NORWALK, Conn. — Ten-year-old Connor Buisson spent his summer doing something most kids his age don’t get to try. He wrote, drew, and colored his own comic book.
The finished project, called “The Ivy Neighborhood: The Story of King Rex and Avo,” is eight pages long. Connor will show it off to his school community at Cranbury Elementary on Sept. 18, where he’s a fifth grader.
The idea started with a birthday gift. Connor’s mom and stepdad gave him a card saying he’d get to work with Phil Lohmeyer, a cartoonist and educator who runs The Comic Tree. Before their first session even started, Connor got a head start on his characters.
“I thought that it would be funny to make an avocado a character,” Connor said about Avo, the story’s villain. King Rex came from a talk with a friend about dinosaurs. “I felt like he could be the leader, so I felt like I could name him King Rex,” he said.
The comic follows King Rex, his assistant Mrs. Kendall the frog, and a loyal army of ants as they fend off Avo’s repeated attempts to steal King Rex’s fortune. The three stories in his series include a magical orb, a taco hideout, a bank robbery, a merry-go-round, and a trap at the Fence Depot.
Connor said making the comic followed a clear process. First came the characters and setting. Then came the main idea for the story. After that, he sketched the pages by hand, and Lohmeyer checked his work before Connor moved on to inking, tracing over his pencil lines with a special pen to make the artwork bold.
Once the artwork was finished, Connor and Lohmeyer colored the pages digitally using Adobe Photoshop. Connor said they had to be careful not to leave any gaps between the lines, or the digital color would spread outside the shapes.
Connor also wanted his story to carry a message, something inspired by the show “Family Matters.”
“You can’t do anything by yourself,” Connor said, describing his favorite lesson from the show. “You need your team, you need your family, so I included that in the book.” In his own comic, he put it this way: “Even King Rex can’t do specific things by himself.”
The character Connor relates to most is King Rex. “He’s nice, and he doesn’t want anybody to feel left out,” Connor said. “I feel like I kind of do that sometimes.”
Consistency was the hardest part of the process, Connor said, since he wanted every character to look the same in every panel. Once he sketched his characters, though, he said their designs stayed the same.
Connor said he’s excited, and a little nervous, to present his comic at Cranbury Elementary. He’s planning to ask the crowd if anyone knows the show that inspired him before explaining the connection.
He also has advice for other kids who want to make their own comic. “I would probably sit down with them and talk,” Connor said. “What would you like your comic to be about? Do you have any specific characters you would like to use?” He said he’d want credit to go to them, not him. “I’m just there to [help].”
A digital download of “The Ivy Neighborhood” is expected to be available on Etsy by the end of the month.
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