AGE APPROPRIATE: 11th grade and up (nudity and violence)
COLOR: no
PAGES: 400

I’ve spent a lot of my free reading time this summer digging into ancient India. One of the biggest school districts in Virginia has begun to teach ancient India to elementary students, and I’d like to draw a comic book about it this fall. As I have waded through library books and old National Geographics, I also looked for any other graphic novels on the subject.

I found an 8-part epic about the life of Buddha, written and drawn by Japanese manga forefather Osamu Tezuka! I’m not a fan of manga comix, so this was a chance to learn not only about the life of the founder of Buddhism but also to try swimming in a form of comix that is very popular with American teens.

There is a lot of vitality to Tezuka’s storytelling. He’s called “the Japanese Walt Disney,” and “Buddha: Kapilavastu,” the first of his 8-volume series, has a lot of action and silliness - in many cases the animals LOOK like they came from the Walt Disney studio. It amazes me as a cartoonist that even within a scene or even one panel Tezuka draws some characters seriously and others in very cartoony fashion. He even puts himself into some panels — with scribbles over his head identifying himself! The unevenness between his panels showing the scenery of India and panels showing goofy sentry jokes and panels dropping modern references make for a strange ride. And American audiences may be unsettled by the casual nudity of a mother and a small boy or the violence (blood is shown black since the comic is not in color). But maybe this all-but-the-kitchen-sink approach is the appeal of manga - Tezuka certainly uses all the elasticity of the art form (sometimes characters bounce off the panel borders or break them into pieces).

But if it’s good manga, does that make it a good telling of the life of the founder of one of the world’s great religions? The person who becomes Buddha is only born in volume 1! He appears on only a handful of the 400 pages, in only two of the 12 chapters. So I learned much more about Tezuka as an artist than I did about the historical Buddha. The rest of this first volume is filled with the antics of fictional characters — some of whom don’t survive this volume and so have no impact on the life of Buddha. Some of their stories deliver messages about the caste system in India, but it’s also clearly filler — Japanese manga comix are often published weekly, so there’s much more volume to their stories than you find in American comix.

So the bottom line is: do I think the path to enlightenment can be found on my way to paying $15 for each of the next seven volumes in the story????

I enjoyed all the comparisons between Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln made at the Democratic National Convention this week. If anything, Lincoln was LESS experienced at the time of his election than Obama is now: Lincoln had only one 2-year term in the House of Representatives and was a complete dark horse candidate at the Republican convention in the summer of 1860 and a shock to the East Coast establishment when he got the nomination.

Get ready for a lot more Lincoln - next year is the bicentennial of his birth, and a nationwide commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War will also gear up next year. There’s going to be a lot of blue and gray around, and I’m preparing to do a comic entirely on Honest Abe!

As research for that, I just finished reading Tom Wheeler’s “Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails.” Wheeler’s thesis is a fine one — that Abraham Lincoln’s use of the new technology of the telegraph mirrors our own experience with the new form of communication we call e-mail — but this book reads more like a long piece in the New Yorker than a book. He repeats his thesis over and over rather than to push his analysis into secondary or tertiary levels of description of how lightning-fast communication could be manipulated for the sender’s purpose. A decade into the e-mail practice, we all know now how e-mail can be used or NOT used to get a point across to friends, co-workers, bosses or others. There are glimmers of this kind of analysis in Wheeler’s book - such as when he notes Lincoln’s own perceptive view that a telegraph message ranked below a handwritten letter and far below face-to-face talking in its effectiveness. That hierarchy of human communication still exists today!

But more often Wheeler’s book is a simple review of the events of the Civil War. And a great reminder of what a jerk Union General George McClellan was! This is a fast read that could have moved a little more slowly than the speed of Morse code.

FUN PASSAGE:
“It might be argued that the telegraph’s intrusion had sapped (General) Hooker of his authority. Clearly he was frustrated, observing to a fellow general that dealing with Lee ‘had occupied two hours of his time each day, Washington had required the remainder.’”

My son Truman and I did our first Civil War reenactment last weekend at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Museum. I’m sure I’ll be a bluecoat soldier at some point, but for now it’s easy to act as a cartoonist freelancing for a New York newspaper while embedded with the 79th New York Volunteers unit!

So here’s the reverb: I’m a freelance cartoonist who draws history who is, in this photo, portraying a Civil War freelance cartoonist who draws history with historically-accurate tools.  (Which was a great use of time because I had a deadline to meet!!!)

The work I was doing was a rough draft of a Revolutionary War comic I’m doing in cooperation with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. I’ll post some of these rough draft pages soon for you to see how I put a book together, but here you can see that
a. I am indeed an ink-stained wretch (the classic description of a journalist)
b. I am doing cartooning that a Civil War cartoonist could have been doing!
(I’ve tried using a pen like this on my political cartoons off and on over the years but never felt completely comfortable. It’s a slower tool than a brush and I work quickly. But that slower pace sure felt nice during this beautiful day of living history!)

Truman and I found this unit of reenactors when we visited an event at the wonderful Endview Plantation in Newport News, Virginia in March. They are based on the Peninsula, so it makes it easy for us to stay in contact with them. They have great equipment and a lot of experience - and are glad to have a drummer boy! As soon as Truman started hanging out with them Saturday, he cocked his kepi like a veteran. I’m so proud of Truman for investigating Civil War life and then going out and experiencing that history. This love of his has developed over many years and is getting quite rich. (He says he wants to grow up to work at a National Park Service historic site!!)

I just spent a week in the Blue Ridge Mountains at Boy Scout camp with my youngest son, Truman, and while he was off practicing first aid and woodcarving I got to sit under the cool shade trees and read! (Yes, yes, I also recertified in Red Cross CPR and kept a watch on all the Scouts, but the chance to sit and read quietly away from any computer or deadline was a real treat!)

One of the books I read was this study of how measuring expressed populism, economics and democracy — a book that sounds horribly dull until you start reading it. This was a mirror image of Dava Sobel’s popular “Longitude” book from 1996 — but better. Linklater told me things about Jefferson I didn’t know and wrapped politics and big ideas and economics into the simple act of surveying land. (This book gives you a great feel for how the young George Washington surveyor image connects with the old George Washington land speculator.) I was taught in college all about Jefferson’s belief that a nation of small farmers would preserve our virtue and our democracy, but this narrative connected all that to my gradeschool lessons about the metric system in the 1970s! And I’m from Ohio, so Linklater’s opening passage that set the action in the Northwest Territory was particularly fun. And he never forgets the Native Americans who inhabited the land before the settlers started marking the trees and claiming the streams, so he keeps the book from shrinking into just European intellectual history. (Don’t worry - the ideas are big, but the many illustrations help the story speak in a language that a modern reader understands.)

The only trouble is: Linklater gets at least one big, basic fact wrong, and that calls me to question every single absorbing detail he offers in the book. This English author tells us in two separate passages that Jamestown was founded in 1609. No. It was 1607. What else so basic did he miss?

(His story is further hampered by the book jacket, which sets the expectation that this will be about “How the United States Was Shaped By the Greatest Land Sale in History,” which caused me and friends to expect something about the Louisiana Purchase. But Linklater is not talking about the greatest land sale, he’s talking about the greatest land SURVEY, which converted America’s vast public lands into private property. It’s not one sale, it’s millions and millions of sales in individuals. That’s not Linklater’s fault but the marketer’s.)

There’s no off-season for an author: In the last week of July — between taking Cub Scouts to a baseball game, shuttling my kids to work at Colonial Williamsburg and doing a Chester Comix contract extension with the Daily Press — I got three chances to re-energize with readers. Nothing brings me awake again like talking to parents and drawing with students.

My week started with a Sunday night book signing at the Colonial Williamsburg Visitor Center. I rushed there from the Richmond Braves game that I had led the Cubbies to — I was still wearing my olive green Scout leader pants behind the table full o’ comix. It may seem a weird time to go to work, but Sunday afternoons at the Visitor Center I can visit with many families coming out of the Historic Area excited about history after a full weekend in the 18th Century. A two-hour signing there usually flies by.

On Tuesday I went to Fort Belvoir in Northern Virginia for an appearance at a library summer reading program. We met in a neighborhood clubhouse because the crowd was too big for the tiny 1950s library building on base. I’ve been at this long enough that now some of the kids in the audience have read my books before I get there - which must happen to other authors all the time but has been a rare situation for me in the past decade. I gave my standard one-hour chalk talk (which is still fun for me because there’s a lot of interaction with the kids as I draw on an overhead projector) and then spent an hour signing books and chatting with kids one-on-one. Thanks to the librarian, Richard Freeman, everyone at the Ft. Belvoir chalk talk got their own comic to take home.

And sometimes art is hard work!!! The photo above is from a mini-residency I did Thursday at Charles City County for a summer school program. In my longer appearances I give the students several templates to work with: some panels to make a story or a pencilled male or female figure to design their own character. Here we’re trying to get the hair just right on a female superhero.

This is the best part — seeing what bold ideas come out of the students. I volunteered for 10 years in the art classes at Matthew Whaley Elementary while my sons went there, and this creative time in Charles City felt a lot like that. I love teaching!!!! (One important point I always make: you CAN talk and draw at the same time. I encourage it. I never understood why the teachers kept saying the kids had to be quiet as they created - how do they think brainstorming works, anyway??)

Finally, after four days of me trailing after them from Jamestown to the slave cabin at Colonial Williamsburg to the taverns to the costume shop, one of the teachers said, “Honestly, who would follow after a bunch of social studies teachers?!”

Me. I’m a hardcore groupie! I love hanging with those who think it’s important to teach the next generation about the highpoints and problems and vital choices of our past. I think it will affect our future.

I’ve worked with Colonial Williamsburg staffers in many ways since I moved here in 1992, but it was still a welcome surprise when CW invited me to spend a week shadowing one session of their summer Teacher Institute. For almost two decades, CW has given master teachers a chance to renew their knowledge of Colonial times and pick up new tricks for making history vital. They bring in about 600 every year from across the country, many of them paid for by donors in their home state. I jumped at the chance.

I did learn some new things myself and corrected some misconceptions that had creeped in to my own knowledge base. But mostly it was just fun to see these folks from Texas and California and Wisconsin and Washington play around the Historic Triangle — they acted like it was history teacher Disneyland. One woman had spent time in Virginia as a girl in segregated days and was happy to see the story of slavery portrayed so well at Jamestown, Yorktown and Williamsburg. One woman had worked summer school in her Florida district so she could pay for this and make it a vacation with her daughter, who also teaches. Many had never been to Colonial Williamsburg and were awestruck at the detail this place offers. At the end of the week one young teacher said, “I can’t WAIT to get back and NOT use my textbook!”

What can I say, I’m a history geek. Yes, yes, it’s good business for me to hang with them — these 29 teachers found my comix in the various gift shops around town and went nuts for them, but that’s not why I did this. My interest in education and history and kids is so strong that the transition between all the hats I now wear feels seamless to me. Often during the week I would pivot in an instant from being student to being a teacher of history. But it’s ALL advocacy!

Send me a message or post to this note if you’d like more details on what I saw and did with the Teacher Institute! You can also find official info on CW’s website: www.history.org/history/teaching/tchsti.cfm

Last week I met the Rev. W.A.R. Goodwin, the man who thought Colonial Williamsburg could be brought alive with just a few million dollars.

Well, I didn’t meet Goodwin himself. I met Ed Way portraying this wonderful Virginian as if it was 1937 and the restoration of the Colonial capital was well under way. It was a treat to stand toe-to-toe with 20th Century History in a place that usually shuns it.

The only thing missing was the sweet tea. Way’s new program at Colonial Williamsburg has him greeting visitors and chatting under the shade trees on the crisp lawn behind Bassett Hall. The man with the seersucker suit and gentle Virginia accent quoted Scripture, told tall tales about Congressmen and condemned cars. “I used a horse-drawn conveyance as long as I could, but it’s not safe anymore, with cars going by you at 30 miles per hour!” Way said as Goodwin.“I never have liked motor cars. Big old expensive mischief machines is all they are.”

Goodwin came out of the Blue Ridge Mountains to Williamsburg in 1903 to be the rector at Bruton Parish Church. The 1715 structure needed a new roof and other repairs. Goodwin pushed the congregation to completely restore the church to its Colonial appearance in time for the 1907 celebration of the 300th anniversary of Jamestown. His ability to mix History, politics and fundraising made the Bruton project a success and convinced him the same could be done with other surviving Colonial buildings in the small, dusty Southern town. He approached several industrialists (Ford, the DuPonts, etc.) before he found a partner in billionaire John D. Rockefeller Jr. in the late 1920s.

“I didn’t push him hard,” Way says as Goodwin. “He teases me, saying to people, ‘Some people get taken for a ride; I got taken for a walk that’s cost me $68 million!’ But truly, I didn’t have to press him. I just talked about the idea with enthusiasm.”

The irony is that the foundation Goodwin helped create is right now putting up fencing to pasture animals on the land where Goodwin died. Goodwin’s last home was a mile across the Historic Area from where Way gives his presentation on Tuesdays and Thursdays; CW tore that home down in 1993 (I wrote the newspaper story about it) because Goodwin’s home was on the edge of the 18th Century area and didn’t fit the storyline they focus on.

I miss that kind of physical marker, but the History is still there. That downtown city block actually has an amazingly dense story. Goodwin’s home stood behind a 1715 home, which is one of the oldest in Williamsburg. Just over the fence from where the historic animals will soon graze sits the Armistead family cemetery; the Armisteads fought in the Civil War and have fought Colonial Williamsburg since it formed (their antebellum home on Duke of Gloucester street is the last non-Colonial holdout). A few feet away from that cemetery is Matthew Whaley Elementary, which Rockefeller built to butter up the town and where my two sons attended elementary grades; Whaley is 77 years old now and is ITSELF on the National Register of Historic Places!

And I haven’t even told you about how Georgia O’Keefe lived in this neighborhood as a little girl . . .

These ghosts are all still floating through this one city block, whether a living actor calls them to mind or not! It’s all in how closely you can listen to them . . .

This week I met Souindoula Simao, director of Angola’s National Museum of Slavery! He is on a three-week tour of the United States to build partnerships with museums here and better tell the story of the African genocide during the trans-Atlantic slavery trade.

I interviewed him for a story in the Daily Press (www.dailypress.com), the paper that hosted Chester the Crab for 13 years. Mr. Souindoula was a true historian: well-spoken, curious — and, ummmm . . . lengthy! (I think I asked him three questions but his answers filled the 40-minute interview on the shaded porch of a Colonial Williamsburg home.)

I had a wonderful time learning new things from him about the cultural connections between his nation in southern Africa and our continent. Did you know there’s a coastal town in Delaware called Angola? The African nations took slaves in their wars, but the number of slaves taken really jumped when the Europeans started buying. Mr. Souindoula’s museum is in a Portuguese slave trader’s seaside home, where thousands of slaves were baptised before being crammed into ships for the Middle Passage to the Americas (a trip that killed many of them).

This was a great connection to make. You can see it in the photo I took of Mr. Souindoula, his Portuguese translator, and a Colonial Williamsburg interpreter portraying a newspaper publisher of Colonial times. Our Founding Fathers weren’t all white gentlemen who now appear on our money; it took men and women of all colors and backgrounds to build the nation we have today.

On a recent Friday night between two long days at a homeschool convention in Harrisburg, PA, I went looking for fun on the capital city’s designated fun island in the middle of the Susquehanna River. I found a lot of History! And one awesome punchline. . .

This cool Friday dusk would have felt completely different if the AA Harrisburg Senators had been playing a home game instead of away. I was sad to occupy the island with a few joggers and the ghosts of players in the Negro Leagues of baseball. One team there was called the Harrisburg Colored Giants. The Giants played 1906-1908, but on a deserted City Island it was hard to judge which team was more a part of faded history, the Giants or the Central Penn Piranha (a nearby sign proclaimed them “The Winningest Team in Minor League Football History!”)

The joggers crossed a pedestrian-only bridge from the island to downtown Harrisburg. The sign proclaims it “The Oldest Metal Span Bridge in the U.S. 1888.” I have no idea what engineering made this bridge possible or special, but I love finding that detail of History. That sort of claim doesn’t often show up on Google — you’ve got to walk a place to find that.

Before air conditioners, this island was where city folks came to cool off in July and August. A cement beach sits on the north end of City Island. They still use the bathhouse built for the beach in the 1920s! The peeling paint added to the spooky atmosphere as the sun set and the security guard looked happy to be leaving his own hut on the fun island.

The city’s website says the island’s “RiverSide Village Park features seven rustic concession stands offering roast beef and fish sandwiches, crab cakes, sausages, hamburgers & hotdogs to french fries, lemonade, & ice cream.” I loved the idea of wrapping all this in a historical tone - I just wished I could have gotten some eats from the convincing replica of the John Harris Trading Post, 1705-1785.

. . . and then I walked behind the trading post! And saw a different kind of post!!! This great log cabin replica got carted in on a mobile home trailer and parked there 20 years ago, and they still haven’t bothered to cover up the trailer hitch!! Or maybe that’s just the place where the ashes from the chimney come out??? The view you don’t get on the postcard.