Parent and Teacher Resources

As a parent who has done some teaching and has been around educators most of my life, I have always been very mindful of the positive impacts that reading and making comics can have on us at any age. For children I think the main benefits include literacy skills (for both text and artwork), stimulating the imagination, and even providing positive modeling for difficult situations. A perfect example of these qualities would be the best-selling books of Raina Telgemeier, who has written and drawn autobiographical graphic novels about very relatable problems like getting braces, having a sibling, and friend group dynamics.

Zines have the added benefit of being something that anyone (including kids) can make easily themselves, with nothing but printer paper and a pencil if need be. I started making zines myself at about the age of 15 as part of a thing called an Amateur Press Association - in those pre-internet days it opened my eyes to new friends and fandoms and encouraged me to explore making all kinds of art.

When I get more time I will organize some information here for you in a more organized way but in the meantime here are some links to get you started:

• How to Draw Comics the Marshall Way was my comics advice tumblr, where I reblogged a bunch of useful posts on various parts of the comics making process, and also posted a couple of still reasonably useful pages on how to get started making comics and so on. If you don't want to scroll through a bunch of old posts try searching the site for keywords like "drawing" or "inking".
• The Instant Comic Book is a blank comic zine that you can print out, copy, and give to kids (or use yourself) to make your own comics.

Black Rocks Books is a micropress and zine distro run by Scott Marshall. It exists to promote and celebrate comics and illustration created in Atlantic Canada (or by our expats and imports). If you have any issues or questions, please don't hesitate to contact me via email at shop@blackrocksbooks.com or ask in the BRB Discord. You can follow @blackrocksbooks on Bluesky. If you want to follow my art stuff as well you can follow @scottmarshall on BlueSky.

Black Rocks Books operates gratefully in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq people.

We also acknowledge that people of African descent have been in Nova Scotia for over 400 years, and we honour and offer gratitude to those ancestors of African descent who came before us to this land.

This site is always under construction, and I am a broken man on a Halifax pier doing all this. Please bear with me.

The artwork shown on this site is copyright ©2025 by its respective creators.
Everything else on the site is copyright ©2025 by Scott Marshall unless otherwise indicated.
All rights are reserved. Contact: shop@blackrocksbooks.com