The Bristol Board Jungle

    (NBM, 2004)
™ and © 2004 respective creators

College art professors Pendarvis and Kneece had an unusual idea for a senior project: have top students collaborate on a graphic novel. But here’s what’s really different: Their story is not a fantasy story nor a human drama; it’s a collective semi-autobiographical account of teachers’ and students’ time spent in the very Savannah College sequential art class that teaches the craft.

That’s right: It’s a comic book about students learning to make comics by students learning to make comics. That might not build expectations of greatness, but, rather than come up with an uninteresting exercise demonstrating the blind leading the blind, Pendarvis and Kneece show that they’re not only excellent writers themselves, but also excellent teachers who have groomed the talents of seven artists with excellent potential.

Broken into seven chapters, each drawn by one of their students, the book takes readers through the beginnings of a semester right up to the fledgling artists’ first opportunity at landing work. Along the way, it throws in a few how-tos that are of special interest to both would-be comics creators and casual readers. Although not intended to be an exhaustive deconstruction of the art form, à la Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, it delivers the same kind of fascinating peek into the world of sequential art. 

It’s also a fascinating story in its own right, highlighted by contrasting personalities and interests of the students and their analyses of each other’s work—work that is used as a story device, further enriching the story’s characters. A neat trick is Pendarvis’ mimicking the myriad of amateur art styles of his various students. All this only demonstrates that the world of creating comics creators can be of equal interest to those who read comics and those who make them.

— Jim Johnson
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