Everyone can draw comics. Kean Soo of TO Live’s The Arts Squad will show you how!

July 20, 2020July 27, 2020 Scott Sneddon

In Part 1 of our series on TO Live’s The Arts Squad, SesayArts spoke with Herbie Barnes about the series of 10-minute theatre lessons he has created for housebound children. In Part 2, we speak with fellow Arts Squad member Kean Soo about his 10-minute comics storytelling lessons.

Accomplished graphic novelist Kean Soo is the Toronto-based author of the Jellaby and March Grand Prix graphic novels for young readers. His work with TO Live’s The Arts Squad is a natural extension of both his career to date and his personal aesthetic. As he had previously conducted successful workshops for famed Toronto comic shop The Beguiling, The Beguiling’s ownership pointed TO Live in Soo’s direction when they were putting together the multi-disciplinary Arts Squad. Soo jumped at the opportunity: “Given the current conditions of the pandemic and everyone being in lockdown, I thought it would be a fun way to get involved and get kids to tell their own stories and express themselves through drawing and stuff. That’s always good!”

Soo’s contribution to The Arts Squad is a series of warm, welcoming and deceptively simple cartooning lessons. Along with lessons from the other Arts Squad members, a new lesson from Soo will appear every Monday until August 3. The videos succeed brilliantly thanks to Soo’s warm, low-key “You can do this” presence and his clear, ultra-logical lesson plans. They avoid the kind of crazy detail a non-artist might fear, yet the straightforward guidance Soo provides can still lead to a meaningful result. (I know because I tried one myself!)

Soo describes himself as a “hands-on”, self-taught cartoonist. He was educated as an engineer, which proved an unexpected asset to his art: “Coming from that background of engineering, I have this very analytical mindset where I’ll sit down, and I’ll try to take things apart and figure out what works and what doesn’t work.” Kids who try his Arts Squad lessons are the direct beneficiaries. For instance, Soo’s first lesson starts by imparting how “the iconic cartoon characters are all iconic silhouettes with basic shapes” – literally circles (Mickey Mouse), squares (SpongeBob) and triangles: “They’re super clear, and they register on your brain immediately, and that’s definitely stuff that applies really well to kids. Everything’s very simple.” His first goal is for children to use these super-simple building block shapes to create their own unique characters.

Soo’s infectious and democratic message is that cartooning is something all children can do well, regardless of drawing ability: “One of the really great things about comics and cartooning and animation in general is that . . . the art itself . . . the illustration and the technical aspects of it, don’t have to be brilliant or amazing. If you’re using the art as a method to tell a story, then the art itself doesn’t have to be super well-rendered or close to realism.” As long as you have a story, Soo asserts, it’s acceptable and appropriate to use the simplest, most basic type of illustration: “stick figures are one of the best ways to make comics and to tell stories because they’re super easy to draw, and when you’re reading them, you can immediately register what’s going on. There’s not a lot of confusion.” This is why Soo’s first video lesson focuses on how to turn simple shapes and lines into a character, then the second focuses on how to find a story within the character. Further lessons build from there.

Soo’s own characters are whimsical and energetic, and – as he shows in his video lessons – they, too, are rooted in these same universal fundamentals, which Soo picked up during extensive childhood reading. Before his family moved to Canada, Soo grew up in Hong Kong during the 1980s and 1990s. There, he had “great access to all sorts of different comics” from all over the world. He devoured them all, regardless of whether he understood the language: Japanese manga translated into Cantonese, western superhero comics (the X-Men were a favorite), newspaper comic strips (especially Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts), French bandes dessinées (most notably Asterix). And above all others, Soo acknowledges that “one of [his] biggest influences is Akira Toriyama, who wrote and illustrated the Dragon Ball series, one that I still absolutely love” and which is still going strong.

Kean Soo, comics photo illustration by Kean Soo

Clearly, Soo’s goal is not to turn children into Toriyamas. But in this time of privation and heightened social awareness, he does have three larger hopes for his humble art lessons. First, he hopes they can be catalysts for empathy. Soo believes that “being able to empathize with other people” is deepened by drawing and visual storytelling: “We’ve got these fictional characters, and if they’re really well drawn – if there’s a depth to these characters – it’s sort of like putting yourself in the shoes of somebody different from you, and being able to learn how to empathize with people. Even a space alien or an anthropomorphic mouse or something like that. . . . It’s a way to sort of teach yourself how to feel empathy and to connect with other people and other characters – people who are different from you.”

Soo’s second hope is that we can appreciate the uniqueness of the stories we each choose to tell: “It’s important that kids express themselves. . . Everybody comes at something with their own collection of experiences and their own background and who their parents are, and all these different things, so one of the things that I always tell kids is that everybody’s got their own unique story, and so if you want to express yours, your story is going to be unique, no matter what.”

His third and final hope is that children who try out his lessons will stretch themselves – because that’s where true fulfilment lies. This is a personal philosophy for Soo, who says, “my best work is when I really have no idea what I’m doing”: “Because I write and draw my own graphic novels, as a writer I’ll write things where I’m like, ‘I have no idea how I’m going to draw this!’” Painting himself into a corner like this forced him to learn how to draw cars from every conceivable angle for his March Grand Prix graphic novels. It is currently forcing him to master the incredibly difficult skill of drawing realistic animals for a new story: “It’s so important being able to push myself to keep learning and to keep growing as an artist . . . and if it doesn’t work, you know, it’s just one drawing. You know you can always go back and try it again, or do something different.”.

As the pandemic stretches on, Soo keeps pushing himself, “keeping busy here and there” – and doing something different as well. In addition to his role in The Arts Squad, he is at work on two “sort of science fiction graphic novels” for younger adults. He’s also part of the TD Summer Reading Club (you can find some of his webcomics on their site). But given his lessons and his own vibrant comics, his upbeat energy and his ‘can do’ philosophy – his most important role of all might just be as cheerleader for the children of Toronto in this summer of pandemic strangeness: “I want the kids to be able to keep pushing themselves to try new things and be excited about drawing!”