programs. There's a summer camp on this topic. We cooperate with international schools. We also promote our idea of reading with comics. In Russian, Russian parents don't actually like comics. And I would like to know what do American parents think of comics and do you receive any feedback from them? Well you know it's been we've been doing this I've been doing this for for quite a few years now and there's been kind of this movement in the United States towards comics and and what we call visual literacy. So the idea that you can teach and learn from images as well as words. And that's pretty that's pretty advanced here in the States. I would like to say that in the United States there has been a movement that is that is making use of visual content in education, that is making use of education in visual form and in text form. And this movement has received a lot of development and now it's at a fairly professional level. But there's still a lot of resistance and there's still a lot of understandable concern because it's sort of like saying that you know candy is good for you I guess is kind of our argument and that's a hard one for parents to accept. And so one of the things that we try to do is we collect research and we actually are trying to put new research together looking at how the brain actually interprets data, interprets information. So when you think about how the brain works we have different parts of the brain are specialized in different tasks. One part of the brain is concerned about language and other parts concerned about image and pattern recognition. And so when you're using both of them together you get a better outcome. There's a whole theory behind this called the dual coding theory of cognition. I don't know how that necessarily translates but it's the idea that when you put an image and text together you're more likely to not only understand but to remember what you saw than if you saw either alone. So something I'd like to see if I can find something here. So this is something I like to show when I talk about how the real world uses comics. Now if any of you have ever been on a plane you've probably seen something like this right? And so in the real world when it's absolutely essential that you learn how to do something in just a few seconds or you'll die we use a comic. But this isn't when we think about something like this when we think about comics we don't think about something like this right? This isn't what comes to our mind. But comics are just pictures in a sequence. And so that means that things like what I just showed you diagrams showing you how to assemble a piece of furniture or a flow chart showing you you know the how an organization works any of these things they're comics too. And if all those things are comics then we use comics in our lives all the time we just don't think of it that way. And so what we try to do at Reading with Pictures is you know point out these things and then try to find the best ways to use this material. Because I mean the you know my own story is that you know hooked on comics worked for me you know I was I was a college student when you know I was a college student at 12 years old you know something worked there and if we can do this and replicate it for everyone then we can do something really special. And there are two questions from our online audience. Okay my first one what academic type of literature do you recommend about reading and pictures visual literacy etc. Okay so probably the best repository of that can be found on our website readingwithpictures.org.org so readingwithpictures.org and that's we have a database that's full of research and rationales and lesson plans. The second question the second question is at what age can children start learning reading with pictures? The second question is at what age can children start learning reading with pictures? I mean I think we we should start them learning with pictures and I think we do start them at incredibly young ages because we all learn to read by associating words with pictures right I mean that's that's how everyone learns to read everywhere on earth. And we do that because it's a normal part of human cognitive neurological development to understand that a picture of a thing can also represent a thing. So think about like when a dog sees a its reflection in a mirror and it doesn't understand that it's looking at itself it thinks it's another dog and babies are the same way but once we get to about two years old we start to understand that that picture in the glass is us and so then they can see a picture of an apple and know that that stands for or represents an apple even though they can't eat it so this is natural but language the idea that you make some lines on a paper and that that is apple the same way that that picture is apple that is something we all have to learn so I mean right from the beginning we're always putting you know words and pictures are together like this it's just as we get older we start to pull them apart right and think how easy it was to learn language especially but to learn all sorts of things when you're very young and think how much harder it gets the older you get and we believe that a big part of that is that we're just not using our entire brain you know when you take images out of the equation it's like running a race by hopping on one foot I mean you could do it but I wouldn't recommend it and Mr. Elder there's a question from our audience well creating comics is a quite a difficult task and what do you do to simplify the process do you have any secrets and could you please give us some examples of it sure so I actually have some stuff I'll show you here let me let me queue it up so this is one of my issues of the batman strikes from a few years ago and the process that I went through for this it starts with an outline and considering I also had to get this approved by DC comics it also was sort of a pitch as well I was both saying this is what the story would be and telling them why it's going to be good and worth uh worth them publishing and you know every story has to start with an outline right it's like you know a body without a skeleton it's not very useful you know so once you've got your outline figured out you know what your story is about and you know basically the sort of the framework of it then it goes to this stage so this is uh very similar to what you would see in a screenplay for a movie uh the script for a stageplay you know we describe the action we uh we walk out the dialogue um there are a few key differences uh mostly related to the format of the comics itself you'll typically describe what happens in every panel you'll take account of for things like sound effects or narrative captions basically anything you would see on the page you're going to want to try to account for at the script cadre and this is true whether you're drawing comics yourself whether you're writing and drawing or whether you're working with collaborators uh and this is primarily because it's much easier to make changes here where you're just cutting and pasting then if you have to erase and redraw an entire page worth of artwork so once you have the script and everyone likes it and you're ready to start drawing it it goes to this stage and uh these are the pencils and so this is typically done by uh an art team especially with the with comics like this uh it's like an assembly line and everyone has a role to play uh so i came up with the story i wrote the script and then it goes to the penciler uh who drew what you see in front of you and this is sort of the blueprint or the foundation for the rest of the art the you know all the elements are there but it's not finished yet and uh there's a question sure how much time does it take to create such a such a work such a page so professionals who are who are doing this as their job uh they typically can turn one of these pages around in a day that's the rule um summer faster summer certainly slower uh but the the sweet spot is that you can do one page a day uh so once the penciler is finished with his work it goes on to an anchor and what was sort of semi-defined now has now it's there you know now every all the details are there and uh you can also see that they put in the lettering uh like the the word balloons uh for the characters dialogue the narrative captions uh up there at the top left and if this had sound effects those would be in there as well and then the final step this is the finished colored page and now we can see the setting sun uh we you know now know that back girl is a redhead uh you know all of these details that are now coming to life through the colors and this page is a good example as well of a specific type of storytelling that you often only see in stories about characters like batman and how much time does it take to create such a picture uh so this so colorists and anchors can typically do between um two and three pages a day so the penciler takes about a paid a day to do his work the anchor can do his job in about a half a day and the colorist can do you know about a third of a day and we need to turn out 20 pages of this every month at least and so that's why we have to have a team working on it instead of just one person usually and and with characters like batman what's you know with stories that you created on your own anything can happen um but with batman you're kind of limited um so uh every batman story starts the same um a bad guy shows up every story ends the same batman stops him and the key is can you make all the parts in between uh fun interesting and unique so in this story the you know there is a villain and batman's going to fight it and uh but the the fun part of the story the thing that you know where anything can happen has to do with batgirl who's in the batmobile with batman in the beginning of this story oh sure sure so the the part that's interesting is has to do with the relationship between batgirl and batman and no problem uh so they're they're uh driving across the city to go take out this bad guy and batgirl saying you know i have my driver's license now i could drive us and batman's like you're not driving this car it's my batman voice and batgirl's like i bet you let robin drive it when he turns 16 and so batman's like believe me robin is definitely not driving this car and batgirl's all like fine whatever i didn't want to drive your stupid old batmobile anyway so this is what we call in dramatic terms um check-offs gun um you may have heard of that guy Anton check-off um and he said that if you have a gun uh on the mantle piece in the first act of your story it had better go off by the third so batgirl wanting to drive the car is what we call check-offs gun from the playwright Anton check-off who said that if you have a gun on a mantle piece in the beginning of your story it had better go off it had better someone had better fire it by the end and so batgirl really wants to drive the car right and batman does not want to later drive the car so we know she's gonna have to drive the car and unlike the fight with um the super villain where we know batman's going to win anything could happen when batgirl gets behind the wheel the wheel of that car and you know she drives the car they get into an accident she doesn't have any insurance it's a it's a big mess um but you know it's all okay in the end um but that's the that's what makes this story fun to me and to the reader there's ways you can introduce uh different types of story elements even when with a character like batman you're kind of put in a little box into what you can do there's still ways to make it fun I noticed that the pages that were in pencils and ink are done manually and do you use any computers any new technologies to optimize the process so a lot of people do uh most people still pencil and ink and by hand but almost all coloring is done in uh on a computer usually using photoshop or a program called manga studio and a lot of penciling and inking is now done uh on like a wacom tablet uh or you know any kind of other anything where you can draw directly on a screen they can now use that for the penciling and inking you know so as long as it's really up to you however you want to do it everything uh everybody uses different tools and another question from the audience well you have a lot of characters and each character has a story but um how can you how can you find the main story how can you find the main one so when you have a story with very strong characters um and whether it's your story or they're your characters or their characters that someone else has created like batman or superman um the key is deciding what you want to say what you know the meaning of it all so uh i did a story called mail order ninja um about a boy who gets a ninja in the mail and takes him to school with him and so it's pretty funny and it's pretty silly but it was actually about um uh sort of being being bullied and being picked on and um what what happens when you become the strong one do you become a bully too and you know with stories like um i wrote a superman story that uh was all about you know in in the story superman fights a like an evil robot uh but that wasn't the point of it the that was just a way to illustrate the idea that um no matter how powerful you are you still have to struggle uh and that people who have been um who have been blessed with you know talents and abilities whatever they are uh they can be inspired by people who have been given handicaps by life instead but still struggle anyway still keep fighting and so the i guess the the thing that the best way to do this is to ask yourself the question why am i writing this you know why am i putting my heart and my soul into this story and then why should i expect someone else to care um and if you can't answer that question then you don't really have a story uh so the the i guess the summation is you know you have you can have great characters who have their own voices and uh their own stories that you know that they'll tell but if you're gonna put them in a story then you need to make sure that that it's a story we're telling that means something two questions from our online audience okay and the first one is the first one from Margot's uh Margot's at the Moor other than superhero type comics how receptive to other types of comics are the publishers in the states or other countries so i mean it's been a the the kinds of comics and the kinds of of stories and genres that you find in comics has has just really been exploding over probably the last 20 years i'd say and so you can find comics about just about anything now um whether it's non-fiction you know biographies uh books about economics and science you can find you know comics uh comics for kids comics for adults comics for everything in between comics for adults i mean the real key is uh finding something that you're passionate about really you know a topic uh an art style something that where your enthusiasm and your excitement shows through uh and if you can do that then you have a pretty good shot at getting published somewhere and you don't have to and the great thing about the modern era is that you don't have to wait on someone to publish you you can take your comics to the internet um and one real quick thing about that i was going to self publish my mail order ninja series and i randomly entered it into a contest and won the grand prize and then i got a book deal out of that and that's how i started working in comics professionally but it was all because i believed in my story and i was going to put it out there regardless of what anyone else thought and there is another question from our audience a question about your project and graphic textbook um how um how did you work on this graphic textbook did you follow some already existing educational programs or did you just take some situations and display them in your textbook okay so we wanted to make something that um you wanted to make a textbook that kids would actually want to read uh so we recruited uh authors and illustrators who were popular with the age ranges of the students we were trying to reach and so these were the people that these kids were already spending their own time and their own money to read uh the work of these people and uh what age are you working for what a target audience this first uh this first book is uh ages really about nine to twelve our first book was published for children from nine to twelve years but we plan to uh again at this book is a success we plan to uh start focusing on very specific grade levels um and specific subjects so we do math for um people in grade five for kids in grade five and so the process is that we have uh the we have these really talented uh cartoonists and we give them a list of topics and these are the things that someone has to learn in math at grade five and we say pick one and if it's we we want them to be excited about the topic and be like i can tell a great story about that and then we let them do that and our education team is sort of looking over their shoulder to make sure that all their facts are right and it's doing all the stuff that the educators the teachers needed to do uh but otherwise we just sort of get out of their way and let them do what they normally do which is make comics that kids want to read and another question from our online audience we're starting from Nasta Danilova are there any color keys used for story coloring for one issue as for there is in animation or how does it happen uh that's a great question um so what you'll often see especially when you're talking about um um characters that are established uh like batman uh you'll we typically have what's called a style guide uh with color keys that's like batman's cape is this color and if it's stories of our own uh and characters of our own uh we will create those as a part of the uh the process so the answer is uh is yes um you know and and it's not exactly like it is in animation but it's pretty close well the first question is about those who are new in comic business and what can you advise for those who are good at creating characters at drawing characters but like skills necessary for drawing buildings or drawing surroundings do these people should these people start drawing some simple comics like Snoopy or should they develop their skills at drawing buildings and create some professional comics well i mean i think you have you have three choices the first is you can just play to your strengths you can just draw what you like and find a way and find characters in a world that let you just draw what you want to draw one of the most popular comics in the world is called xkcd uh and it's uh has stick figures uh you know it doesn't hurt that the the guy who creates xkcd uh he works for nasa and so he's a he's a rocket scientist he's a pretty smart guy um but you know he uses stick figures to tell all sorts of amazing stories so you can just draw to your strengths and be very successful um the second option is that you become a part of a studio uh the way that most manga is created in japan is by a studio so i showed you how in american comics someone will pencil the whole page and then someone will ink on top of that whole page uh in manga they typically break it down even more so one person draws the characters and one person draws the backgrounds and so you don't have to be an expert on everything because you have a studio mate sitting right next to you who is and the third option is that yeah you can basically just you know keep working at the stuff that you're not strong at um and eventually you know master all of it and that takes a lot of time but it can certainly be done i'd like to quickly recommend a few books uh that i think would be very helpful for anyone wanting to make comics and i don't know if these have been translated into russian um but they might have um but i'll i'll give you the titles and then we can hope for the best the first is called drawing words and writing pictures and it's uh authors are jessica abel abel and after jessica abel and matt madden madden and mad man uh and then another title that i would very much recommend is called understanding comics by scott mclout and he has also written two other books about reinventing comics and making comics that i also highly recommend between those uh i think you you're off to a pretty good start sorry i couldn't hear you sure i said between those i think you'd be off to a pretty good start right and um and last question and we're done um no uh there was a second question from that lady and uh the question about the balance between text and images in comics what is that balance and um how does the text impact on images and vice versa and what do professional comics makers think about it so fundamentally you want them to both add something unique uh you don't simply want to the text shouldn't simply describe what you can see and the images shouldn't show what you're telling with the text there sometimes it actually is very useful for the two of them to say essentially the same thing and to you for you to repeat yourself and text an image especially when you're trying to teach because that repetition and that connection is valuable excuse me could I repeat please so if you're trying to teach something uh you actually often want to repeat yourself you want the text and the image to essentially say the same thing because that's the point of it you want you want someone to understand something and so you kind of tell them twice in the same space but when you're uh trying to be artistic when you're trying to create a uh a compelling piece of of art and literature you want them to complement each other uh you want one one does one thing and one does the other and when you put them together you get something that's greater than either would be alone and uh the the ideal is that the text if the text was seen alone there would clearly be something missing and if the images were seen alone there would be something missing but when you put them together then it feels like uh everything is there but again this is more art than science uh so it really honestly it depends on you and what feels right to you and that's all for today thank you very much for for the lecture for answering questions thank you everyone this has been a this has been a lot of fun i hope you guys had fun too and i would like to pass the microphone to alexander he wants to say a few words uh thank you josh thank you mr. elder so have a nice evening i'm good