BRADENTON — Pow! Wham! Zing! Kids may go to Bat City Comic Professionals with a comic book vocabulary, but they’re likely to leave with multisyllabic vocabulary words, new art skills or previously unexplored ideas for career paths.
Shannon Live is a former educator who has never stopped teaching. A former reading and writing specialist in Title 1 schools, she runs the nonprofit Bat City, 915 Manatee Ave. E., with her husband, Matthew. The money they earn helps fund programs she designed to teach kids everything related to the comic book industry and beyond, from characters, plots and resolutions to writing, illustration and marketing.
Bat City is a tangential reference to Batman, but it’s really a reference to where the couple met — Austin, Texas, known as Bat City because of its plethora of flying mammals.
“We met while I was selling him comic books in 2017,” Shannon said. By 2018, they had started a store of their own. By 2020, they were cutting a wedding cake with Superman and Wonder Woman on the top.
They visited a company in Lakewood Ranch that grades comic books and realized how close they were to Anna Maria Island, where Matthew’s family had vacationed, so they looked around town a bit. Back home in Austin, when it started getting too expensive to live, they decided to move to Bradenton. They found a historic building to live and work in and bought it in 2022.
“We’re in one of the first five buildings in the town of Manatee,” Shannon said. “It was here since 1880. It was a cigar factory, then a bakery. Now it’s our job to protect it.”
This year, Bat City celebrated its fourth year in business in Bradenton during Local Comic Shop Day on Sept. 26. They also celebrated having been named one of the five best comic book shops in the world at the comic industry’s Will Eisner awards during San Diego Comic Con every year since moving to Bradenton. Their celebration drew local comic aficionados and featured a giant community comic that people added to throughout the day.
But what the couple celebrates most is that Bat City has taught over 5,000 students through its writing programs since opening in Bradenton, with another 2,700 students using their comic-based reading programs and even more participating in kid, teen and adult art classes.
Bat City partners with schools, libraries, Boys and Girls Clubs and other organizations to promote literacy. Since last year, Bat City has worked with the Manatee School for the Arts, offering a weekly after-school club for about 40 students listening to college-level lectures on how to build comics and stories.
The Comic Creation Workshop is a writing class for students in grades two through six, Shannon said. It covers elements of writing, character creation, plot building, story climax and the cliffhanger conclusions employed in serial comics.
Students who don’t like to write initially start drawing and transition to writing as they gain confidence, she said, adding that using verbal and visual skills simultaneously assists in retention.
Students write their own two-page comics, which teaches writing skills while avoiding boredom, she said.
Other programs include Academic Avengers, which turns standard games into educational games, SLAM (Story/Lettering/Art/Marketing), a free, 12-week class for all ages on creating and drawing characters, developing new worlds for them to live in and producing and marketing the comics, and Creator Meetup for adult creators of comic books, film, puppet shows and more, offering networking, artist development training, peer review, and help with pitching, editing and publishing stories.
The programs are staffed by the Lives and an art teacher they trained and hired.
“Having a chance to see young people in our community develop skills in reading and writing has been an absolute joy,” Shannon said. “We’ve tried every day since we opened Bat City to inspire a passion for comics, community and charity. The city of Bradenton has helped us live that model every day, truly building the next generation of superheroes right here in the Friendly City.”
Cindy Lane is a staff writer for the Tampa Bay Beacons. She can be reached at clane@tbnweekly.com.