When I teach a comics class my interpretation of “comics” is really broad. In fact it includes pretty much anything with words and pictures, and anything where you have to figure out characters or a process or a story or set a scene or make something happen. So that can be pop-up books, or little dioramas, or whatever else.

This summer, the thing has been games.

I think it started when we were making cubes and those got made into dice and then it was not long until we were rolling the dice and deciding stuff.

I started a board game, and invited the kids to fill in squares with their characters and write what happens when you land there. That ended up like this:

I especially like the square, “Never Meet Bob.” I also don’t know what happens when you fight Thomas.

Then more kids made games:

The second week, another group of kids self-organized a game using a white board. I’d put the white board in there because I had a crowd who seemed like they brought with them a wide range of ways-of-being and I had a sense they might need to stand up and stuff like that.

The game was called “Chickenify” and you had to take some drawing or shape someone put up there, and chickenify it. Your chickenification was then judged and given points for having all the parts, how funny it was, stuff like that.

The game continued and changed all through the week, and one kid even came in one morning with an “update” to “download” into the game because he was in charge of the game’s mechanics in this way.

The discussions were endless and nobody won anything. The games and the making of them never came to a conclusion.

Because the thinking and the doing are the same thing. We figure things out by figuring things out.

When we behold some sort of a thing someone made or invented or messed up, we see the thing and we also see the doing of the thing. The thinking and doing are inseparable. This is how we look at each other, and ourselves, and the world, and I am grateful for that.

Neptune Road

The story of folks making a life on a terraformed Neptune.

Things Of The Week

A fascinating meditation on how art makes us.

Amazing site where you can search on a location and find out what sorts of creatures are doing what currently

Related: A site that maps out the plots of works of literature

Books, Art, Cartoons

All Three Sloth and Manatee books are at Radiator Comics!!

Brainwaves cartoons collection 1: The Fountain of Stuff at BookShop

Brainwaves cartoons collection 2: Best of Brainwaves Volume Two: Mom, Dad, I'm a Cat at BookShop

License my cartoons: CartoonStock are terrific and I’ve been with them forever

Art Prints: Capybaras, Moose, Baphomet, more in the Print Shop at INPRNT who also are great and have cards too

Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.

May you think and do, may you do and think, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy