Mt. Blue High School’s Dan Ryder is an English teacher with a passion for comic books.
He has his students create their own comics when teaching Shakespeare and even teaches the graphic novel “Watchmen” as part of his Advance Placement English class.
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“I try to work in my passions where I can without pushing it too much,” he said.
High school and middle school students at the Wilton Free Public Library got a taste of that creativity Saturday when Ryder taught a class focused on creating, making and self publishing their own comics.
Ryder said he got his start reading G.I. Joe comics and graduated to superhero comics by middle school.
He has taught the class annually for the past three years, starting with a class for hearing impaired students.
Thanks to the Internet, he says anyone can write and self publish their own comics today as comic books become harder to find and comic writers focus more on adult audiences who grew up reading comics.
To start the class, Ryder opens by asking young writers to write down what super power they would want as well as what “kryptonite” or weakness their character would have.
“If you want your super power to be that you can eat four million Oreos and not gain weight, that can be your super power,” he said.
He tells students to make sure they have plenty of notebooks around to write down good ideas.
“It’s one of the best things a creator can do today, because if you come up with an idea you really like and think you’ll remember it, you won’t,” he said.
As for how to write a good story, Ryder advises young creators to focus on characters. If the characters aren’t interesting, the story won’t be interesting, he said.
For writers such as 12-year-old Benjamin Drumm, that character is a unicorn wearing a biker jacket and glasses who drinks liquid “kryptonite” and sprinkles.
Drumm says he came up with the idea because it was the most random thing he could think of.
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