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  • 1)Message de yann posté le 13 July 2012 à 14:54:13
    Le bonuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuussssss !!!!! Mais j'aiiiiime !!!! Hein, quoi ? Parent refoulé ? Qui ? Moi ? Eeeeeer, could be. Du coup je ne détaillerai même pas les 3 erreurs de trad'.
  • 2)Message de Tatayoyo posté le 13 July 2012 à 14:56:02
    I guess I have to react in english to an english note right? I'm actually just trying to find the french version of that... Great in english, probably even better in ov... (haha c'est ridicule de faire ça...)
  • 3)Message de Anonymous posté le 13 July 2012 à 14:57:19
    As a (future) art teacher, I have encountered the same problem noumerous times (already! D: ). I find that if you give them reference material, they are more inventive. They just need something visual to associate with/through.
  • 4)Message de Yann posté le 13 July 2012 à 14:58:38
    Whhhoooooops a daisy! Got carried away and posted in French, sorry. Sooooo : What a killer bonus!!! Just love it to bits!!! What? Who's a frustrated parent? Me? Euuuuuhh, p't'êt' ben, ouais... And the mistakes are... Naaah, just kidding (but there's a biggie in the bonus though, all the funnier as you got it right the second time you used the structure (still in the bonus)... Oh well...)
  • 5)Message de boulet posté le 13 July 2012 à 15:00:13
    Tatayoyo: just click on the comic. Anonymous (3): you're totally right ! After this comic some people wrote me about methods they had tested with kids, and it appears that "do what you want" is the worst I could have done ! actually I should have known better, because even as an adult it's the same: I work a lot better if I'm given a theme. It's incredibly hard to start from nothing !
  • 6)Message de Moose posté le 13 July 2012 à 15:01:26
    Epic bonus !
  • 7)Message de Fiona (@FionaN_A) posté le 13 July 2012 à 15:08:17
    Great as always. A relevant ted talk that I feel should be linked here: "Schools kill creativity" http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
  • 8)Message de Tatayoyo posté le 13 July 2012 à 15:15:43
    Huhu... Effectivement, au temps pour moi. Ou plutôt Eheh... My bad... (c'est joli le français tout de même) Thanks!
  • 9)Message de Anonymousse posté le 13 July 2012 à 15:40:27
    epic bonus ^^
  • 10)Message de Tofu posté le 13 July 2012 à 16:27:47
    "Kids have more imagination THAN adults" non ?
  • 11)Message de Towers posté le 13 July 2012 à 18:09:01
    Nice to discover this old note another time :) Especially with so great Bonus !
  • 12)Message de MadH posté le 13 July 2012 à 18:19:53
    Yeah, I remember my art teachers running into that problem a lot. Dragon Ball Z was super popular then, and it's all the boys wanted to draw. So he did the smart thing: he did a week-long class on how to draw superhero proportions, action poses, and foreshortening. They loved it. I was even frustrated at my own lack of creativity back then. I remember making a collage and thinking, "A pig with wings? How unoriginal! But I can't think of anything else..."
  • 13)Message de huli posté le 14 July 2012 à 06:15:59
    A lot of people have a very misguided view of children ha ha they think that children are blank slates so they have an imagination "without context" or "without precedent" but advertisers and toy makers and children's media also know that children are blank slates so they all compete for their attention which is why stuff for children is so loud these days! I'm 20 so I guess I can't say for much since I did grow up in the time where that really started but it's really bad. Attention spans are gettubg shorter and shorter and when you can't focus you can't really cultivate a good imagination to the point of being productive anyway.
  • 14)Message de Zachariah posté le 14 July 2012 à 06:34:55
    It's so sweet Huli thinks 20 is grown up! Bless his/her little heart! ;)
  • 15)Message de Anonymous posté le 14 July 2012 à 07:58:00
    Le plus dur ce coup-ci aura été de trouver l'équivalent à nos Théo, Léo et Léa :). Tu as fait un sondage auprès de lecteurs anglais ?
  • 16)Message de MadC posté le 14 July 2012 à 12:47:37
    Even though your teaching skills were not the greatest ones back then, I have been struck by this main idea you raised there. It's true, children have no imagination. They just copy. Imagination is not a children thing, it is something we build with time and experience. Why had I never heard about this while it now strikes me like an obvious truth ? I guess this was an important theme for you to tackle, as an artist in a field which is not really recognized because it is a art for children, in other words an easy art for lazy people. Et oui, moi aussi je teste mes connaissances pratiques en anglais pour l'occasion, pardon pour l'éventuel massacre.
  • 17)Message de Jesse Farrell posté le 14 July 2012 à 15:33:16
    Oi. I've taught art classes for kids (mostly ages 12-17 but some as young as 8-12)before and I can attest that this is scarily accurate. I found that some of the kids loosened up and actually created after a while, but they needed to really get it through their heads that this wasn't school and experimentation- and not rote repetition- was encouraged. I blame the public school system for beating a lot of it out of kids. Kids will cast about for the "right" answer, regurgitating what they've been "taught" by media, afraid to venture any new ideas. Some of them really do get over it and create crazy stuff (yes, usually it's flavored by things they've seen before, but no one creates entirely in a vacuum).
  • 18)Message de Anonymous posté le 15 July 2012 à 10:45:19
    Hello ! I both agree and disagree : - children dont specially have better imagination than adults, but they spend a bit more time to imagine fantasy world than the average adult. - adult neither have better imagination, they merely have further thinking, making things to be less ordinary. Anyway, adults still work on fairy world, which is 100% imagined, but needed thousands of years to create it. Another example : aliens doesn't always need 2 eyes, or at least eyes, teeth, legs, being 2 meters tall, or even having a shape... But they generally do. Imagination is just a difficult thing you cant ask in 5minutes to children unused to autonomous reflection and self-criticism.
  • 19)Message de Anonymous posté le 15 July 2012 à 11:10:27
    Oh, special message for art teachers ... I'm very, very bad at drawing, so I never was good in such class. But I tried at least to be imaginative ! On the project "an artistic piece of furniture with a person presenting it", everybody made a chair or a table. I made an integrated bed and lectern with an hanged monk. Teacher just conclude I had serious problem. On the project "Escher style 3D illusion", I tried something new adding a stair going inside is own thickness. Teacher just conclude I failed the perspective. I just conclude that being original is very wrong.
  • 20)Message de allari posté le 15 July 2012 à 15:02:20
    Love it! XD Of course, that fact includes a lot of people that have long passed childhood. Love your work!
  • 21)Message de Kat posté le 15 July 2012 à 19:10:23
    @ anonymous (19): Keep going! Never give up! ;)
  • 22)Message de Morris posté le 15 July 2012 à 22:11:56
    I think the reason people believe that children have better imaginations may be that children have fewer inhibitions. An adult is more likely to come up with an imaginative idea and then think, "That's stupid; I don't want to draw that or show it to anyone", while a child is more likely to draw whatever they want to, without worrying whether it's "stupid".
  • 23)Message de Steeve posté le 16 July 2012 à 20:21:13
    I think that imagination is a skill to develop as well as any other technique we learn at school. Unfortunately, the only things I could learn as kid was to make jewels out of pasta or jewellery boxes with a camembert box and shells. Imagine Delacroix or Renoir making this kind of stuff as a kid. Thanks for the note and the bonus.
  • 24)Message de franzy posté le 23 July 2012 à 12:47:19
    Hi Boulet, I showed this comic to my wife who is teaching a course on fiction for younger readers this semester. She loved it. She's using it in her class. I told her to check with her boss, just because of the swearing. Her boss loved it. Now they are both using it in all of their classes! I just looked at your FAQ and using this one comic seems okay from what you say? It's a public government university, used for one class, no craziness, just learning about imagination, children's (limited) imagination and reading and writing. Also, her class list reads pretty much exactly like the one in the comic.
  • 25)Message de BradyDale posté le 10 August 2012 à 19:13:12
    I thought this was a really good comic. I think kids are more romanticized in this way than they should be. Buuuuuuuut.... I got to thinking about it, and you're kinda guilty of the same problem in reverse. Maybe, sorta. In a way, this comic represents "kids" as one great organism. Where in fact there are many organisms. The truth is, there aren't that many creative people among the children just like there aren't that many among adults. I bet if you thought back, you would have remembered some kid who was coming up with cool stuff on there own. I know when I was a kid I was always trying to make up original thing. Sure, they were all very derivative, but I was trying. And I always had friends who were trying, too. Still, all the kid worship is silly. And the idea that "all kids are super creative" is silly, too.
  • 26)Message de Murray posté le 20 November 2012 à 12:32:00
    Your cartoon isn't untrue, but it doesn't address a couple of very important points: 1) 99.9% of anyone claiming a desire to be creative have their engine make a sticky "gluh" sound when told "DRAW ANYTHING." The paradox is, of course, that a few general constraints and the engine roars with unstoppable power. A slight nudge, a few general conditions and those kids would provide some interesting stuff. In your cartoon rant, you sound just like some of my clients. "I have no idea at all for my logo design. You have a blank page!" So, I sweat and and shoot blindfolded at random and show my first selection to the client. "WHAT? Why on earth would you draw (____) for me to consider? Can't you read my mind??" 2) Again, in your example of the story on the blackboard. You begin down a familiar path. So familiar, it is more a worn trench made by cliche. If you're not going to be imaginative, why should the kids? Child plus forest equals wolf. They were probably humouring the very dull adult. If you wanted an imaginative storm, start them somewhere intriguing. Somewhere they have to, hey, use their imagination. 3) A special subset of adults have imagination. A classroom full of adults given blank pages of paper and crayons wouldn't even draw "Hello Kitty". They'd squirm and twitch and lock right up. Ask that group to continue the story and you'd get responses of outrage that a child is alone in the forest. Where's his parents? "He finds a phone to call search and rescue." The "craziest" adults would say "wolf". That's why adults, overall, are addicted to booze. Only alcohol lubricates their rust-locked imagination. Still, a funny rant you made there!



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    F.A.Q.

    • Q : Who are you and what is this blog ?

      I’m Boulet, a french cartoonist living in Paris. I’ve had about 20 books published, most of them for young readers. I also worked on two books of the “Dungeon” series with Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar (available in English, ask at your local comic shop).
      This blog is an attempt to translate my french blog ” bouletcorp.com “. I started in 2004 and have drawn more than 1600 entries. I’m trying to catch up but it’s a huge undertaking!

    • Q : The translation are sometime awkward, how do you work ?

      The translation is a very delicate subject !

      Most of the translations were performed by followers of my french blog, but very few of them are native anglophones, so the accuracy varies a lot.

      I tried to find a professional translator but it turned out it was far too much expensive for me alone. So I offered to give an original artwork in exchange of amateur translations (like, for a month or so of comics to translate) but even then it was complicated because just the re-handwriting the texts and posting them alone took a lot of time, and having to do original artworks for it and posting them was a lot of work too. Anyway I can’t manage it like this either.

      So for this new version, I’m going to give it a try and translate all by myself.

    • Q : Can we help you to make it sound better ?

      That would be the idea !

      As you can see in this FAQ, I’m not so good in english ! So here’s what I have in mind: if you think you can make the translation sound better, just write your propositions in the comments, and I will gradually update the comics.

      The more comments and remarks I’ll get, the more I’ll be happy !

      Just be indulgent, I try my best, and translation is not my main job !

    • Q : I am french, but I fluently speak english, can I help anyway ?

      Yes you can, of course, but must tell I will pay more attention to native anglophone comments !

      I had a lot of people trying to translate, and each time, english or american people told me it was still awkward. French people tend to be overconfident with their level in english or at least, with their ability to translate a comic. It’s not just about being accurate, it’s also about making it soud good, you have to feel it, and that’s almost impossible if you are not english or american.

      The best help I could help would be from english or US cartoonists !

    • Q : I can’t translate, but is there anything else I can do to help ?

      Even if it’s written in english, it’s not easy to share this webcomic: in France I can rely on cartoonist friends or specialized reeferers to share, but it’s very difficult to make people discover my work in other countries !

      So if you want to help, it’s very easy: you can share with your friends ! If you have friends who don’t speak french, tell them about this page, and use social networks to share the comics you liked !

    • Q : How did you make this layout ?

      First, this blog was programmed with flash.

      But flash is a very heavy format, and very difficult to share. A few months ago, I decided to rebuild it whith a different platform. I discussed about this with Arnold on Twitter. He’s very good with WordPress, so I designed and he made this happen !

       

    • Q : Can I use the same layout for my blog ?

      WordPress is supposed to be a free-sharing platform, but we worked a lot on this, and we don’t specially want that anyone could use it without consulting us.

      The layout programming is Arnold’s, so you can ask him and he will be the only judge ! If he likes your work, I think he will be happy to authorize you to use this !

      His contact is at the bottom of the site, on the main page.

    • Q : Where can we buy your work ? Do you have a shop with posters, mugs or T-shirts ?

      For now, there’s not such a thing. I try to keep this the less “commercial” I can. But maybe I will change my mind some day !

      The only available work I have in english are the two books I drew for the serie “Dungeon” with Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar. Ask for it in any comic book shop ! The more you ask them to order it, the easiest will it get to obtain !
      If you want to have a better translation of this webcomic, you just have to harass US and UK publishers, till one of them agrees to publish it in english :)

      For my french work, I drew a lot of books, here’ the entire list:

      Glénat Editions:

      -Raghnarok

      Tome 1 : Dragon Junior

      Tome 2 : Fées et Gestes

      Tome 3 : Terreurs de la nature

      Tome 4 : Légendes urbaines

      Tome 5 : Tempus Fugit

      Tome 6 : Casus Belli

      -La Rubrique Scientifique

      Tome 1

      Tome 2

      Tome 3

      -Le Miya (with Reno, Julien Néel and Libon)

      -Womoks (only scenario, drawing by Reno)

      Tome 1 : Mutant, suspends ton vol…

      Tome 2 : Le croiseur s’amuse

      Tome 3 : Albon, les brutes et les truands

       

      La boîte à bulles Edition:

      -Le vœu de…

      Tome 1 : Le vœu de Marc (coscenarist with Nicolas Wild, drawing by Lucie Albon)

      Tome 2 : Le vœu de Simon (coscenarist with Lucie Albon, drawing by Lucie Albon)

      -Amour et Désir (Collectif, seven pages under the alias Ella Forbin)

       

      -Delcourt Edition:

      -Donjon (avec Lewis Trondheim et Joann Sfar au scénario, et Lucie Albon à la couleur)

      Tome 5 : Un mariage à part

      Tome 6 : Retour en fanfare

      -Notes (these are the compilations of all the entries of the french blog)

      Tome 1 : Born to be a larve

      Tome 2 : Le petit théâtre de la rue

      Tome 3 : La viande, c’est la force

      Tome 4 : Songe est Mensonge

      Tome 5 : Quelques Minutes avant la Fin du Monde

      Tome 6 : Debout mes globules ! (à paraître, 23 novembre 2011)

      -Chicou-Chicou (under the alias Ella Forbin, with Aude Picault, Domitille Collardey, Lisa Mandel and Erwann Surcouf)

      -Boule de neige (collective compilation of works for the 24-hours comics of Angoulême )

      -La Maison Close (collective book by Ruppert et Mulot)

      -La Page Blanche (scenarist, drawing by Pénélope Bagieu. Release in january 2012)

      -Bragelonne Edition:

      -Tous malades ! (original title: Now we’re Sick) (illustrations for a collection of adult poems by Neil Gaiman and other authors, with Reno and Mélaka)

      -Erik le Viking (illustrations of the french version of Terry Jones’s book)

      -L’almanach illustré 2008. (texts by Laurent Genefort and Gudule)

       

      Nekomix :

      -Soupir (collectif)

      Tome 1, 2008

      Tome 2, 2009

      -Nekomix 7 spécial cinéma (collectif)

       

      -Barclay-Universal :

      -Repenti (Illustrations for Renan Luce’s album, christmas edition)

    • Q : Can I use one of your comics to print a shirt / a poster / to put it on my blog / to illustrate my book / magazine ?

      No, you can’t ! :)
      All this comics ask a lot of time to draw, and I don’t want them to be taken out of this blog, especially if it’s for commercial use.
      And most of this blog material is already printed by the french publisher Delcourt, so it would be highly illegal !
      They are some exceptions, though:
      -You can use one panel or two if you are making a citation (for example: if you write an article about my work or about webcomics in general, you can show a couple of pictures, without asking me. You just have to put the source under it: my name and the blog’s URL, clikable if your article is on internet. You don’t specially have to tell me, but it would be nice)
      -If you want to share a story on internet, the way I like better is one panel, clikable, redirecting to my original blog.
      -You can use a comic or more for pedagogic use if it’s a non-commercial use: if you’re a teacher and you need a printing from the blog for your class, if you’re a student and need an illustration for an essay or your thesis, I’m totally ok if you respect these two conditions: you have to ask me FIRST (because I wouldn’t like to illustrate something I totally disagree with), and the use must be completely NON-COMMERCIAL (you CAN’T sell it, no matter the format), NON-POLITIC (especially if you are a kind of nationalist NRA douchebag) and NON-RELIGIOUS (I’m an atheist, and I work for no church or cult)

    • Q : Can I buy you an original artwork ?

      I don’t really need mone for now, so I don’t sell my original works… So no !
      And I have a lot of work waiting to be done, so I don’t have time to make special drawings for birthdays, christmas presents or stuff like that !

    • Q : I’m very rich and I want to hire you / I want to publish your work

      Ok, send me an email and we’ll see ! :)
      I’m not specially looking for work now, but if you have something nice to propose, maybe we can find an arrangement !
      If you want to publish material from this blog, my publisher shares the copyrights with me, so you have to contact him ! look for “editions Delcourt” on the web !