No. 20 Vol. 11
www.mypaperonline.com • 973-809-4784 November 2024
Denville Youths Publish Comic Book
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By Megan Roche ucy Coster and Sabrina Bendo, two Denville teens, recently combined forces and wrote their own comic book. The book, The Fighters Guild, was a project for their EXPO Class. The EXPO program, similar to a gifted and talented program, requires that students produce an original project that can be sold during the school’s TREP$ marketplace. The two created the comic from the ground up. They started with brainstorming, character creation, story writing, deciding on number of pages for book, storyboard/ thumbnail sketches, line art, color illustration, and adding in text. During this process they also needed to get quotes from the printer and decide on how many books to get printed, and then determine a sale price. While waiting with anticipation for the books to arrive, Coster and Bendo had time to reflect on the project. “Working on this project, it deepened our friendship because we had lots of time to bond, and we know for certain that we can communicate well with each other and stay calm and enjoy the process, even with looming
Lucy Coster and Sabrina Bendo selling their comic book, The Fighters Guild, during the annual TREP$ Marketplace at Valleyview Middle School
deadlines,” Coster said. In addition to the book, Coster and Bendo also created keychains of the characters to sell during the market. The two worked diligently on the project and spent a ton of time finalizing the details. “I split my work into three groups of panels; in those three, one was 21, one was 20, one was 15, so it was a total of 56 hours for me for coloring. Plus, the keychain which I created and colored on my own in an afternoon - about six hours,” Coster said. “My total time for drafting and line art, according to Procreate, was 36 hours. Plus, brainstorming with Lucy beforehand and
sketching thumbnails and afterwards to finalize the dialogue,” Bendo said. Coster, a freshman at Morris Knolls, and Bendo, a freshman in the Design Academy at Morris County Vocational Technical School, are looking beyond their comic and at studying art in college. Bendo learned a lot from the project. “If I were to be hired as a job creating a comic, my experience with Lucy in creating our comic would prove beneficial because it helped me know the right terms to use and communicate better with someone I’m working with,” Bendo said. Overall, the two girls are
proud of their work. “I thought it was fun. I didn’t know how long it was going to take or where to start but once we got into the groove of things, it worked; it clicked. We worked well together,” Coster said. “I like drawing and I don’t like doing Math, for instance, so if choosing between a Math assignment and this project, I was happy to work on this project with my friend,” Bendo said. The girls have 28 comic books ($5) and 25 character keychains ($3) left in stock. If you’d like to support your local teenage artists and illustrators, please reach out to conquestartwork@ gmail.com.