Life With Mr. Dangerous by Paul Hornschemeier

The students complete weekly sketchbook work, where they doodle and create graphic diaries, as well as assignments where they break up a story into single scenes, or panels. In his second year at Chicago teaching Writing the Graphic Novel, Hornschemeier examines different ways to tell a story in pictures, focusing on drawing the moments that make up the narrative. Pretty pictures is an illustration, and I’m not teaching illustration here.

Writing and storytelling, that’s what’s really important. “There’re always at least one or two students that I have to talk down from a ledge. Dangerous (Random House), coming out in May. “I think a lot of people, when they come into the class, are worried about their drawing skill,” says Hornschemeier, the author of two full-length graphic novels, with a third, Life with Mr. But when admitting students to the class, Hornschemeier, a visiting lecturer, looked for good storytellers more than for experienced artists. Some have more experience creating comics than others-one student wrote a final paper last year in graphic-novel form. Fourth-year Madeline Underwood studies biochemistry, and Piali Yang, ’13, concentrates in computer science with a math minor. None of the seven students, mostly undergraduates, in Paul Hornschemeier’s graphic-novel class is an art major. Hornschemeier leads a critique of student work, a regular class exercise that helps students learn to translate the foreign language of comic symbolism into storytelling.

Life With Mr. Dangerous by Paul Hornschemeier