Vera Vance: Comics Star

by Claudia Mills

  “The rest of you, go get another snack.” Buzz-Bee waved them away.

  “I’m not hungry,” Harper said.

  “Yes, you are,” said Buzz-Bee.

  Nixie shot Vera a sympathetic look as she turned to follow the others to the snack table. Once they had departed, Buzz-Bee repeated her command: “Draw!”

  So Vera did. Sixty seconds later she had a squirrel!

  “There!” Buzz-Bee patted her on the shoulder. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be.”

  Tell that to my mother, Vera wanted to say. My mother has to think it’s perfect or she won’t let me stay.

  But the last thing in the world she wanted was for the comic-book teachers and her mother to ever meet.

  * * *

  The comic-book part of comic-book camp ended at five. After that, kids who needed to stay longer could do homework or pretty much anything that wouldn’t bother anyone else, until the program ended at six. At cooking camp, Vera’s mother had been one of the come-at-six parents.

  Vera was relieved that by the time her mother arrived to collect her that afternoon, Brian, Buzz-Bee, and their tattoos had already departed. She grinned at her squirrel, chicken, and elephant drawings. They were good, they really were! But even if they were as amazing as Brian’s and Buzz-Bee’s, they would probably still look silly to her mother. So she tucked them safely out of sight inside one of her library books for her report on the life cycle of baboons.

  “How was it?” her mother asked once they were buckled into the car.

  “Great! There are two teachers, Brian and Bee”—Vera was glad she hadn’t let “Buzz-Bee” slip out—“and they can draw anything.”

  “What did you do?” her mother asked.

  “We did a bunch of drawing, too. Lots of drawing, actually. Of different kinds of animals.”

  “So it’s really more of an art class,” Vera’s mother said, apparently trying to reassure herself that this new camp wasn’t a waste of time and money, after all.

  “Yes!” Vera agreed happily.

  “So that’s the only thing you did for the whole time? For two entire hours?” her mother persisted. “Just sat there drawing?”

  “Well, we also saw a video.”

  Too late Vera remembered her mother didn’t believe in after-school programs that parked kids in front of a TV. “Screen time” at Vera’s house was limited to half an hour a day.

  “It was an educational video,” Vera added. “On the history of comics as an art form.”

  Her mother gave a snort. But Vera had liked the video. It had covered the blah-blah-blah on the history of comic books that Brian had skipped in an entertaining way, with animated characters doing the narration.

  So far she had liked every single thing about comic-book camp. Well, she wasn’t completely sure she liked Harper and James. Harper was mega-talented at drawing and clearly knew it. But maybe Vera was just jealous. And James had a smirky kind of face. But maybe that was just the way his face looked. Unless she made a special effort to smile, Vera knew her own face tended to look serious, even sad.

  “Did you finish up your homework?” her mother asked then.

  Vera nodded. She always used her free time after school to get her homework done.

  “Well, do your piano practice, and then you can help me make dinner,” her mother said. She added, “I wouldn’t mind curling up in bed early tonight so we can read some extra chapters of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.”

  Even though Vera could read perfectly well on her own, her mother still read to her each evening before bedtime, and it was the best part of the day.

  Though maybe today it would be the second-best part of the day.

  The best part was when she had drawn her squirrel and could almost feel his fluffy tail waving at her.

  three

  In camp on Tuesday, they spent most of the time reading and talking about a huge stack of comics and graphic novels Brian and Buzz-Bee had brought in from all over the world. Brian explained that although the terms are used by different people in different ways, “comic books” are generally installments in an ongoing story that may continue for years or even decades. “Graphic novels” are longer and more complex, telling a single story from beginning to end, the way regular novels do, except in comics format.

  When her mother asked her, on the way home, what they had done at camp, Vera chose her words carefully.

  “We looked at multicultural comics and graphic novels.” Her mother loved things that were multicultural.

  But Vera could tell from the way her mother raised her eyebrows that she liked multicultural books, music, and films better than multicultural comics.

  On Wednesday, Buzz-Bee said the special thing about comics was that they were made up of pictures in a sequence: that is, the pictures were placed one after the other, in a particular order. Comics tended to be organized in panels or frames on each page with tiny bits of white space between them. Characters talked in speech bubbles. Sound effects were things like WHAMMO! written in big bold letters so you could practically hear and feel the impact the action made in the story just by seeing how the word looked on the page.

  Brian passed out a bunch of blank pages with four panels on them. The campers were supposed to decide what dialogue to put inside speech bubbles for each panel and then draw pictures and sound effects to go along with them to tell a story. It was hard but fun, like a puzzle that needs to be solved.

  Nolan was the best at making everything fit neatly into each panel. Boogie kept knocking his colored pencils onto the floor and then having to hunt for them under his chair while James snickered. Nixie’s speech bubbles with BOW-WOW and ARF! ARF! in huge letters took up so much space in her panels she had no room left for pictures. Harper acted bored, as if she had already done stuff like this a thousand times before.

  Vera was thrilled when she finished her page, with quick sketches of dogs (Nixie had begged her to draw dogs) fitting perfectly into each panel to make a story about a new puppy arriving at Bow-Wow Academy. She did love comics so much!

  On Thursday, a guest comic-book artist came to camp. He was young and funny, with a crewcut and a polka-dot bowtie. His drawings were completely different from Brian’s and Buzz-Bee’s: superheroes engaged in mortal combat. Watching him draw was like being in the middle of a battle. Vera didn’t mention that part to her mother. Her mother thought violent comics were the worst comics of all.

  On Friday, Brian started off with two announcements.

  Next week the campers would begin on their big project for the camp: creating their own original comic book.

  Nixie gave Vera a big smile. She leaned over and whispered, “We’ve started ours already!”

  It was clear Nixie was still assuming the two of them would be partners. Vera didn’t have an idea of her own yet that she liked better than Nixie’s dog school, but what if she found one between now and then?

  Brian’s second announcement was that the grand camp finale would be a field trip to the opening day of a comic-book convention. He called it a comic-con.

  “Hundreds of comic-book artists. Thousands of comic-book fans, many in unbelievable costumes. All together in one enormous place for a three-day spectacle,” Brian said. “There’s nothing else in the world like it.”

  The library erupted into chaos. Buzz-Bee put her hand in the air to signal everyone to quiet down so Brian could finish talking.

  “And,” Brian said, “there’s going to be a chance for kids your age from schools all over the country to display their work, so we’ll be sending in one finished page from each of your comic books. A team of professional comic-book creators will award ribbons to ones they think are especially promising.”

  Nixie nudged Vera. “And they’ll think Mistress Barker’s Bow-Wow Academy on Wag-a-Tail Lane is the best comic they’ve ever seen, and they
’ll help us get it published, and we’ll make a million dollars, and split it fifty-fifty, and then my parents won’t be able to say we can’t afford a dog!”

  Vera had no choice but to return Nixie’s happy grin this time. But what if she made a comic on her own, not with Nixie, and her comic somehow won a prize at the comic-con? Maybe that would make her mother glad she had let Vera do the comics camp. But it already seemed too late to tell Nixie she wanted to work alone.

  Buzz-Bee had to raise her hand again to get everyone to settle down. Vera was glad when the library was quiet. She wanted to hear every detail about comic-con.

  “Can we miss school to go? So we can be there the whole day?” someone at another table asked.

  “No,” Buzz-Bee said. “This is an after-school program, so the trip will have to be after school. We’ll take a bus there as soon as school is dismissed at three and be back in the school parking lot by eight. Parents are welcome to join us, either coming along on the bus or meeting up with us later at the convention center. We’re sending home permission slips for the trip today.”

  The mention of permission slips and parents made Vera’s stomach clench in a hard knot. A comic-con definitely didn’t sound like something her mother would consider an enriching activity. But if it was part of the camp, surely her mother would sign the form to let her go. Her mother always supported her participation in school activities.

  But this was an after-school activity.

  And it wasn’t gymnastics, or piano, or some special math or science thing for gifted students.

  It was a comics activity.

  The knot in her stomach tightened even more.

  * * *

  “Guess what?” Vera asked at dinner.

  She had decided to wait until her mother changed from her financial-planner suit into comfy sweatpants and T-shirt, and the leftover spinach lasagna had been heated up in the microwave. She had set the table without having to be reminded. She had even folded the cloth napkins into pretty triangles and moved the vase of asters from the counter to be a centerpiece.

  “What am I supposed to guess?” her mother replied.

  Vera took a deep breath. Then she plunged in. “There’s going to be a field trip at the end of comics camp! The coolest trip ever! To a comic-book convention! The teachers gave us the permission slip for it today!” She took it from her lap and laid it next to her mother’s plate. “Here it is!”

  And you’re going to sign it, right? But she didn’t ask that. If she didn’t pose it as a question, maybe her mother couldn’t give her the answer she was afraid of hearing.

  Her mother swallowed another slow bite of lasagna. It was never a good sign when her mother gave a long pause before saying something.

  “Honey,” she said, “I don’t think a comic-con”—Vera was surprised her mother knew what they were called—“is an appropriate trip for someone your age. I saw a story about them once on a news program, and there will be huge crowds of very weird people.”

  Vera tried to think of something she could say to convince her mother. “There’s going to be prizes for the best comics by kids.” Her mother had been so proud when Vera placed first for kids eight and under in a piano competition last summer. But maybe her mother wouldn’t think a comics prize was the same thing as a piano prize, or a gymnastics trophy, or a school award for math or science. Besides, if anyone from their camp was going to get a ribbon, it would probably be Harper, who already seemed to know everything there was to know about comics.

  “I hate to disappoint you, honey, you know I do,” her mother said. “But I have to do what I think is best.”

  Vera knew better than to whine or beg. If there was anything her mother hated, it was whining and begging.

  So unless Vera found some other way to change her mother’s mind, which had never happened before in Vera’s entire life, the answer was no.

  four

  Over the weekend Vera practiced the piano an extra ten minutes each day. She made all the fact cards for her life-cycle-of-the-baboon report for Mrs. Townsend. She didn’t ask if she could call Nixie for a playdate. Vera hoped her mother would notice her extra piano practice, the tidy stack of baboon fact cards, and how cheerfully she hopped into the car for gymnastics. And then her mother would say, What was I thinking? Of course you may go to comic-con!

  But her mother didn’t.

  * * *

  “All right, artists!” Brian said, when the second week of camp began on Monday. “We’re going to do some role-playing today.”

  “What’s role-playing?” someone else asked so Vera didn’t have to.

  “Acting,” Brian explained. “Using our faces, our bodies, our whole selves, to show emotion.”

  Vera felt her face, body, and whole self showing the emotion of hating anything to do with acting. In kindergarten, she had been a turkey in the Thanksgiving pageant. All the kindergartners had been turkeys, wearing turkey costumes made out of brown-paper grocery bags colored with markers to look like feathers. Even at age five, she had known she looked nothing like a turkey. One of the other parents had called over to her, “Cheer up, Vera! Nobody’s going to be eating you on Thanksgiving!”

  Brian kept on talking, telling them how important it was for comic-book artists to pay attention to the different ways characters showed emotion physically. Emotion was shown in your eyes, your shoulders, your hands, even in the way you positioned your feet.

  “Take shyness,” Brian said. All at once, before their eyes, he became a shy little boy with tilted head, hunched shoulders, hands hidden in his pockets, one sneaker tucked in against the other.

  “Okay, we’re going to start with fear,” Brian continued, turning back into a grown-up comic-book teacher. “Fear is a great emotion to launch a story with, because you can show your character facing that fear and finally overcoming it by the story’s end. What are some of the things you guys are afraid of? Everyone, take a piece of paper from the pile on your table and write down your three top fears.”

  Vera wrote:

  ACTING

  MATH TESTS

  Vera hated when she had to answer a bunch of math questions quickly, without time to double-check her answers, and then brought home a paper with red marks scrawled all over it.

  She thought for a minute before writing her third fear:

  MAKING MY MOTHER MAD AT ME

  Though her mother never got angry, exactly, just disappointed, which was even worse. So Vera crossed that one out and wrote:

  MAKING MY MOTHER SAD

  “All right,” Brian said. “I want everyone to tell me one fear from your list. Just one.”

  He went around the room calling on kids at top speed. The answers rang out.

  “Roller coasters!”

  “Snakes!”

  “Spiders!”

  “Aliens!”

  When he turned to Vera’s table, she said, “Math tests,” and people laughed, in a friendly, not a mean way. It always surprised her when someone thought she was funny, especially when she hadn’t meant to be.

  Nixie said, “Movies where bad things happen to dogs.”

  Nolan said, “Falling into a hole when I’m walking along thinking about something else.”

  Harper said, “Spiders,” which wasn’t very original in Vera’s opinion as three other kids had already said that.

  James said, “Stepping in dog-doo,” and people laughed at that one, too. Vera had a feeling it wasn’t really one of James’s fears, he had just said it to get the laughs.

  Boogie said, “Clowns,” which seemed strange, as he would make such a great clown himself.

  “Okay!” Brian said, once the last kid had spoken. “Let’s go with spiders, since so many of you picked that one.” Harper looked pleased, as if Brian had given her some kind of praise. “Though…maybe it would be more interesting to choose an unusua
l fear. So let’s do fear of grasshoppers instead.” The girl who had offered that fear beamed.

  “Now for the fun part.” Brian grinned at the kids. “I’m going to need a few helpers up here to act out a scene for us.”

  Vera shrank into her seat. Don’t pick me. Don’t pick me. Don’t pick me.

  Fortunately hands shot up all around the library. Brian chose four kids, including Boogie and James.

  “Come on up, actors!” Brian directed. The four kids left their seats to form a group next to Brian’s big drawing pad.

  “So you’re terrified of grasshoppers,” Brian began. In a low voice he said, “It’s the way they hop. The thought of those little feet hopping over you, and of course if this was going to be a real comic, we’d do some research into how many legs grasshoppers have. Let’s say six. Six little grasshopper feet hopping all over you, and those papery grasshopper wings brushing against your bare skin.”

  Vera shuddered. Now she’d have to list GRASSHOPPERS as fear number four.

  “So you’re outside on a summer day, and the sun is shining, and the sky is blue, and then there it is: a grasshopper! Lying in wait to hop all over you! What do you do?”

  One kid still stood the same way he had been standing before, with no expression on his face. Vera sympathized, but why had he volunteered to be an actor if he didn’t want to act? The only girl in the group waved her hands in the air and gave a fake-sounding, too-loud-for-a-library scream. James made his mouth into a big O and clapped his hands to his cheeks, then cracked up as if he thought he was being extra-funny.

  Boogie was the best. He froze in place, shoulders raised, hands dangling helplessly, mouth slightly open, eyes twitching from side to side. Vera felt even more afraid of grasshoppers just looking at him.