Interview With A TEFL Go-Getter: Grammarman Creator Brian Boyd

It takes a certain personality to get into and succeed at teaching English in a foreign country…but to, on top of that all, develop your own innovative comic strip and get it syndicated in newspapers such as the New Straits Times in Malaysia or the Buenos Aires Herald in Argentina*? Well. I had the opportunity to carry out an email interview with Grammarman creator Brian Boyd to find out how he does it.

What’s Grammarman’s all about? Check out the official Grammarman site and then read more in an English Club interview with Brian Boyd. You can even see Grammarman live on YouTube via a link provided here.

Seeing his EFL students with their noses buried in local comics, Brian Boyd had a brainstorm: why not use his background in design and technology to develop a hero who fights bad grammar? After this, and with the help of a fellow English teacher and friend, it was a matter of making sketches, developing the first six Grammarman comics for a portfolio, physically going around to publishers in Bangkok and at the same time contacting others by mail with a CD containing the first six episodes. No less than seven publications have decided to syndicate Grammarman – Boyd creates a new comic every week. Another lesson in perseverance: getting these cool results involved contacting over 200 publishers. As any good EFL student of cliches would say…no pain, no gain.

Find the second part of this interview here.

*TEFL Logue readers in Korea, I know you are out there. Grammarman has yet to by syndicated by any Korean newspaper or magazine. Hello? Gigantic EFL market. Alert your local newspapers or magazines if you too think Grammarman is neat. Or, send suggestions this way by posting here on the TEFL Logue or contact Boyd himself (or his press office (?)) via the official Grammarman site.