With the leaves slowly changing colors and brisk breezes whirling through the trees lining the quad, yet another school year has begun this Fall. With the new year comes a few changes and additions to our Central Catholic community, the most notable being our new STEM building. In addition to the extension of our campus, there are a number of new members of the Central Catholic teaching staff. Naturally, the majority of those are to accommodate the new building, so most teach classes having to do with science or engineering. However, the new facility will also foster lessons in the artistic creativity – manifested in a very unique way. With the new building comes a new field if study at Central… and a new teacher.

Mr. Wos began drawing when he was only four years old, though instead of on paper or canvas, his work was plastered onto the walls of his childhood home. Having been inspired by Charles Schulz’s work as the creator of the iconic cartoon “Peanuts,” his artwork continued to progress as he went through his childhood years. Eventually, at age 14, Mr. Wos did his first ever professional work drawing caricatures at festivals, and his work took off from there. Throughout his career, Mr. Wos has written and published multiple books, and is currently working on a four book deal with a publisher. In addition to this, he was recently awarded a Syndicated Feature, the highest honor a cartoonist can get. This means that his own cartoon series, “Mazetoons,” is nationally published every single day. With all the national recognition and publishing deals, it begs one to ask: how did Mr. Wos end up at Central Catholic?

Mr. Wos began his teaching career at Good Shepherd Grade School in Braddock, close to where he lived as a child. He then went on to teach at the Pittsburgh Center For The Arts. Currently, in addition to teaching at Central, Mr. Wos is an instructor at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, where he travels for two weeks every summer and fall for the past 15 years to teach classes. With ample experience in the field, Mr. Wos brought the idea of a cartooning course at Central up to Brother Bob, who happened to be a huge cartoon fan. And although Brother Bob left for Rome, but lucky for us, the idea stayed.

The course itself focuses on every aspect of the art. From setting, came context to the actual telling of the story through illustrations, this course is designed to make even the most novice of artists into expert cartoonists. Although it is currently only offered to Juniors and Seniors, Mr. Wos is looking into opening it to the underclassmen. Amazingly, Central is currently the only high school in the country to offer Cartooning as a credited course, and getting a lot of attention because of it. Before the school year even began, Mr. Wos was contacted by Wacom, a creative design technology company, and received free tablets for the course. Needless to say, this was a very large step in the progression of the new program, and this is only the beginning.