Collaborative Worksheet #2
It doesn’t get more real than Back of the Yards, on the South Side of Chicago, when you’re growing up as a teen. It’s where fantasy and the power of story can build resilience, foster healing and lead to greater understanding. Based on the stories and experiences of real urban youth, the Made Collaborative Studio presents Back of the Yards, a new comic series of gritty truth that’s beyond your wildest dreams.
A fictionalized version of the real Back of the Yards neighborhood serves as setting for the eponymous comic book series. Likewise, the stories and the characters themselves are based on the real lives and musings of Chicago youth. These stories were first conceived by students attending an afterschool arts program in the West-Side of Chicago. They were collected by the project’s founder, Jimmy Briseno, during Made Collaborative’s first round of afterschool collaborations.
From these original afterschool collaborations, Jimmy then had an idea to elevate these kids’ ideas by bringing professional comics artists and writers into the creative process. In this way, Jimmy hoped to validate the kids’ stories and experiences by weaving them together as the narrative threads of a real comic book series.
The result is a collaborative effort between artists and youth and the start of our comic series. And it is also this framework that we are presenting you with an opportunity to join in this collaborative experience by submitting your own creative ideas to us for the possibility of being developed and illustrated further by our group of participating artists and even incorporating some of your selected ideas into future issues of this new Back of the Yards comic series!
In many ways, this entire project was born in the classroom on one cold winter’s evening at one of those early after-school sessions when a young youth proudly proclaimed that he had “an idea, and it is going to be great!”
From there, we first learned about the character of Andre, who would later become Andre Davis, one of the primary characters of our new comic’s early storyline.
Shortly thereafter, we would create other characters based on those first classroom collaborations, including Tamia Parker and Russell Patterson.
Our own writers would then create a character named Carl Castaneda, who would ultimately serve as the lynchpin character that tied those various early characters together into one common comic narrative – the Back of the Yards!
You can learn about all of that and more, including reading Issues #1 and 2, by visiting our Back of the Yards Studio Card page by linking to the QR Code to the left (link also provided). https//madecollaborative com/cards/studio-card-3
With this collaboration, we will continue to build our fictional Back of the Yards comic by providing you with the opportunity to submit to us places and people from your own neighborhood that you would like us to include in our comic series.
The places can be anything from a school, church, store, restaurant, park … any place at all so long as you can describe it to us a little and tell us why you remember it, i.e., why is it important to you.
And in that same way, the people you submit from your neighborhood can be anyone from an old teacher, a storekeeper, someone who you just saw on the corner of your neighborhood regularly, an old mentor, friend or even a family member. Anyone at all that you can remember from your neighborhood and can describe to us in a short paragraph or two.
And ultimately, we will include many of your submissions into various comic scenes in the comic starting with Issue 3, along with background on your submissions highlighted on our project website. And in this way, your submissions will help us further create the “Ordinary World” of our comic series (the first phase of the “Hero’s Journey” storytelling framework, which we will also introduce you to in this collaboration).
To learn more, just turn the page. And thanks in advance for your collaborations!
Featured Comic Collaboration Worksheet #2
Let’s Create the Fictional Back of the Yards
Neighborhood!
STEP ONE!
As with all collaborations, the first step for this collaboration is to simply link to our “Neigborhoods & Residents”
Studio Card page on the webstie. And you can do that by either linking to the QR Code to the right or linking to site page link below:
Chicago, Our Comic’s “Ordinary World”
As you will see, once you land on the Studio Card webpage, as you scroll down you are immediately presented with a quick video (below) that highlights the city from which this comic project was born, Chicago. You can access simply by clicking the yellow play button on the website page.
Pen & Paper!
The next step for this collaboration is to just grab a pen and paper (or just use this worksheet for your paper). The key to making this collaboration work will be for you to take time to collect your thoughts and make notes as you creatively brainstorm about your new character. And don’t worry. we will help guide you through this creative brainstorming process with the next 4 simple steps to follow.
Introducing the “Hero’s Journey”
To help provide you further context for this collaboration, and comic collaborations going forward, we introduce you to the Hero’s Journey on this Studio Card page. The Hero’s Journey is a classic narrative structure that outlines the stages a hero goes through in a transformative adventure. Popularized by mythologist Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, it serves as the blueprint for countless myths, legends, and modern stories from Star Wars to the Black Panther. The journey typically includes stages like the Call to Adventure, and the Road of Trials, highlighting both external challenges and internal growth of your story’s Hero. (You can learn more about each phase of the Hero’s Journey by clicking the video on the Studio Card page.)
And most notably for this tcollaboration, the journey begins in the Ordinary World the hero's familiar environment before adventure calls. This world reflects the hero’s everyday life, often marked by routine, dissatisfaction, or a sense of something missing. It's crucial because it grounds the character and allows us to understand who they are before change begins.
The Real Back of the Yards
Finally, on the Studio Page, we introduce you to the real Back of the Yards neighbrhood, which is what have loosely based our fictional comic neighborhood on. The real Back of the Yards is a historic neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, best known for its deep ties to the city’s industrial past. Centered around the once-thriving Union Stock Yards, it was a hub of meatpacking activity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, drawing in waves of immigrant workers initially Irish, then Eastern European, and later Mexican and other Latin American communities.
Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle famously depicted the harsh conditions faced by workers in this area, shedding light on both labor abuses and the resilience of immigrant families.
We have included a short comic feature on the Studio Page for your reading pleasure depicting some of those conditions. And we plan to do more of these short comic features on different neighborhoods and communities in the future, including some of those submitted by you as part of this collaboration
Featured Comic Collaboration Worksheet
#2
Pen to Paper!
Today, Back of the Yards remains a diverse, working-class neighborhood with a strong sense of community pride. While the stockyards closed in 1971, their legacy still shapes the area’s identity. Residents continue to face economic and social challenges, but the neighborhood is also home to vibrant cultural life, grassroots organizing, and redevelopment efforts aimed at revitalization. Community centers, local businesses, and murals reflecting the area’s multicultural history all contribute to its enduring spirit.
It is that tapestry of people, personalities and life experiences that makes every city and community special. And it’s also that same tapestry that may help us to continue to build upon our own fictional Back of the Yards neighborhood for our comic series. It’s in that context that we wanted to facilitate this Studio Card collaborative series, Neighborhoods & Their Residents working with participating youth, artists and others, to create comic content for our Back of the Yards comic series based on some of the unique characteristics of their neighborhoods.
And we will start this collaborative series with this Collaboration by presenting you the following prompts to think more about your own neighborhoods, including places and people from those neighborhoods, and ultimately invite you to share some of those people and places with us. We will then select some of your submissions, working with your directly to include those peoples and places in our comic series, starting with Issue 3!
PROMPT #1 - Take some time to think about your own neighborhood growing up, whether now or in the past. What was/is the name of your neighborhood? What city? You can use the space below to describe your neighborhood in a short paragraph or two.
PROMPT #2 - As you think about your neighborhood, are there any particular places that more immediately come to mind? Like a church? Playground? A store? Restaurant? Any other landmarks? Try listing 3 to 5 such places from your neighborhood and provide a short description of what these places may have looked like and why they may be part of your neighborhood memories?
PROMPT #3 - Finally, neighborhoods are about the people that inhabit the communities, both past and present. Are there any residents from your neighborhood that you remember in particular? A teacher? A cousin or friend? A store owner? Anyone at all. Try listing 3 to 5 such individuals with a short description of them.
Let’s Collaborate!
Just as it says below, with this collaboration, you will have an opportunity to develop your submissions with us. Especially creative submissions will then be chosen for further development with the Made Collaborative team (including illustrations of your submissions by participating artists, which you can review and provide input and direction). We'll feature your places and people on our website and some will appear in the Back of the Yards comics, starting with Issue 3!
Interested? It’s starts simply by clicking the yellow button on the Studio Card page.
Once you click the yellow button, a Google Collaboration Form will expand below, within which you will see prompts for your new character submission.
