Date: 19th December 2017

Venue: IDS, Building 8, GTU, 75 Kostava Street, Tbilisi

Event: Making Comics and Graphic Novels

Format: Workshop

Instructor: Damian Wampler, Photographer and Comic Book Writer (USA)

More information on https://www.facebook.com/sevarawillrise/ and https://www.facebook.com/damian.wampler.98

Poster © Damian Wampler

Eric Binder, the IDS design professor, introduced to the students an American photographer and comic book writer Damian Wampler, who is currently residing in Georgia as Cultural Affairs Officer at the US Embassy in Tbilisi. A few months before his own workshop Damian was responsible for introducing to IDS David Mack in the latter’s role as Ambassador for the US State Dept. It then become apparent that Damian, who had graduated from School of Visual Arts in New York City with a master’s degree in digital photography and is the author of the 2014 book A Man Named Jay, in 2015 already published the first graphic novel of his own: Sevara: Dawn of Hope (Volume 1).

Damian shared with the IDS students his plans to publish a sequel to the novel, also how he works with graphic artists from Indonesia and Spain, and how he wrote a three-part guide on writing up effective panel descriptions for the comic book scripts.

For the workshop, he split the IDS students into two groups: those who had volunteered to draw were asked to leave the auditorium and those who had stayed wrote a short description of what they saw on color pictures of extracts from the Superman series Damian gave them. A half a dozen of these descriptions (carrying no reference to the Superman) where then given to the free-hand drawing students who returned to the auditorium with pencils and papers and quickly visualized what they had understood from the wording left by the other group.

It looked that Damian actually liked the results of this brief experience, but we all agreed that the students who had seemingly enjoyed the assignment may want to continue the workshop, the final results of which may be critically assessed after the Christmas break - in a month’s time.