Behind the Scenes Look at Communal Bin Drama piece

Sometimes it takes a community (bin) to spark and idea

It was sometime in August when I saw the kerfuffle taking place across social media as parents had VERY strong opinions on the communal bins for school supplies. More specifically, the requirement that they buy supplies for the class rather than just their own child.

I have no children so I do not have the same skin in the game, but I wouldn’t balk at picking up an extra box of pencils and few notebooks at Walmart or The Dollar Tree (don’t judge, they are fine).

What shocked me were the posts where parents were oddly possessive of THEIR kid’s supplies. Admittedly, if they are buying super nice stationery products for their kid and they get tossed into a communal bin, 100% on their side. But if they can pick up cheaper versions of the product to add to the well-being of the class, that felt like a relatively simple ask.

But you’re not here for the “discourse” you’re here for the humor inspired by it. First things first, I made a list of ideas, allowing the dumb ones to creep in there because at this stage there are no dumb ideas.

From there I picked 5 and played more with what I might do with them.

(Bin a entity that must be fed, a speech or social media post from the “cons” parent, debate stage, Bin as a larger than life force/ten commandments.)

I kept playing with the ideas, writing more jokes and doing more doodles in parts that helped me picture the mood of the piece. Notice the teachers with witch hats, I was wondering whether I should go the creepy route. Sometimes I know an idea isn’t working immediately. You can see I crossed out debate stage from get-go because I struggled to think of how to heighten it with different panels.

Eventually I picked the one I thought might be the strongest. The result was short, but still, I thought, for the first truly new piece I’d written in a long time, it was not bad. The end result you can read here. Or you can listen to a live reading of it on Substack.