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Comic Book Artist Visit
By: Jessica Griffiths
9F Journalism
On April15th Riley Rossmo came to Crowther because Ms. Smith’s Language Arts classes were just finishing a unit on comic books. Riley Rossmo is a local comic book artist, and Ms. Smith wanted someone with real experience in the comic book industry to talk to her students about all the things they had been learning. They had prepared questions to ask him about the industry, about what he did and questions that Ms. Smith could not answer.
Riley talked to the students for a period, answering the kids’ questions and telling about his career and his life. Then he spent the second period helping the students with their comic book spreads they were working on. As well, he talked about plagiarism. If you are going to copy someone’s design your design has to be 80% different than the original. His favourite super hero is Dare Devil or Hell Boy. He drew a picture of Hell Boy for Ms. Smith. He started drawing when he was really young during class. He designed a Cd cover for a band called From Fiction. He works on PROOF magazine. He also does a lot of advertisements. In his work Riley likes to put friends and families in the comic, whether it’s their name, to their personality, to how they look. Aspects of comic making is working with yourself, self motivation, not doing things traditionally, your work reflects who you are and shows your personality, and your voice. His first paying job was the U of C paid $1,200. He attended the Alberta College of Design (Illustration).
Ms. Smith told me that comic books and graphic novels have been used in the classroom to help increase reading comprehension, motivate the reluctant readers, and even help students that are learning English as a second language. I bet this is a fun subject to learn and teach. It will also help students with expressing their texts in different forms. The kids will be able to expand their vocabularies. She has always had a love towards superheroes, especially the X-Man. She
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