In 1995, Nizzibet and I were living in Santa Rosa, California. She was getting some work freelancing for comic publishers and I was employed part-time as a proof reader / type setter at a rubber stamp company. We were pretty broke. So when the opportunity came to make some extra money came up we grabbed the chance.

The Luther Burbank Center had offered an after school class in doing comics for a kids 10-13 years old. The artist who had originally planned to teach the class had to drop out and, somehow, my name came up as a possible replacement. I’d never taught a class before but I’m willing to try almost anything once. Especially when I’m broke. I got hired on as the teacher and Nizzibet got a job as my assistant. And thank god for that.

I was a terrible teacher. Okay, maybe not terrible, but certainly not very good. A good teacher can imagine more than one way to teach a lesson and can ask the students questions in order to know what the students are getting and what is going over their heads. I wasn’t good at that then and I’m not much better now.

Fortunately, Nizzibet is very good at working with people of all ages. She’s very good at explaining things in different ways so concepts can be easily understood. Because of her the class was a success.

I did manage to contribute a few useful things. One of those was this minicomic instruction book on how to make a minicomic. It’s purposely unpolished. Our students were still learning to draw and I wanted them to concentrate more on getting their drawings done than on making them perfect.