How to Make Awesome Comics (The Phoenix Presents)

Bought this for my 10 year old son for his birthday... he ignored almost all of his other presents and spent the entire next few days reading this book doing all the exercises and drawing comics. A nice feature is being able to download and print the exercise pages so that you don't need to draw in the book itself, and can repeat them. It is written in a fun way that is instructional and encourages creativeness. It is mainly about the ideas of making characters and plots rather than a how to draw book.

I use this in a comic-club workshop I run at school. If I’m totally honest it was recommended to me by one of my pupils. It’s a great book. Full of practical and useful advice on how to structure comics as well as designing characters. Would recommend to anyone running a similar type of club or to anyone who has an interest in comics, or has someone in their life who perhaps doesn’t like reading conventional stuff, but does like comics.

Excellent instruction book. 11 year old grandson was impressed. This kept him away from eloctronic games for a while. Not sure how long it will last though. He is addicted to his electronic games!

Really interesting and fun. Teaches kids character and story development in a child friendly way. Lots of cool ideas and written in a way that is really accessible. My kids are 8 and 10 and both love this. They are fans of Phoenix comics too so the humour and ideas are familiar to them. Had considered getting them a blank comic creator, but glad I chose this as the have kept picking it up weeks down the line.

My son's a massive fan of the Phoenix Comic and loves drawing. This book gives great ideas to inspire kids to have a go at unleashing the random wondrousness that's in their mind and putting it down in comic strip form. Maybe one day he can be a Phoenix Comics artist!

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Worth it JUST for the page about how to make things funny - explaining humour without being humourless is a very subtle art, and this book pulls it off perfectly. (The rest of the book is also excellent but that page always sticks in my head.)

Our son loves making comic books and Neil Cameron's How to make awesome comics has been greatly appreciated. Neil visited his school a while back so he was already a big fan!

How to Make Awesome Comics does exactly what the title suggests: it teaches you how to draw comics. Now I'm not good at drawing myself - I can come up with a pretty convincing stick man, tree and vampire face - but from reading this book I can now draw dinosaurs, a couple of monsters and a penguin (I tried drawing a wizard on roller skates but it didn't turn out too well). Professor Panels and Art Monkey take you through this book, with step-by-step instructions on how to begin to draw comics. Professor Panels uses proper comic strips to introduce the lessons, and there's then plenty of opportunity and space to complete Art Monkey's challenges. Everything is covered here, from ideas to drawing faces to how to tell awesome stories and come up with a good ending. There's a great lesson on how to draw awesome monsters, which I think is the page I spent the most time on. I still can't get that centaur right, though... This book is really informative for anyone interested in drawing or comics, and even better if you want to combine the two. You don't have to be an expert at drawing to be able to enjoy this book - as you know, I'm pretty terrible and look what an afternoon with Professor Panels has done for me! I can't wait to try out more of my new drawing tips and tricks, especially when I one day write a picture book about tiny vampires (ha!). I'm sure How to Make Awesome Comics will be a big hit with children and teenagers, too - really anyone who just wants to draw a bit better. Well done, Phoenix Comics!

My nieces are all about making comics and they now use this book all the time!

Funny, creative book to give ideas to a beginning artist interested in comics.

My son was given this, loved it, and has been inspired to make his own comics. My daughter made me buy it for her too - she also loves it.

Was a great choice for a nephew who is into drawing and comics. He opened it, and started reading/leafing through it with intent at Christmas. I felt vindicated in the purchase of it when my Christmas gift lasted longer in his attention span than what other's expensive toys could muster.

I got it for daughter and for myself. We both love drawing and wanna do creative comics. She and I are having a lot of fun with it. And to make it last, we use separate sheets of paper so we can repeat the process again and again.