Who's Who in the CBU 2009

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

Comics Week - Why I Love It Here!

By Regie Rigby

It seems like years ago now.

I was in the English Departmental office discussing what our next “theme week” should be. Somehow, in the eight months since I qualified and became a “proper teacher” I seem to have developed a reputation as the theme week king - but I was stumped. We’d done Harry Potter Week to coincide with the release of the movie. We’d done Lord of the Rings Week to coincide with the release of that movie. I was racking my brains but I just couldn’t think of anything suitable.

Then the boss said “How about comics week?”

Couldn’t believe my luck. I mean, I’d been banging on about using comics in lessons for ages, but hadn’t really thought I was getting anywhere. But something I said must have made an impression because Comics Week wasn’t my idea.

This was a good thing, because there was a little bit of scepticism from a few of my colleagues. I needed the fact that it wasn’t my idea to deflect some of that. I mean, I don’t blame them – I suspect that if I wasn’t the comics nut I am I’d be a little wary of such a project myself. After all – as teachers of English shouldn’t we be encouraging our kids to read “real” books? And what about the parents?

I can imagine some of the reactions something like Comics Week must engender from a non-comics reading public who already believe that education is going to the dogs. Couple all of that with the fact that everybody knew that comics were my thing and I have to tell you that I felt no small degree of pressure to perform. Not to put too fine a point on it, as the start date for the week approached I was slowly devolving back into the primordial quivering blob of jelly that was my distant ancestor all of those millennia ago.

I needn’t have worried.

Right from its inception Comics Week was a guaranteed hit. It simply couldn’t fail.

Not because I’m an organisational whiz kid or anything – far from it. (One day I’ll post a picture of my desk up here and you’ll see what I mean…) Not even because the kids I teach were mad for comics before I started, because they weren’t. Indeed even the youngest of them has reached the ripe old age of eleven and has therefore come to regard the medium as being merely “for kids”.

No, it was a guaranteed success because of the communal nature of comics.

Having been given the task of putting comics week together the first thing I did was to reach out and touch my friends on the ‘net with the query “Any ideas?”

My Inbox was snowed under for days, both with helpful suggestions for activities and offers of practical help. For example, the Bristol based comics artist and web animator Simon Gurr made a serious offer to travel up to Doncaster (a round trip of a fair few hundred miles) to spend a day doing art with my classes, and was only put off by the insanity of British train timetables.

In how many other industries would a professional you have never met offer to seriously put themselves out just to do you a favour?

Not many.

And yet comics is full of such people. Simon couldn’t make it, but Mel Gibson lives much closer, and was able to make the trip.

Oooh, I love that reaction. Obviously I mean the real Mel Gibson as opposed to the actor. Mel (short for Melanie, since you ask) is two things. She’s passionate about comics and pop culture, and she’s a seriously inspirational speaker.

Oh, and she holds a Phd in Girl’s Comics – and it doesn’t get any cooler than that.

Dr. Gibson brought armloads of comics into school and talked to the kids about them. The transformation was interesting to watch as my class went from hostile, to disinterested, to enthusiastic, to desperate to get their hands on as many volumes as they could. For the entire day Mel leaped around the classroom like a woman possessed thrusting comics in front of new readers – new readers who for the first time in all the time I’ve been teaching them were silent because they were reading.

English teacher heaven.

Oh but it didn’t stop there. I was also contacted by Dan at Cool Beans World , a comics and digital animation company based just up the road from my school in the city of Sheffield. Dan’s a writer, not an artist, but as you might expect he knows a lot of folks who are artists and he offered to come along and bring an artist or two with him.

Which he did. Which is why my class were given a lesson in comics composition by D’Israeli last week. D’Israeli (also known as Matt) has worked for DC, for 2000AD and independently. To my mind, having D’Israeli turn up in my classroom is a bit like having Kenneth Brannah arrive to help me teach Drama.

Dan and Matt arrived first thing in the morning, went straight into a classroom and started a writing/drawing double act explaining how to turn a story into a script and a script into a comic. They didn’t stop once. They even worked through the lunch break, using our computer room to take kids on a tour of the Cool Beans World Website. Ask any teacher – for two non-teachers to spend seven hours performing at full pelt in front of six different classes without a break is seriously impressive stuff. Matt even left me with sic pages of detailed notes so that we could teach the same thing to other classes.

Where else would this happen?

Bear in mind that we’re not talking about people I’ve known all my life here. There are not even people I knew well enough to contact directly. They contacted me and offered to help just because they knew they could. Mel and Dan and Matt came, shared their enthusiasm with both staff and students and left the school buzzing. No other industry does this.

Comics does.

On occasion I’ve been a bit critical of the “prima donna” attitude of some creators, pointing out that even the major stars in comics are basically unheard of so far as the general public are concerned. This may be true, but think back to the last con you went to. How many pros did you talk to? I bet there’s a whole legion of fans out there who’ve supped a pint with Garth Ennis in convention bars, or spent hours talking to Bryan Talbot about art and pet rats.

Yet these people are stars! Can you imagine going to the Caan Film Festival and propping up the bar with Stallone or Connery? You’d never get in the same building, let alone the same bar!

And it’s not just the pros. a couple of weeks ago a few thousand comics fans went on an emergency shopping spree to keep a comics company solvent. Not a major company either, a mid sized player. As I observed at the time, outside of comics not even Coca-Cola or Harley Davidson can command that kind of brand loyalty.

Comics week was a success for the same reason comics remain successful. Because enough people cared enough to make it a success. Truth be told, I had very little to do with it. (Although naturally I took all the credit at school…)

Feel good about yourselves. You’re part of something amazing!