Instead of pages, the final project for one English seminar at Northfield Mount Hermon took the form of panels — comic panels, to be exact. To tell the stories of family histories, hidden feelings, deep relationships and newfound callings, students returned to the art form that first made them fly through a book.
“You can see their faces light up,” Patrick Harris said, describing his students as they shared their first comic books in his class, “Comic Studies and Theory.” “What happened along the way that made [them] lose that joy in reading?”
By asking the high schoolers to create their own zines — specifically memoirs split into comic book panels — Harris sought to remind his students of that early joy. In the Greenfield Public Library on May 20, the class shared their creations, now published works in the library’s zine collection.
The 14 students’ zines told stories often shelved away from small talk and everyday chatter through stick figures, cartoonish characters, realistic sketches, photos, speech bubbles, captions and a little help from artificial intelligence. Parents’ and grandparents’ sacrifices immigrating to the United States; experiences of depression, anxiety and homesickness; passions for sports; and even the ins and outs of microeconomics illustrated through a round of golf came to life in the comic panels.
Cherry Liu’s project captures her first few days at the boarding school “feeling very lost” through dark backdrops and chipped panel frames before she discovered the school’s crew for her favorite sport.
“I felt like I was acting in a normal way when people were talking around me, but actually I was very lost and I didn’t know what to say,” Liu remembered. “Then, I found this community in dance, and it opened me up to a new world.”
Zarriah Ottley’s memoir explores her relationship with her mom.
“We both grew up where we weren’t surrounded by people like us, so it’s about how we both connect through that, and how sometimes I doubt myself and she keeps me grounded,” Ottley said.
Hayden Addison called his comic, “Fine on the Outside.” In the panels, the story reveals the mental health challenges often lurking underneath common teenage habits like late-night scrolling and thin, routine responses to “How are you?”
“Being a male, we don’t say stuff, we don’t express our emotions,” Addison said. “We don’t tell what’s actually going on inside us, and we don’t show it. We show on the outside we’re fine, but on the inside, we’re not.”
Other students talked to family members to uncover details of their relatives’ lives — the stories at the center of their zines.
“I’ve lived a very privileged life, but for that to happen, a lot of my ancestors had to sacrifice, and that starts with my grandfather and my grandmother,” Luca Bilotto said while describing his memoir.
Italian and English collide in his zine, which follows his grandfather’s journey immigrating from an Italian village to Montreal “with nothing, just himself.”
“I didn’t want to change the reality of things, because this is really my grandfather’s story. I’m writing for my family and they all speak Italian, so I wanted them to really get the true version of things,” Bilotto said. “If other people and other immigrants can connect and understand his story and parts of it, then that’s the best of both worlds, but I really wanted to stick to what my grandfather lived.”
Teen librarian Francesca Passiglia and local zine artists listened as the students explained the idea behind their zines. To the students, Vanessa Brewster, vice president of Looky Here, an arts center in Greenfield, described the process of piecing zines together as “taking something really complicated and making it super simple so you can share it with as many people as possible.”
Brewster crafts her own zines, hunts for zines at book, art and zine fairs for Looky Here’s zine library, and teaches visitors how to make zines.
“I like making art of all kinds, but zines are really cool because you can just do whatever you want,” said JD Hairston, whose zines surrounded the students on the walls of the library. “The things that I make and the things that resonate with me the most are the authenticity of what feels like a direct line to the creator’s own story or vision … Being able to get to that vulnerability is really cool.”
For Harris, the vulnerability that comics crack open is no coincidence.
“What really stands out is how many kids wrote or talked about something they’ve never talked about before,” Harris said. “I think there’s something about the slowness of comics, it takes so long to make them, and you’re like, ‘If I’m going to have to spend a month on this, it better be something that actually matters to me.'”
As the students opened up in their comic panels, Harris watched them grow closer over the course of the class and build their confidence.
“For a lot of the kids, they reconnect with what they actually enjoyed about reading and writing, but now they see it as this thing that can actually be used to talk about really important, complicated things,” Harris said. “What I like about this is seeing kids who don’t see themselves as readers, writers or artists starting to.”
