Cartoon storytelling helps students navigate personal challenges, connect learning across subjects, nurture creativity, and strengthen peer relationships.

Margaret Hespen

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Creating a comic strip is an excellent way for middle schoolers to express the unique struggles of their age group because they can explore difficult experiences through a character. They can freely experience embarrassment or fear in fictitious but entirely possible situations. Showing a social mistake in a cartoon makes it look like someone else made the mistake, not the actual artist, and universalizes the experience. Who hasn’t tripped, fallen asleep in class, or accidentally used deodorant as hairspray? Students frequently explore themes of identity, body image, and bullying, and the little guy almost always wins. Students endow their heroes with powers to overcome any situation, including problems that hit close to home, like the sixth grader who created a comic about a family being given an eviction notice. Making a comic strip can be a powerful way to engage with real life.

If you teach multiple subjects or can network with other teachers, cartooning is an easy way to integrate learning across subjects. Cartoon storytelling with a problem-solution framework is the perfect medium for teaching health habits, telling a historical event, organizing an original story, or even explaining scientific principles.

Cartooning is especially effective in practicing foreign language skills. My Spanish students drew a comic strip with one character complaining of a simple health problem, such as stomach pain from eating too many peanuts or not feeling tired from lack of exercise. Then they drew a doctor advising them on a solution using the informal command tense. The assignment gave some students for whom verbal expression in another language was difficult a chance to shine, and it also reinforced grammar as students checked each other’s rough drafts.

What if a cat went to dine on a moon made of cheese? What would happen to a boatful of tourists if the earth really was flat? Do weather changes happen because a cloud gets in a fight with the sun? What is bowling like from the perspective of a bowling pin? Cartooning lets students explore impossibilities with limitless abandon. Students nurture divergent thinking in the brainstorming stage as they play off one another’s ideas.

All through the weeklong process of developing their comic strip, I encourage students to collaborate with peers. Sometimes the storyline gets lost in the exuberant drawings, so partners check each other’s sketches for clarity. They can’t wait for me to project their final product for the class to read. This can be done all at once or one a day as an attention-getting warmup as the students come in. You can also display the pieces on a bulletin board or compile them in a binder for free-time reading.

First, we talked about their favorite animated characters, and I showed examples from former students and a PBSLearning tutorial to illustrate story arc, character development, and creative composition.

A cartoon planning page with a guideline of three main characters and four story frames helped students crystallize their plot. A mini-lesson on easily drawing facial expressions and hands gave them tools to complete a spec sheet of their main character with various poses and emotions. Students completed these spec sheets before beginning their storyboards.

Next, in the rough storyboard stage, students explored receding space, simulating different camera angles, and zooming in on key interactions.

Finally, they drew the finished strip on a simple template, using a lightboard or window to trace their pencil sketches onto clean paper before coloring.

To expand the lesson, you could spend a week on each of these concepts, bringing in drawing skills like rendering facial expressions, showing action through gesture drawing, or using two-point perspective.

It is important to review some lettering basics with students so that their strip is legible. For the dialogue bubbles, they can opt to print neatly or type and copy and paste. For title and action words, teach simple block or bubble lettering or have them stamp letters. Alternatively, you could teach this as a digital project using a free program such as OpenToonz or Canva.

Drawing cartoons is a fun project that provides endless opportunities to showcase learning, assess understanding, and encourage expansive thinking in a variety of subject areas. But perhaps it is most valuable as a tool for connection with issues, thoughts, and people that loom large in each young artist’s world.

Margaret Hespen is an art teacher at North Clackamas Christian School in Oregon City, Oregon. margarethespen@gmail.com

Four Ways Cartooning Sparks Storytelling