Building a School for Cartoonists: Tom Hart on Mindset, Community, and Trust

Tom's earliest memories are of copying Peanuts characters from newspapers. After teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York for about a decade, he moved to Florida and founded SAW, starting to put courses online around 2016. What he discovered surprised him. "The techniques actually are pretty teachable through video and simple critiques," he explains. "But what isn't present when you do that is all the things that come up with that, that are frustrating, one's sort of journey to be an artist." The real work of teaching comics, he found, is dealing with the emotional and mindset challenges that block creative expression. "A large part of that is community. Let's get everybody in on a live call together and talk about these things and share the experiences we're having." In SAW's six-month graphic novel program, many students enter expecting to produce dozens of pages. Most produce far fewer. But they leave calling it a success because they got something more valuable: they learned that their struggles are normal, their process is common, and the lows are part of the journey.

Tom's first online course, Storytelling Flow (or Storytelling Vinyasa), was designed to help cartoonists trust their own ideas and stop being nervous about a blank page. It sold well thanks to a mailing list he had built over years. "I thought I had it all figured out," he admits. Then he launched four courses at once -- three by guest instructors -- and none of them performed as well. "I've learned that just offering a course doesn't mean it's going to sell." Today, SAW offers an entire ecosystem: free weekly 90-minute sessions that build community and audience, four-week courses at $229-$300, six-month programs at $2,500, and a nine-month program at $3,500-$4,000. The school is a nonprofit, which means Tom constantly balances generosity with sustainability. He compensates instructors with an hourly rate (replacing an earlier percentage model) that scales with enrollment, typically capping classes at 16-17 students with a minimum of six to run.

When asked what drives enrollment, Tom gives a disarmingly honest answer: he does not know the precise mechanisms, but he knows trust is the foundation. "You get people to trust you by being trustworthy," he says. "By having a good track record, and having people that can vouch for you, and having good experience after good experience that you can report back on." What surprises him most is that the majority of students who sign up for the big six-month and nine-month programs are often new to SAW. Many are older adults revisiting a creative medium they loved in their youth, or artists from other fields who feel drawn to comics. Tom acknowledges that marketing "keeps you up at night," but frames the core challenge as building interconnection rather than mastering funnels. Free weekly workshops, festival appearances, and genuine relationships within the comics community generate more trust than any advertising campaign. As he puts it: "If I got hit by a bus, the school, the community, even the students would rally around. There's a lot of trust in the community now."