Usually I am the Weirdest Thing of The Day when I visit a school — but that was not the case this week at Boonsboro Elementary on the west side of Lynchburg, VA!!!

When I swept in to the office of Boonsboro for a presentation of my “Author’s Silly Purpose” talk, there was a mom steering a Mexican red-kneed tarantula around the shoulders of her son’s first grade teacher!!! Of course I wanted my turn with this lovely female named “Cruella . . . ”

I actually had to make my silly faces for the photos in complete silence because the beautiful Cruella would jump at any sudden motion or sound. I laughed once while she climbed on me, and she didn’t like that boisterousness! She was really lovely — calm and quiet and slow-moving (despite the office folks’ jokes about her going for my jugular vein).

Cruella’s knees weren’t red, as her name implies; they were a peachy kind of orange. Her kind are among the most popular tarantulas available in the pet trade, due to their impressive size, coloring, and peacefulness. Wikipedia tells me they are a slower growing species; it is not uncommon to have females live 25 years or more. (The mom had one plastic container for Cruella and another one full of crickets for her to eat.)

After my fun with the tarantula, it was back to work. I spoke to a cafeteria full of third-, fourth- and fifth-graders at Boonsboro. They liked the crab hat.

One fellow liked the crab hat so much that after the assembly ended he ran to his classroom, grabbed this crab hat and came back to show me!!! I’m glad he was brave and silly enough to share a photo and a fist bump with me — that’s the kind of inspiration I hope to leave at each school I visit.

I’m back in Richmond this week doing artist-in-residency work with 4th graders for the arts organization Young Audiences! This is my third school year of helping elementary students become authors over these 5-part workshops.

When I was in 4th grade I was copying “Peanuts” comic strips out of the newspaper, line by line. By 5th grade I was making my own little chicken-scratch comix by folding a regular piece of typing paper in half and drawing with an over-the-counter black felt pen. My Dad copied the original for me, and I sold the black and white copies to my friends for 25 cents.

I like helping the students today do MORE than I did. I push them to really structure their ideas and practice them through three full versions of their stories (a text rough draft, a thumbnail sketch version and a finished, colored version) — I sure didn’t do multiple drafts when I was drawing “Dyno-Man and the Army of Justice!!” The good news is that their ideas are worth that work. Today I edited stories about Harriet Tubman and John Henry building a freedom railroad to the MOON and about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington arguing about where to have lunch!

http://www.chestercomix.com/rough-drafts/

The rough drafts are the second step in my Creative Trail. (The first is research – When I pick a topic, I love the hunt for information I will use to tell the story the way I want to tell it.) I hope that inviting students into this second step with me will excite them about the creative process. Teachers can print these rough draft pages and give them to students to review and correct. Now, for once, the students get to be the editor! I’d love to get feedback from teachers and students via email or via a snail mail return of the pages, marked in red or green or purple or whatever color the students want to use to mark their suggestions.

I will take all suggestions into consideration before making my final author’s choices on these pages. Classes who make real contributions to this story will get signed copies of the final book!

The background:
Chester the Crab was born in 1995 as a narrator for a short series of Earth Day comic strips in the Daily Press newspaper. He and I goofed around for a few years after that tackling such important subjects as: Which came first, crunchy or creamy peanut butter? But in 1999 the testing wave hitting the public schools was growing so big that the newspaper noticed and called together a roundtable of teachers to ask what we could do to help them.

“Make Chester tell stories linked to the state standards!”

I drew five years of Chester adventures with a pen in my right hand and the thick state standards document in my left. I built my stories from the ground up to cover the classroom material (key words in bold, timeline across the top of every page, lotsa maps . . .). Virginia’s Standards of Learning are pretty detailed, so it didn’t surprise me to find that most of my stories met standards in other states as well.

When I launched the Chester Comix business in 2003 to put his adventures in book form, I printed teacher’s guides with the matching standards on the back. But it wasn’t a great system: I couldn’t fit every state onto that list, and when a state tweaked its standards my printed list went out of date.

Now, finally, that idea has moved to this website. Click on the state standards box in the menu bar above and you’ll see a map of the U.S. Click on your state and see a grid of that state’s social studies curriculum and how Chester Comix can help teach it! Please let me know if I’m missing an important detail, or if you think other Chester titles apply. We can edit these grids as the classroom reality changes!

(PS – creamy peanut butter came first)

I’ve been blessed to meet most of my cartooning heroes in the past 20 years, but I never got to meet Charles “Sparky” Schulz.

Until two nights ago. I had a dream that I found him — he was undercover, hiding from his worldwide fame as the creator of “Peanuts.” He was a schoolbus driver for elementary kids! Somehow I had reason to get on his bus (though my two sons are well out of elementary school now, I may have been there mentally because that’s still my target audience for my comix) and I easily recognized him under his old guy felt cap. He looked like a kindly grandpa and was very quiet — even as he asked me to not reveal his secret. Of course I promised I would not.

It was a great dream. It made me very happy to make that simple connection, standing on the steps of that bus. The day outside the bus was sunny and warm — were we in California, where Schulz the Quiet Minnesotan had found a place to draw his magic? Or had he moved to my town, Williamsburg, like so many other retirees? My dreams are always based in reality — I’m never flying, never shooting through space talking to aliens. I’m chatting with Charlie Brown’s dad!!

A 42-year-old cartoonist dreaming about Charles Schulz is nothing remarkable — my generation of cartoonists grew up chasing his example. I and many of my peers started drawing by copying the Charlie Brown and Snoopy strips we read in the newspaper. I recreated a bunch of them line-for-line and mailed them to Schulz, and some nice secretary mailed me back the form letter you see above. And it was one of the best moments of my life.

Thank goodness Sparky paid for that secretary to crank out those form letters. That simple piece of paper inspired me to keep going, to keep practicing, to believe that my dream of finding a job as a cartoonist could be real. I’ve had plenty of inspirations from many sources to be an Artist, but Schulz was the shining example that you could get a JOB as a CARTOONIST and maybe conquer the world.

And here he was in my dream, giving up the world to live a simple life caretaking children. Which is what he had already done for decades with his cartooning.

From one of those kids, Thanks, Sparky!

I remember hearing about Twitter for the first time on an NPR talkshow in 2007. The host kept reading sample Tweets and then asking the founder, “But WHY do I care that Jamie just ate a taco?!?!” I asked the same question. I love Facebook so much that I thought it and this public website blog would keep my update bases covered. Who would care if I ate a taco?!?!

But Twitter is really connecting a lot of interesting people. And it seems a great Do-It-Yourself way to send a short press release. And my business is all about Do-It-Yourself tech. So I’ve added my voice to one of the most insistent pieces of the Web 2.0 cloud of information.

I hope it’s not too boring for you to hear about when I’m researching just how to draw an 1890s farmhouse in Idaho . . .

Check it out: http://twitter.com/ChesterComix

If reading Dr. Seuss to kids at age 5 is good, then it’s good for that same kid to read Spider-Man at age 10. Comix shouldn’t be the only thing kids read, but if it’s the favorite form of reading for a child who would otherwise be playing a video game or watching TV, then let’s keep comix near him!

Why do we assume that reading a chapter book with no pictures is the highest form of literacy? A book without visual images does not look like the world I live in — a novel is actually an artificial construction, cutting off most of the information we use to navigate the real world (visuals, sound, interplay in conversation . . . ). In their own way, novels-without-pictures are as much an artificial environment as any video game — and can be as fun and as worthwhile to dive into as any video game, but why do we as a culture continue to assume that novels are superior to other forms of media?

Soon, articles like the one I’m linking to won’t appear because the category lines in children’s literature will have blurred so much. I try to blur that line in my author’s talks to students and in my teacher in-service training programs. I ask people to compare the page layout of a children’s book with pages from comix, and, like Tilley here, we can see the distinct comic book tools — frames, thought and speech bubbles, motion lines — being co-opted by children’s books, creating a hybrid format.

Here’s the whole article:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091105121220.htm

I’m in the homestretch for the homeschooler book! I’m hoping to get it to the printers this week. One of my favorite parts of making a new book is drawing the cover, which is a great moment to try to draw all the inside contents together.

This cover is a tribute to the Justice League of America comix I grew up on. Every year there would be a 2-issue crossover story featuring a whole pack of heroes, so their busts would appear around the edges of the cover to promote the story. To do an homage to that kind of kitchen-sink cover was a fun way for me to get out front more of the one-page bios. (I’m hoping this book will also sell at gift shops in the various museums dedicated to these folks.)

Unfortunately, this stage of the creative process is also the hardest for me emotionally. It’s where I don’t feel talented at ALL! Near the end I get really frustrated as I pull back and see the difference between what I have in my head and what appears on the page. (This used to happen even near the end of much shorter projects, such as the daily black and white political cartoon I drew from 1995 to 1999.) So I’m diving back in and trying to sharpen things up in these last few days — kind of a marathon runner’s last gasp push to cross the finish line strong!

One of the teachers who brought her class to see me at James Madison’s Montpelier for Constitution Day ‘09 sent me this snapshot! I am on the porch of Madison’s beautiful home after speaking to the kids and the gathered public — I lov…ed being between the Constitution and President Madison himself (played so well by John Douglas Hall). I’m such a history geek – this really was one of the most thrilling things I’ve done in my work to bring powdered wig history alive for today’s students! I MEAN IT!!!!

First, the school purchased sets of my history comix for each classroom last spring. The teachers reported to me how excited the kids were to read them and how much their test scores improved last spring. So the audience was ready for me Tuesday! (One girl in the front row made a point to tell me, as the other students filed into the cafeteria, that her favorite title was “Slavery’s Storm.” I don’t think of that one as a feel-good favorite. But I was happy she found connection with my stories about the political and social struggles leading up to the Civil War.)

Speaking to about 200 fourth-graders in a big cafeteria is a challenge. But the microphone was great, and I could do my roaming among the rows of kids easily, peppering them with questions and trying to draw ideas with them. Here was one of my inventions for Williams: my fourth drawing in the talk is usually a drawing of me drawing a historical figure, who stands to the side and critiques my drawing. I’ve used George Washington (“My nose is NOT that big!”) and James Madison (“I am NOT that short!”) but for Williams I decided to draw Frederick Douglass and his awesome historical afro! The kids loved it — and, to my happiness, knew who Douglass was. That’s rare among American fourth-graders.

The fifth-graders in the afternoon session also threw me a curveball I’ve never faced. I put on the overhead my page about the Dred Scott decision, which features the black robe of the chief justice of the Supreme Court covering over the panels below it. I started the discussion of the page by asking, “What kind of person wears a black robe for their job?” One student said “Lincoln!” Hmmmm, he did wear a black longcoat . . . “George Washington!” Ummmm, yeah, we see him in a black heavy coat in the crossing of the Delaware, but what kind of job would a . . . “PREACHER!” Oh boy, I hadn’t thought of THAT one before!!! EXCELLENTLY broad cultural referencing there! My own preacher doesn’t wear a big robe, but many ministers in many other kids of churches do.

I laughed and then made my Judge Judy reference, and we were back on track.