Grubako - the unofficial fanfic co-created by me and a group of my elementary school art students - is here!

Hey all.

I made a comic in the Star Wars universe.

The only way to learn a thing is to do the thing.
I’ve always had a billion ideas, and they all bang around in my head, and they’re hard to pin down and they can be even harder to turn into actual things.

Last May - May The Fourth, to be precise, myself and a very groovy group of kids from assorted Petaluma Elementary schools were gathered at an after school art class I was teaching. We were rolling with a goofy idea about a spoofical character called - not Chewbacca - but… Grubako.
See what we did there?

And then, thanks to a random idea generator I happened to have on me at the time, we conceived of the illustrious Bruno Tusk.

Here’s the picture I sketched on the white board to prove I’m not making this up:

As you can see, I changed some spellings, had to get rid of the helmet (because if you’re in a prison cell, they won’t let you keep your helmet, right?) and changed the size ratio a bit.
Also, there were no baby yodas involved.
Though we did draw one that day.

It turned out that making an idea into a thing when the whole world (the world of Star Wars) is already built for you, and where you’re not putting loads of pressure on yourself to be a Genius Original Creator (a GOC, which is a pejorative term, by the way) was immensely fun, liberating, and delightful.

I powered through 20 some pages of Grubako adventure, and had a ball painting the cover, and here is what came out.

Hope you dig it.