Schools, college and universities can download the Kirknewton Story, a 56 page comic produced by several professional comic creators and the school children of Kirknewton Primary School, supported by Heritage Lottery Scotland, for FREE here in digital.

If you like it in digital and want a hard copy for your classroom you can purchase it below.

THE PROJECT

The project was funded by Heritage Lottery Scotland. We started with comic workshops at youth clubs and multi generational meetings between young and old sharing history stories. Then Covid hit!

When schools re-opened we wanted to work with the local primary school to take the project forward. The Head Teacher agreed it would be the first major all school project when the primary re-opened after Covid lockdown.

Each class researched the history of Kirknewton before we arranged online workshops with Kev F Sutherland to produce the school childrens own comic. A sample of their comic pages are below along with a page of everyone who contributed (which was later used for a fundraising tea towel!).

These pages were to be added to the final comic. Meanwhile writer Colin Maxwell and Editor Tony Foster used the information researched by the school children (plus other stories from parents/carers) to write a 40 page comic story with each page illustrated by a professional artist.

These stories would be of particular interest to children as well as adults and told the history of Kirknewton from the Iron Age to the present day, The comic includes stories about US Presidents, Burke and Hare, Aliens, Ghosts, Mail Order Medics, Environmental Campaigns and school bombs!

When the comic was finished we ran an assembly and all the children and their families were given a free copy. It was also handed out at a volunteers evening and delivered free to every door in the village of Kirknewton.

The project enthused the children of the school to learn, read and draw and this was shared by the teachers to other schools. We even bought young graphic novels for the school library and classrooms because they enjoyed producing their own comic so much.

But that’s not all. A year after publishing the comic we arrange an art exhibition in a local arts centre for people to see the childrens work. It was a great success with many visitors. Here’s some of our favourite quotes.

Thank you. I like making my own comic (age 4)

I liked reading (age 3)

I liked the war stories (age 4)

We have some extra copies in print for schools, colleges, universities, libraries and museums which I hope will inspire you which you can buy above. We are happy to answer any questions about the project – email comicsceneuk@gmail.com

Don’t forget to get down to your local comic shop on May 6th for FREE comic book day and read more information about creating comics and details of our digital comic library at ComicZine here

For classroom resources check out this Comic Boom podcast from Lucy Braidley here.

Richard Ruddick padlet here.

Helen Jones padlet here.