AUBURN – Scott Fickett, 14, flipped through the pages of his never-opened comic book. And he blushed.

Between a gun-wielding stick figure named Evil Bob and a goggle-eyed rabbit in a Sgt. Pepper’s uniform, Fickett found his fellow, a Japanese assassin named Tasamu Ujigaki.

The pen-and-ink drawings that seemed so sloppy against white drawing paper seemed precise when shrunken onto the page and offset against a gray background.

“How did I do?” artist Mike Jordan asked Fickett and 10 other kids.

“Man, you’re awesome,” Fickett said. Others, many with their heads still buried in their copies of “The Golden Prize,” nodded.

Jordan sighed. The 21-page comic book took months to create.

There were six classes with the young artists, mostly students from Auburn Middle School’s Community Learning Center. They’d met in a quiet corner of the Auburn Public Library last fall, learning how to create a character and tell a story from Jordan, a Lisbon artist who has been drawing his own Medieval comic, “The Parvarian Tales,” for four years.

Almost as long as Jordan has sought readers for his comic, he’s been encouraging young artists.

In 2005, he began offering a series of workshops at the Auburn library. The one-night-only classes aimed to teach kids some of the basics of drawing, such as creating lifelike figures.

Then, Jordan and Sally Holt, the library’s teen librarian, became ambitious.

They decided to publish a book.

The kids came up with their adventure story on their own, each with an original character.

“It’s a quest, seeking a magical item that could give people their fondest wish,” Jordan said. In the comic’s finale, what the adventurers find is a giant Twinkie.

The kids did their own drawing.

Holt praised Jordan’s patience with the teens and preteens.

“He talked to them like they were at the same level,” she said.

Jordan, who has also begun teaching at other libraries, said his mindset with the kids was simple. When he was a kid, nobody taught him. And he would have loved it.

“I didn’t have anybody to show me what to do, like ‘this is a graphic square and this is how you use it,'” he said.

The kids responded well. Most of the time, they were “very, very serious,” he said.

Last week, as he handed out the finished copies, he was quiet and almost bashful.

“Everything is pretty much as you did it,” he said. “I just cleaned it up and added a few tints.”

Meanwhile, Fickett marveled at the copy in his hands.

“I’ve never really had my work out there,” he said.

Copies of “The Golden Prize” may be seen at www.bigredapress.com/aplworksh7A