My upskilling experience

I chose to take the Creating Public Information Comics upskilling course largely to support my PhD proposal. Successful applications, ones that stand out, are marked by a concentrated and continued interest and effort in your chosen field, not just getting the necessary grades to be eligible. The upskilling module gave me that advantage, and lent so much additional weight to the application, making it all the stronger going in.

What I enjoyed the most was meeting students from seriously diverse fields and backgrounds. It was fascinating and fun for me, who came into that module with a background in comics academically, to see how people entirely new to the medium were interacting with it and discussing it. Many of the people I interacted had backgrounds in health and care, and their approaches to comics helped spark some fresh understanding in myself, despite feeling I knew so much already. Overall, it was just a great additional learning curve where my knowledge of the subject was expanded, thankfully, through interaction with some really talented and insightful people.

The course has helped me broaden my own understanding of the comics medium and has given me a hands on experience on creating comics within a group, which I had never done before. All my own creative work is usually solo or with comics, between me and one person, so to be collaborating on a comics together working out ideas, characters, tone and intent – it’s all massively added to my own creative arsenal and, given how positive and productive it was, is an experience I will carry with me into any future collaborative creative work.     

My advice to anyone considering an upskilling module is, if you have the time, do it. You can only benefit from the experience and if it’s anything like my own, it will be enlightening and fun and offer you some real advantages for further academic pursuits. If we’re talking purely functional? You’re going to be able to put on any CV or application that you took the time to seek further learning in your chosen field, and that is always going to look good.

As part of the comics module we did two major projects. One was a solo comic, written and drawn by yourself with a considerable amount of creative freedom given, and then the aforementioned group comic. My solo project used tropes from superhero comics in a tongue-in-cheek approach to then depict the processes of a manic episode in real time. As a person who has suffered through mental health problems myself, being able to depict something that represented my own struggles to some extent, however fictionalised, was really rewarding. The comic we created as part of a group, which focuses on fibromyalgia in the wake of COVID, was also very personal as my mum suffers from this condition. In mentioning this to the group during the initial stages, they were very excited by the prospect of having a real person at the heart of our story, and so we incorporated a great deal of her own comments and experiences into the comic, which really gave it some emotional rhythms. This comic will be made available at DeeCON 2022 on Saturday 9th April where I and others will be behind the booth. So come say hi if you can and we’ll have a chat about comics too!