KIDS MAKE COMICS #2: Where Do Ideas Come From?

Hi I'm Dave McDonald/ Welcome to Kids Make Comics! Where do ideas from comics come from? I"m asked that question all the time in the school programs and let me share the process with you on how can I come up with ideas for comics For me it's a combination of 2 sources, the first source is my experiences, things that had happened to me Could be something as simple as going to a park or a rodeo or the zoo, right? Or what happen during your day. Did you go to a soccer game? Did you play in a sport? These are experiences that you have and nobody else has the same experiences as you You really have a bank of personal experiences to pull from.
Now, I'd like to combine those experiences with my imagination and everybody has an imagination. It's a great tool for artist and writers. So you combine the experiences with your imagination and you can come up with story ideas for comics
So for example just the other day, I had two friends they were arguing about a chili cook off recipe,of all things, chili. So one person was saying "Oh the only kind of chili, the real chili doesn't have beans in it." And the other person was like "Oh I don't make chili without kidney beans. It has to have beans in it." I thought kidney beans. So my kind got to racing, "kidney beans" I thought of the word "Kid" and the "Kidney" I thought that would make a great character a "Kidney Bean", "Billy the Kidney Bean"
So I grab the closest piece of paper to me was an envelope from mail and I grabbed it and I started drawing and you can see I created "Billy the Kidney Bean". I thought it would make a great hero for my comic. Now in real life of course Billy the kid was an outlaw. He's a bad guy and I thought I can turn that around make him my hero Villy the Kidney Bean. Then I got to thinking, okay who would that adversary be, who would that villain character be And I thought about the ingredients for chili and I thought the old western movie you have black bark. Right? I thought of black bark. Black pepper! Black pepper is an ingredient for chili.
I thought I could create black pepper so i thought of taking a triangle and a little oval shape And creating black pepper, tun tun tun! And of course he's gotta have this mustache on. All villains have a mustache. So there is black pepper, all set for the chili cook off showdown, right?
And I even got to start making a fridge door comic based on these characters and so you can see, I started my fridge door comic "The Adventures of Billy the Kidney Bean" Alright! And that's how my ideas become comics. I take things that happen to me, personal experiences and mixed with little imagination and I come up with a story.
So go ahead, kinda jostle your memory banks for things that had happen to you Add some imagination and go make a comic