Juneteenth Workshop
Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts
Hartford
June 19, 2024
It’s not often that you can get free lessons from an award-winning cartoonist and writer, but that’s exactly what happened at the Bushnell on the morning of a balmy Juneteenth celebration.
Joe Young, the creator of movies like Diamond Ruff and cartoons like Scruples, hosted a workshop to show children, their parents and anyone else interested how to not only draw some of his characters, but how to come up with “blockbuster” characters of their own. Young is dedicated to making sure that he serves as an inspiration and guide to the next generation of Black storytellers. As he put it to me, “We have a responsibility to show young people what’s possible, and that they can do it too.”
Young’s rules for creating a blockbuster character are simple. First, they have to be funny. He illustrated his point with a joke to the room full of youngsters.
“Why did the football coach go to the bank?”
After a series of incorrect guesses and perplexed looks, another adult in the room landed the punchline.
“To get a quarter back!”
Admittedly, there were more groans than laughs at that one. But the joke led into the next lesson: build the audience up for a surprise.
“If you can surprise your audience and make them laugh, you’re on your way,” he said. He also told them that drawing the character was secondary; the most important thing about making a character was writing about them.
He asked the children to help him come up with a new character, putting their new knowledge to the test. They decided on making him an alien, and started throwing out alien names.
“No, we need a human name,” Young told them. “Remember, we want to surprise the audience. We want them to ask, ‘Why does that alien have a human name?’ That will make them interested.” He encouraged the kids to get funnier and more outlandish with their ideas.
Eventually they came up with Rick the Alien, a 15 year old who lives on a bar of soap in the breakroom at Walmart in Miami.
One of the young artists was brave enough to share their creation. Stephon created a character named JJ, short for Jimmy J. He’s 1,000 years old, and he can live anywhere, although he prefers living in your basement. JJ’s best friends are the alliterative Poppa PP, Billy Bob, and Joel. His favorite activities are chilling, relaxing and eating pizza.
It wasn’t just a day for fun and play though. Young also made sure that the kids gathered understood the importance of the day that brought them together.
“What does Juneteenth teach us?” he asked.
A woman with glasses and a yellow shirt towards the back of the room raised her hand to speak.
“It teaches us how to come together and be brave and stand up for what is right,” said Lina Osho-Williams, the assistant director for youth and family services at Hartford Public Library. It’s a lesson the children took to heart, that will hopefully inspire them to be brave whether in the face of injustice or brave when they create art in the future.
