Young American Comics is proud to present 52 Comic Challenges! 

52 Comic Challenges is a weekly exercise designed to shake you out of old habits and encourage you to try new things and push your limits in comic making.  We’ve made a habit of our own: a habit of creating cool experimental comics and hosting large scale group anthologies. In that same vein, we hope these exercises will inspire your creativity and encourage you to try new things.  All of the exercises are specifically designed to help you experiment with a specific element of the comic-making process.

Feel free to take each challenge as far as you would like.  If you find some of the challenges less intriguing than others, just try a few steps and see what you come up with.  Feel free to adapt a challenge to your liking, but keep in the mind that the challenges that will push you the furtherest out of your comfort zones will likely be the ones that teach you the most.

Complete your pencils or initial digital sketch.  At this point, you may feel that you’ve already taken everything away from the exercise.  Or, you may love what you’ve come up with and decide to continue with the project.  Most of the challenges are geared to a 1 to 2 page comic.  Whether you use pencils on some notebook paper, or you pull out your inking tools and bristol boards, you will learn new things and improve your skills.

We encourage you to share what you’ve done.  Post your completed pages on your blog, put them on your website or collect them in a book!  Post a link to your completed pages on the YAC forums and show off what you’ve done!  There is just as much to learn in seeing how other people completed the challenge as there is to finishing it yourself.

There are no right or wrong answers, and there’s no prize to win if you complete all 52 Challenges (aside from the satisfaction of making great comics, and making your comics better with the things you have learned.)  Many of our YAC contributors have found that persistance goes a long way towards improving their work. We believe that trying new things — especially those that are outside of your comfort level — will develop your skills even further.  We hope these challenges will encourage and push you to write or draw every day, or at least once a week.  And we’re certain you’ll find yourself even more excited about comics and your own work by the end of the year.

Are you an artist but not a writer?  A writer but not an artist?  Many of the exercises in this book have specific instructions for artists and writers on their own, but we encourage you to write even if you think you can’t, and draw even if your stick people come out wiggly.  As an artist pushing your writing skills, you’ll find you’re better able to analyze a script and use the writing to communicate to the reader.  As a writer drawing for the first time, you’ll learn how to fine tune and add even more details to your script that will help the artists you work with understand what you see in your head.  Also be sure to visit our forums and find other artists and writers to team up with.

Independent Comics are the future!