City Weekend recently featured YK Pao School’s Comic Club. Lead by grade 8 student Gina Xia, the club is an excellent showcase for our students’ gifts for illustration and story-telling.
Young illustrators at YK Pao School find the humor in everyday life.
Covering everything from magical Harry Potter-inspired schools to flying ninjas, YK Pao School’s Comic Book Club has encouraged aspiring student artists to harness their creative energy on paper and come up with entertaining comic strips that have grabbed the attention of teachers and students in the school community.
“The reason we started the club was because we all love drawing,” says grade 8 club leader Gina Xia. “Many of us were already drawing comics at home so we decided to combine our work to make a book.” For their first magazine, the club printed about 75 copies, which were mainly distributed to teachers. Riding on the positive feedback, the club’s second issue grew to 1,000 copies which were distributed to both students and teachers across campuses.
According to Xia, the most popular comic strips are the ones that feature regular students at the school coupled with humorous situations and anecdotes. “While everyone loves reading about magical characters, the most relatable stories are the ones that could occur in everyday life,” says Xia. “One time, we were just sitting at the lunch table having a funny discussion and we recorded everything into our comic strip.”
The club meets twice a week to compile ideas, but students do most of their brainstorming and drawing at home. The process is student-run from start to finish, which means the kids have learned to master a range of technical skills in addition to hand-drawing illustrations.
“We start off drawing the comic strip on paper and then scan it to the computer,” says Xia. “After a quick polish on Photoshop, the final copy is sent to the factory for printing. My dad owns a design company, so he taught me all about Photoshop and I taught the other kids in turn. We’ve been able to learn a lot by being our own editors.”
Each comic book runs about 50 pages, and includes individual comic strips based on certain themes. The most impressive part? The books are written in both Chinese and English. The club recently wrapped up their third magazine, which focuses on lengthier stories with more developed plot lines.
“Everyone really enjoys our books,” says Xia. “The only critique we’ve gotten is that the comics cater more to the girls than the boys, so this time we’ve made sure to draw a boy on the cover!”
(City Weekend Magazine, June 6-August 14)
