Coming up soon! No Direction Home Festival, Cornbury Festival, Camp Bestival, Southgate Primary, No Limits Youth Arts Festival, more workshops in Islington Libraries, Burgess Hill Library, Varndean School… more to come!

With all this busy-ness I’ll somehow also be squeezing in a tour and festival shows with my friends Bolide, making spontaneous cosmic soundworlds to confuse and delight peoples’ ears from Newcastle to Cork and back!

Phew!

“Both teachers who experienced James Parsons of Crazy Comic Club thought he was FANTASTIC!  They complimented his creativity, his organisation, energy and general manner with the children.  He managed to switch from entertaining the older children in the morning to captivate the smaller year 2 children’s attention, so they remained really interested and engaged throughout the afternoon.”

If you’re interested please email me… info@crazycomicclub.co.uk

info@crazycomicclub.co.uk

Workshops are are a relaxed and fun environment to be in after a long day at school. We follow three threads of approach. Individually crafted workshops focus on specific aspects of cartoonery, from anatomy and expression, to setting, shading, perspective, dynamism, design, and speech. During free drawing sessions, kids can create what they want, how they want – their own characters and strips – guided and encouraged by myself. We also work on longer term collaborative projects culminating in a beautifully printed comic at the end of the course. They’re sold locally at Dave’s Comics, and the kids get to share the profits. Bonus!

Comics have always been an underrated medium, often perceived as ‘low art’. The intellectual input into the form on the behalf of the reader is however very demanding: in the gaps between boxes of a comic strip, time passes, locations change, things happen. The brain has to make a number of calculations – based upon what it has seen before, and what follows, literally ‘filling in’ gaps in the story with the imagination, based on infinite constantly evolving symbolic ‘clues’ that are embedded in the language of the form. And you thought it was all just fart jokes and laser blasts!

Comics cover ALL subjects – graphic journalism, personal memoirs, philosophy, biography, history… Wherever there are stories there are now comics. My own background is as a cartoonist, writing satirical anti-war comics for 6 years before deciding that life could be more rewarding aiding the development of young people’s imaginations through comics. Direct creative action, if you will…

Art is crucial to the development of young people, as a form of relaxation, freedom, and even therapy. Parents often say to me ‘Of course I’ve never been able to draw…’ Nonsense! Everyone can draw, the confidence and desire just gets sucked out of you at school! Art is virtually bottom the list of academic priorities. School teaches everyone to behave and think the same in preparation for a mundane life conforming to rules and systems. Art, meanwhile, encourages independent thought, antithetical to this ‘hive mind’ mentality. So it follows that free creative thought is suppressed, thus the status quo of our secret lizard masters remains unthreatened! Ho ho! Only kidding readers! Now go pick up a pencil and draw something!

Multicultural Manga Workshop at Central Library

Please let me know whether your child(ren) will be attending. Pre-booking is essential! dates of the sessions will be available closer to the time here on the website. Payment for half-termly sessions is required in the first week of term.

28th July – Seaford Library comic workshop
4th August – Lewes Library
9th August – Bexhill Library
11-12th August – Library workshops in the North East
13-15th August – Summer Sundae
23rd August – Comics in Clay, Westhill Hall Brighton
25th August – Lewes Library
27th – 30th August – Small World

Just a few upcoming dates:
March 4th – East Grinstead Library
March 7th – Walton Library
March 15th – Crawley Young Carers
March 19th – Claremont High School
April 7th – Falmer High School
May 15th – Sutton Library
June 18th – 20th – Big Session
July 3rd, 4th – Cornbury Festival