Age Inappropriate: Why I'm Teaching a Comics Workshop (And Why You Should Come)

February 1—all ages welcome, no drawing experience necessary

For people of my generation, we’ve had 30 years added to the end of our lives. Thirty years that weren’t expected when we were born. And those of you who are younger, I expect you’ll get these 30 years too, and hopefully we’ll know a little bit better what old age is for by that time.

Predictably, I got interested in aging when I started to get old. What I learned about aging was fascinating, and when I tried to share what I was learning with other people I discovered a couple of things.

People’s ideas about aging were pretty much totally wrong. Stereotypes stood in for knowledge. People conflated aging and death as if they were the same thing. People told me they never thought about aging and then couldn’t stop talking about it.

It was weird. Good information existed, but it was tucked in academic books. Popular titles tended to focus on staving off aging rather than embracing it, only fueling people’s fear of aging. People seemed so afraid of aging that it short circuited their ability to articulate their questions, observations, fears, desires.

I thought: there’s got to be a way to kick this door open.

I’ve always loved how pictures and words work together. And suddenly, here I was deep into studying aging, full of ideas I wanted to share and searching for a way to open that conversation, and I thought: comics!

Comics are approachable. They’re fun. They disarm people. They let you tackle hard truths without the weight that often shuts people down.

So I started experimenting— I started teaching a course on Reimagining Aging at UCLA’s lifelong learning institute, I launched this Substack to bring the course, the comics, and community conversations together. And I discovered that comics don’t just make aging less scary to talk about—they make it possible to talk about.

So that’s how I got here. Comics are a way to surface feelings and observations, and stimulate conversations. And in this workshop I want to show you how to build your own.

This workshop, hosted by the fabulous cartoonist-led Crucial Comix, invites you to surface unchallenged assumptions, share stories, and draw your way into unexpected insights about aging. No prior drawing experience necessary. It’s a workshop for all ages, because we’re all aging!

Age Inappropriate is a two-hour online workshop on Sunday February 1st, 10:00am-12:00pm PST (1:00pm-3:00pm EST). The class will be recorded and shared with all registered attendees. Sliding scale.

You can register here.