Cartoonist Visits Bolingbrook Students

Submitted by Valley View School District 365U

Several dozen Brooks Middle School sixth graders spent their lunchtime in the library Tuesday with cartoonist Chris Schweizer who gave them a brief, but outstanding, glimpse of what it takes to draw and write professionally.

“The absolute biggest thing is practice. Hands down the most important thing,”

said the Kentucky resident who both wrote and handled the artwork in The Crogan Adventures, a historical fiction graphic novel series. “Drawing is like basketball. If you don’t keep practicing, you’ll never be good at it. The more you draw, the better you will be.”

Schweizer urged the 6th graders, most of whom were from Charlie McDermott’s art class, to do their own thing when it comes to both writing and creative art.

“Style is very important. You don’t find your style. Style finds you. Style is something you create by doing things over and over again,” he said.

The author of the just-published first book in the horrow series,The Creeps, gave away a couple of personal secrets about being a horror writer.

“Figure out what would terrify you. When I write a horror story, I want it to be scary. I want it to be spooky. I spend a lot of time thinking about things that scare me,” he said. “What scary stories do is allow us to take the things we’re afraid of or that we’re nervous about and give them a physical form that we can overcome.”

He also helped students understand how to create characters, not only in writing, but also in artwork.

“A lot of writing books and creating characters is writing questions. Anytime I am writing a story, I have to think why would my characters do this? What should they do next,” Schweizer said. “What I usually do is give them a problem that seems like it’s insurmountable. Then I think about what they would do in a situation like this. I ask a lot of questions while I’m writing these stories.

“When I draw a character, I always draw loosely first,” he added, telling the 6th graders he is always looking to insert details that make it feel real. “I do a lot of pre-writing because with comics it’s really hard to edit them after you’ve drawn them.”

Schweizer’s new book, The Creeps: Night of the Frankenfrogs, is available through Anderson’s Book Shop. The second book in the series will be published in February.