OH HEY INTERNET,

In Austin, school was supposed to start back up on the 18th. This morning, they told us the start of the year has been delayed by 3 more weeks. The school district is also requesting permission to extend online only classes from 4 to 8 weeks after restarting. This is basically cynical sliding calendar math - they cannot get more than 8 weeks of distance learning approved by the state without losing funding, so they had to delay the start date to give themselves some breathing room before being forced into the role of ad hoc hot zone capitalism enablers.

There is a 0% chance my children will be walking into a school building in 2020, but I made this zine when I was thinking about my daughter going back to class on some mythical futuristic first day of school. This is the digital edition of the paper zine that just arrived in subscriber’s mailboxes across the country!

Bonus/warning: this issue contains an obscene comic strip featuring a pangolin. I have no explanation for this.

For this issue I planned out and drew the pictures of the kids on 9x12 bristol board and used copic markers to shade them. I also used some leftover screentone on the girl’s dress. Then I scanned them in and did the annotations in Figma.

Of course, then I shrunk them down to 2x3 and printed them on a photocopier so nobody could tell that these were basically the best and most detailed drawings I’ve ever made.

Here are some behind the scene shots.

Thank you for reading. More soon.

Ben Brown, Human

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