Saturday, November 03, 2007

What the????

From my nine year old daughter's blog, at " www.bradyparham.blogspot.com ":

This past Summer, Brady finally got to take the Cartooning class she's been waiting to be old enough for, at the Orlando Museum of Art (They actually called for me to teach it, but I was too busy). On the final day, when I went to pick her up, she had this big poster board in hand with her project from the last few days. Their assignment was to come up with a story, and draw a comic page of it...
The story, she told me, is that a girl finds a lsot dog (Brady REALLY wants a dog these days), and the dog is sad. The girl takes the dog to the mall, buys him a collar, and then they leave the mall, and live happily ever after.

I knew something was "different" when I looked at this page, but couldn't determine what, exactly. I knew that it was odd that she'd made an unconventional panel arrangement that was still readable. But then, she pointed out to me, she'd made the story IN THE SHAPE OF A DOG.
.........

I was speechless. I have scanned in and highlighted the page here to the best of my ability (although it doesn't do the original justice). Making unconventional pages, in the shape of the thing you're talking about? Geez! I didn't even know about this until college, when I read Will Eisner's books on storytelling. How on earth did she know about it?

I still don't know. And, I even asked...no, her teacher never said to do anything like this. She just "came up with it". I guess all that comic book reading we've been doing rubbed off, somehow.

5 comments:

Kenny Durkin said...

That's remarkable. Great work Brady!

Eduardo González said...

WoW! I mean: "WoW-WoW" "Rrrruf!"
Really amazing, it seems that your little princess is getting ready to surpass you in many ways!

Keelan Parham said...

Yep, she's said she was "taking over the business" since she could first talk! Sometimes these days it's hard to get her off the computer long enough to get her to draw, but when I see stuff like this, I remember those words, and I believe she just might do it!

The Hurricane said...

Thats awesome!!! WOW!!!

Tim Gardner said...

I think there's a type of poetry which creates a SHAPE with the words. This is similar. Definitely "thinking outside the box" for a little girl. Impressive.