|
|
|
 |
||
 |
"We finished the GOVERNMENT comic book and especially enjoyed the way the various cabinet offices were portrayed. We eagerly await the rest of your books." Deb Kusluski, parent |
 |
 |
||
Archive for the ‘Author’s Purpose’ Category
The Crab and the Bears
Written on Tuesday, March 13th, 2012 [permanent link]
One of the biggest — and most unseen — influences on Chester the Crab are a bear family and the husband and wife team who wrote them. I was sad to hear of the recent passing of Jan Berenstain, who wrote with her husband Stan more than 300 books that sold more than 260 million copies.
Their partnership reads like a storybook itself. Stan and Jan Berenstain were both born in 1923 in Philadelphia and met at the Philadelphia College of Art. In World War II Stan was a medical assistant in the Army, and Jan worked in an airplane factory. They married after the war and worked together as artists and writers, making cartoons for popular magazines. They began writing stories about a funny bear family to please their two sons.
As a young reader I loved “The Big Honey Hunt” and “The Bear Scouts.” Long before I laughed at Homer Simpson’s bumbles, I laughed at Papa Bear’s. The Berenstain Bears stories weren’t as daring as other works for children — you don’t hear many people of my generation reminisce about the Bears the way we do about Dr. Seuss books or classic Sesame Street or the Schoolhouse Rock videos. The Bears had a gentler vibe, a more wholesome worldview — that must have come from Stan and Jan.
Of course I went back to those childhood favorites to read to my sons when I became a parent. But by the 1990s, Stan and Jan were also writing Bear family books that spoke directly to me as a parent. They got me out of a lot of jams with their a series of Berenstain Bear books based on real world family problems. “The Berenstain Bears and The Truth” and “The Berenstain Bears and Too Much TV” were reference books in our household! Whenever we hit a parenting problem, we went looking for Stan and Jan’s advice. Because it worked. How beautiful to wrap nonfiction info into a gentle, funny, warm story about a bear family.
That’s why Chester isn’t that crabby. Chester’s voice is mine, not some spiced up snarky thing that I’m hoping will compete in the big media swirl of kidstuff. I’ve tried to present info in a funny, earnest, quirky way through Chester and just assumed that he would find his audience of people who could understand that you don’t have to be snotty to be cool.
I hope that on some afternoons after school Brother Bear and Sister Bear are reading some Chester Comix up in their room in their big treehouse down a sunny dirt road deep in Bear Country.
Posted in Author's Purpose | No Comments »
History comix for the iPad
Written on Thursday, February 9th, 2012 [permanent link]
When Apple announced last month that it will push to make digital textbooks more available, many bloggers noted just how few titles are available. Well, now there are eight more titles.
Converting some of the most popular Chester Comix titles from printed book to e-book was one of my big projects in 2011. It feels fantastic to look into Apple’s iTunes store today and now see eight of my books ready for download: American Symbols, Founding Fathers, Moving and Grooving, The Jamestown Journey, Go West Young Crab!, World War 2 Tales, GOVERNMENT, and Revolutionary Rumblings.
If you do a search for “Chester Comix” in the iTunes store, you’ll find these books AND the three apps I published in 2010. The books are clearly for the iPad (much too big to be viewed on the iPhone) and the apps were drawings that I cut specifically to be easily readable on the iPhone and iTouch. Those apps can be viewed on an iPad, but they don’t fill the iPad screen. The commercial success of the iPad meant I could present my Chester adventures in their original vertical design. With even MORE vertical-ness! Part of the process over the past few months was making the page layouts that I drew 10 years ago stretch out to fit the iPad screen’s dimensions. For most readers on most pages, the differences between the print version and iPad version aren’t noticeable. But I as the author got more and more excited to see how the added space gave the drawings more room to breathe. I think these iPad versions are more readable for young people, and the history lessons within them flow more easily. The format has helped the storytelling! (By the end of the five-year run of Chester in the Daily Press newspaper in Newport News, VA, I was clearly trying to tell too much story and cramming too many words and detailed images into the space I was given on the page. You could see that I knew the project was coming to an end, and I was trying to say as much as I could in the pages I had left. Some of the Chester pages make me claustrophobic when I view them now 😉
Please help me share this great news about Chester for the iPad. The goal is to get all 27 titles into the iTunes store this year!
Tags: comic book, graphic novel, history, iPad, reluctant reader
Posted in Author's Purpose, Comix Creation, literacy | No Comments »
Chester Comix for smartboards!
Written on Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 [permanent link]Now you can have your whole class read a Chester Comix page together. ( visit Dedicated Teacher! Whoo hoo!)
That was always the goal. All of the Chester the Crab history adventures that you read began in 1999 as a comic in the Daily Press newspaper in Newport News, Virginia. The newspaper sold classroom subscriptions at a discount and raised donations from area businesses to get many copies of the paper in front of students. It was a great way to promote literacy — after the kids read Chester they could then turn to the sports or movie sections or scan the photos. But of course newspaper paper is fragile, so teachers would laminate the Chester pages to keep them bright year after year. (I STILL meet teachers who have held on to those laminated newspaper pages all these years later.) We had a great product but a clunky delivery system.
I knew other teachers in other states would also love to teach with Chester. Not only was newspaper paper too temporary, but sending newspapers through the mail was too costly. So in 2003 I got permission from the Daily Press to put Chester’s adventures into book form. I kept the books paperback to hold the cost down. FINALLY I had a more durable format so I could ship these stories to Texas and California and South Dakota!
I still plan to keep the books in print for all the museum bookstores that carry Chester Comix and all the parents who want to see their kids reading on the couch. But the Great Recession in 2008-09-? also made it clear that fewer and fewer schools would have money to buy class sets of printed books of Chester tales.
As I’ve gone into schools to give my Author’s Purpose talks, I’ve kept a close eye on the rising use of smartboards. In the past year I became convinced that enough classrooms had them to make it worth my while to convert Chester’s stories into a digital format that can be showed on those boards.
Right now it’s just the stories. No hyperlinks, no sound, no bells or whistles. I hope to add those soon. But for now you can put 27 bright and funny books about American history in front of your whole class and read them together. Have fun!!!
Posted in Author's Purpose, History Teacher, literacy | 2 Comments »
