A collaborative comic book project inspired by Chicago youth — and an invitation to help shape what happens next.
Welcome to Made Collaborative!
If you’re discovering us for the first time — and unless you’ve been among the small group working on this project over the years, you probably are — we’re glad you’re here. Whether you’re a comic book fan, an aspiring artist, a professional artist, an educator, a student, or simply someone who enjoys a good story, there’s a place for you here.
Made Collaborative began with a simple idea: What if young people could work alongside aspiring and established artists to explore and develop their own creativity and imagination?
That idea would quickly evolve into in-person after-school workshops in Chicago’s west-side neighborhoods, where students worked alongside writers and artists to imagine characters, develop storylines, and explore the possibilities of collaborative storytelling.
Those early workshops eventually inspired Back of the Yards, an original comic series that brings together neighborhood history, fictional characters, and the creative contributions of young people.
Today, we’re expanding that original concept through an online Virtual Studio platform we’ve cobbled together through years of grit and grind outside of our day jobs — with the hope of making it easier for anyone, anywhere, to explore the project and participate.
First, Explore the Comic
If you’re new to our modest collaborative project, perhaps the best place to begin your orientation is with the comic stories themselves. The first two issues of Back of the Yards introduce readers to a fictionalized Chicago neighborhood where ordinary lives intersect with extraordinary forces.
You’ll meet young characters finding their way through school, friendships, family relationships, and the challenges of growing up. You’ll also begin to encounter a larger mystery involving the neighborhood’s past—and powerful forces operating beneath the surface.
Issues #1 and #2 are available to read online, giving you an opportunity to discover the characters and the world we’ve already begun building.
Next, Enter the Studio
Our next chapter is Back of the Yards Issue #3. And rather than developing every element of the story behind closed doors — true to the comic’s early creative origins — we’re inviting readers, students, artists, educators, and other collaborators to participate in the creative process.
We’ve organized the experience around 12 featured Issue #3 collaborations, along with four bonus Studio collaborations exploring additional characters and story possibilities. Each collaboration offers a different opportunity to explore the Back of the Yards universe.
You might help imagine a new neighborhood location, develop a character attending New City High, uncover something from a character’s past, or explore a mystery that could influence future stories.
And you don’t have to be an experienced artist or writer to participate.
How Does It Work?
Each featured collaboration connects three simple elements:
- Explore the Collaboration. Start with a short introduction to a character, setting, or story opportunity.
- Discover the Studio Card. Dive deeper into the background, artwork, story history, and creative possibilities surrounding that collaboration.
- Enter the Workshop. Follow a few creative prompts and share your ideas through a simple online form.
Some Workshops invite written responses. Others welcome artwork, character concepts, or imaginative interpretations. You can participate in one Workshop or explore several. It’s really all about your own creative and collaborative interests.
And the goal of this collaborative process isn’t to find one right answer. It’s to see what new possibilities emerge when different people bring their imaginations to the same story.
Your Ideas Can Become Part of the Collaborative Story
One of the most exciting aspects of Made Collaborative is the opportunity for creative contributions to influence the comic itself. As we develop Issue #3, selected ideas, characters, settings, and other contributions may help shape the story, artwork, or future Studio collaborations.
Not every submission will appear in a published comic, and participation doesn’t guarantee selection. But every Workshop is designed to give participants a meaningful opportunity to explore the creative process. Some contributions may inspire new directions. Others might spark conversations, artwork, or additional collaborations.
And sometimes, one small idea can become the starting point for something much bigger.
That’s precisely how Back of the Yards began in a classroom years ago, and it’s the fusion of creative ideas and thought that we’re seeking to foster going forward.
A Shared Creative Commons
In this way, Back of the Yards is intended to be more than a comic series. It’s a shared creative universe that we want others to explore, expand, and make their own.
That’s why we’ve made designated characters, storylines, settings, and other creative materials available under a Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).
What does that mean for you?
You can use our licensed characters and storylines to create your own comics, artwork, stories, and other original projects. You can even sell what you create.
We simply ask that you give appropriate credit and, when sharing adaptations of our licensed material, make those adaptations available under the same or a compatible Creative Commons license—so others can build upon your creativity, too.
And if you contribute to one of our Workshops? You retain ownership of your original creative contributions. Our Terms & Conditions explain how submitted work may be incorporated into Back of the Yards and shared under the Creative Commons framework. Certain materials, including our logos, trademarks, finished comic artwork, and other specifically excluded assets, remain protected.
Our goal is simple: a creative universe where everyone has an opportunity to contribute, creators retain ownership of their original work, and new ideas can inspire even more ideas.
You can learn more in our Terms & Conditions.
Collaboration Is Easy — and Free
This project began with a simple premise: creative thinking is an undervalued skill, and opportunities to develop it should be accessible to everyone — especially young people in urban communities where funding for arts and enrichment programs is often under pressure.
Of course, that simple idea eventually evolved into a comic book project. And we fully recognize that many of you have never written a comic book story. Heck, yours truly hadn’t either when this journey began.
More importantly, you might not even consider yourself an artist or a particularly creative person. Maybe you have an idea but aren’t sure where to begin. That’s exactly why we’ve designed our Workshops to be approachable. You don’t need special software, professional experience, or a finished piece of artwork.
All you need is a little curiosity and a willingness to imagine something new.
Our Studio Cards provide the background. Our Workshop prompts help get you started. And you can participate at your own pace.
For educators and after-school programs, these resources can also serve as free creative exercises for young people — introducing storytelling, character development, world-building, and visual imagination through an existing comic book universe.
For artists and writers, the Studio offers opportunities to explore existing characters, experiment with new ideas, and potentially connect with future collaborative projects.
And for anyone simply interested in comics, it’s another way to become part of the storytelling experience.
Discover the Story Behind Made Collaborative
The comic and Virtual Studio are only the latest chapters in a much longer creative journey. Through our This & That blog, you can explore how Made Collaborative began in Chicago classrooms, how students and artists worked together to develop the original comic, and how those early experiences continue to influence what we’re building today.
Our earlier posts share the stories, challenges, inspirations, and creative experiments that helped bring Back of the Yards to life. And that history leads directly to the next chapter.
And in our next This & That blog entry, Inside the Issue #3 Dossier: The Stories We’re Building Together, we’ll take you deeper into the characters, mysteries, and creative opportunities shaping our next comic issue — including how contributions from our Workshops may help influence the story as it develops.
Your Invitation
Whether you want to read the comic, explore a character, contribute an idea, create original artwork, or introduce these resources to young people in your community, we hope you’ll find something here that sparks your imagination.
You can start small. Explore one Studio Card. Try one Workshop. Share an idea. And see where it leads.
Because the next great idea for Back of the Yards might come from someone who hasn’t discovered the project yet.
Maybe that someone is you.
Hello & Welcome!
When we first began what would eventually become Made Collaborative, I never imagined that one day I would be drafting a blog like this.
Back then, the idea was remarkably simple.
Gather together a few artists at an afterschool program. Invite a group of young people into the same room. Ask them what kinds of stories they wanted to tell. Then do our very best to help bring those stories to life.
That was it.
There was no grand publishing plan. No long-term roadmap. Certainly no expectation that one day we would be developing an interconnected comic universe centered around the neighborhoods of Chicago. We simply believed that creativity mattered – and that young people’s ideas deserved to be taken seriously.
Over time, however, something unexpected began to happen.
As artists, educators, and participating youth continued contributing ideas, individual stories slowly began connecting with one another. Characters evolved. New characters emerged. Neighborhoods developed their own personalities. Themes began repeating themselves in unexpected ways. Small ideas became larger ideas. Before long, we realized we were no longer simply creating individual comic stories – we were gradually building a shared world.
During that journey, I was fortunate to be joined by my friend and creative partner, Len Kody. Together, we have spent countless hours expanding the world of Back of the Yards — developing its characters, mythology, history, and long-term vision. I have often said that Made Collaborative is built upon the belief that meaningful stories grow through collaboration, and few people embody that belief more than Len. His imagination, thoughtful storytelling, and unwavering belief in what this project and this comic series could become have helped shape The Back of the Yards in ways that simply would not have been possible on my own.
The Back of the Yards is one result of that collaborative journey.
While the comic series is fictional, its foundation is very real. It is inspired by conversations, sketches, classroom discussions, neighborhood observations, and creative contributions made over many years by artists, educators, community members, and young people who chose to imagine something together.
Through our This & That blog series, we hope to share more about the evolving mythology, history, and world of Back of the Yards, along with the creative journey behind Made Collaborative itself.
Our first several blog entries serve as a starting point for that journey. They provide a frame of reference for the project — how a simple idea, a group of young people, and a handful of artists gradually evolved into the comic book universe we’re continuing to build today. To tell that part of the story, we’ve repurposed several entries from our own internal project journal and are sharing them with you here.
Going forward, This & That will explore more of the neighborhood we’re building, the characters who inhabit it, the institutions and systems that shape it, and the creative philosophy that continues to guide the comic’s development. We’ll also share project announcements, updates from our Virtual Studio, and highlights of creative contributions from young people, artists, and other collaborators helping shape the project along the way.
Some of the characters you’ll encounter in these stories have already appeared in the published comics. Others will make their first appearance in future issues. Still others remain little more than names, sketches, or unfinished conversations waiting for the right moment to emerge.
Like the project itself, they’re still evolving.
That is part of what makes this work so rewarding.
One lesson I have learned through Made Collaborative is that meaningful stories are rarely built by a single individual. They grow through conversation. They improve through collaboration. They become richer when people with different experiences, talents, and perspectives choose to build something together.
Every artist brings a unique visual voice. Every writer asks different questions. Every educator helps uncover new ways of thinking. Every young person reminds us that imagination is limitless when it is encouraged.
Together, those contributions, from creative partners and artists to educators, community members, and participating youth, become something none of us could have created alone.
If you’ve found your way to this opening blog series, we hope you’ll become part of that process, too. Whether you are an artist, writer, educator, student, or simply someone curious about the world of The Back of the Yards, I hope these pages serve as both a practical guide and an open invitation. There is still much of this neighborhood left to discover, many questions left unanswered, and many stories still waiting to be told.
Thank you for choosing to become part of this journey.
And welcome to the Made Collaborative Studio!
– Jimmy Briseno