Treasuring the archives of Friday Night Comics

Sep 16

On sorting through years of a weekly ritual for creativity & connection

I moved to Gainesville six years ago to attend the Sequential Artists Workshop’s year long program, which at the time happened in person, in a large industrial room painted a deep and vivid pink. It was cluttered with comics and art supplies, and although basically windowless, had a garage door wall we could open on nice days. It was surrounded by an overgrown junkyard full of mysterious objects and cats and lizards and good sunsets and I loved all of this.

Still in Gainesville and recently, happily, tasked with gathering and sifting and sending out Friday Night Comics workshops in groups of three, I’ve been struck by how much of what I loved about SAW at the time remains in these weekly online sessions - even though I do miss the junkyard. I’ve decided to write about this here, to tell you why you should be excited to visit or revisit these soon-to-be incoming videos.

The Friday Night Comics workshops were started by the Believer Magazine in the fear and isolation of 2020, and were taken over by The Sequential Artists Workshop in 2021. In the beginning, Zoom was new to most of us, and we watched these heroically brave comic artists as they learned in front of a very large online audience how to share their screen, how to spotlight someone, how to mute and unmute - and we all learned too. These early workshops are full of a very sweet awkwardness. They are full of all of us scared, all of us living through circumstances we never expected to live through. And they are full of all of us learning to adapt, to take care of ourselves and each other, and to find joy where and when we can. At the very least, once a week, on Fridays at 7pm.

And now several years later, we are living through scary circumstances again (see Nicole Georges’ ‘Drawing Through Fascism’ workshop! Don’t worry, I’ll be showing you that one.) The workshops are still here, a solid and established thing with a devoted audience. Even if you are new, you are immediately enveloped in a sense of community. As the Zoom meeting starts and names and faces pop up, Tom asks one person how their move went, and another, how is the new job? So you know it is that type of thing, and you too can become a recurring character, a name and a face that everyone is happy to see appear on their screen.

Friday Night Comics is learning how to make abstract comics, how to use lettering, how to make comics without words. It is learning how to draw from nature, and how to explore the contents of your character’s purse. It’s making comics about reality television and making haiku comics. It is drawing comics about how your pets are manipulating you!

It is a spark when your mind and the page in front of you are blank.

(It is also sometimes, maybe, something like group therapy.)

Above all else, I believe it is a weekly ritual to conjure connection.

If you do enough Friday Night Comics, both past and present, they will make you feel like, don’t worry, don’t worry. No matter what. The world may crumble, and someone will still be here, telling you to divide a piece of paper into four panels. Someone will still be typing the instructions into the chat, for anyone who needs it.

All the best,

Mara McCormick