Members - Dolores, Avy, Ben, Keith E and Brian.

The whole project took about 6 weeks to complete. We started off working with Michelle the Art Co-ordinator, in our Friday discussion group. First, we talked about comics and what our gift or power would be if we were superheroes. We created our superheroes based on our own personalities, helping each other recognise each other’s gifts.

We each drew preliminary sketches of our characters then we worked on the story. Ben took a lead and gave us a thread for the storyline. He suggested that his character had a problem - that his legs weren’t working.

We negotiated the storyline over a couple of weeks and found we needed to ask different people for help until we found a solution to the problem in the story. We realised that this translated into real life - that when we have a problem, we need to find the person who has the right knowledge and advice to help.

We wrote down the narrative of the story and the words for the speech bubbles and then transferred the project to the computer room where we worked with Ros, the I.T. co-ordinator. She guided us through the process of scanning the drawings and how to insert the digital pictures into a Microsoft Word document on the computer. We also typed up the text using Microsoft Word. We arranged the story pictures onto the page and bit by bit, added the text and speech bubbles. It was quite tricky fitting all this on the page so they weren’t overlapping the pictures. As a group, we agreed on a title and added this to the top, making it nice and bold. Our comic strip was then complete and featured in the centre pages of the December newsletter.

Shortly after we had completed the process, an information day for medical students was held at the centre and some members of the project spoke to the students about this process using some key-words as reminders. This really helped us to use our memories to recall all the details of the project.