Kids Create Their Own Superheroes in Five-Week Comic Art Class at Mystic Museum of Art
Kids Create Their Own Superheroes in Five-Week Comic Art Class at Mystic Museum of Art beginning Sunday, Sept. 27, taking young artists from the first pencil marks on a page through the process of creating a short comic book of their own.
The Sunday morning series is designed for ages 7 to 14 and taught by Mystic comic-book creator Brett Swanson, who isn’t simply teaching children how to draw a superhero.
Over five classes, students work through many of the same steps used to turn an idea into a finished comic: drawing characters and objects, developing a story, designing pages, adding ink, creating shadows and texture and assembling those pieces into a visual narrative.
By the end, the goal is for each student to have put an original superhero and comic-book story onto the page.
And Swanson knows what it’s like to begin with nothing but a blank sheet of paper.
From Mystic Mail Carrier to Comic-Book Creator
Swanson has spent decades working in Mystic as a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier, but he’s also spent much of his life drawing.
He told the Postal Service in a 2024 profile that he had wanted to become a comic-book artist since childhood and studied cartoon graphics in the late 1980s.
Rather than waiting for a major comics publisher to hand him a character, he eventually created his own.
Swanson publishes his own comics and has exhibited his work at shows, fairs and comic conventions. He has also taken what he learned into schools, libraries and museums, teaching children how comic books are made.
His own series, Power Kid, follows fourth-grader Johnny Brooks, who gains superpowers from a glowing rock and finds himself battling a decidedly kid-friendly assortment of threats including robots, aliens, dinosaurs and even demented vegetables.
Swanson writes and illustrates his comics himself, by hand.
That makes him particularly well suited to teaching the entire process rather than one isolated part of it.
A Comic Book Is More Than a Drawing
Children who love superheroes often begin by drawing a character.
Creating a comic requires the next step: figuring out what that character actually does.
Students in the Mystic Museum of Art course learn basic drawing techniques involving shapes, objects and figures, but the curriculum moves beyond illustration into layout, design and storytelling.
That’s where comic art becomes its own visual language.
A comic-book artist has to decide how large a panel should be, what the reader sees first, where a character stands, how one image leads into another and how much of the story can be communicated without words.
Students will also explore inking, along with techniques for creating shadows, depth and texture.
Those choices can transform a simple pencil sketch into something that begins to resemble the comics sitting on a bookstore shelf.
One Person Doing the Work of a Comic-Book Team
Swanson’s independent approach also gives students a useful look at how many different jobs can hide inside a single comic.
Mainstream comics are frequently produced collaboratively, with different people handling writing, penciling, inking, coloring and lettering.
Swanson does the process himself.
He has said a single comic can take him three or four months to complete, beginning with a blank page and continuing through the writing and artwork required to finish the book.
For young artists accustomed to seeing the polished final product, understanding that process can be just as valuable as learning how to draw it.
A finished comic isn’t created with one perfect drawing.
It’s built through ideas, rough sketches, revisions, page layouts, mistakes, corrections, ink and a lot of decisions about how the story should unfold.
Five Sundays to Build a Comic
The course begins Sept. 27 and continues on Sundays through Nov. 1, with no class Oct. 4.
Each session runs from 10 to 11:30 a.m.
That gives students time between classes to think about their characters and stories rather than attempting to cram the entire process into a single workshop.
Mystic Museum of Art has previously offered Swanson’s comic-art instruction in both multiweek classes and longer one-day workshops, making comic creation a recurring part of its children’s studio programming.
The museum’s approach fits naturally with Swanson’s own philosophy about teaching comics.
He has described comic creation as a way for children not only to develop artistic skills, but also to tell stories, express ideas and develop the discipline needed to complete a project.
And there’s a useful trick hidden inside all those superheroes, villains and adventures.
Kids are writing.
They’re planning.
They’re sequencing ideas.
They’re solving visual problems.
And they’re reading comics while learning how those comics work.
They just happen to be doing it while deciding whether their hero should battle a robot, an alien or perhaps one of Swanson’s demented vegetables.
More information is available at the Event Website link below.
To register, click the Event Registration link below.
Details
Class: Comic Art: A Comic Book Making Class
Instructor: Brett Swanson
Ages: 7–14
Dates: Sundays, Sept. 27–Nov. 1, 2026
No Class: Oct. 4
Number of Classes: Five
Time: 10–11:30 a.m.
Location: Mystic Museum of Art
Address: 9 Water St., Mystic, CT 06355
Members: $115
Nonmembers: $135
Supplies: All supplies included with registration
Students Learn: Drawing fundamentals, figures and objects, comic-book layout and design, visual storytelling, inking, shadows, depth and texture
Final Project: Students develop and draw their own superhero and comic story
Contact: Mystic Museum of Art, 860-536-7601
Featured image is an artistic representation inspired by the event and may not depict the actual people, location, or activities shown.