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.

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!

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!!!

And I had them right up until last week

When I am asked by teachers or parents or kids about how I came to love history, my short answer is that I was 10 during the Bicentennial party and was excited by that. But there are many, many other things that fed the History fire. On many of those points it’s hard for me now to say which came first, the History or the influence. Did I play with green Army men because I loved true American stories? Or did I come to love American History after I enjoyed playing with green Army men?

With my oldest son off to his freshman year in college, my youngest son and I are remaking their big bedroom and finding stuff that hasn’t been played with in years. From underneath the bunk bed we disassembled there came a drawer full of plastic Army men. Most of them saved from when I was 10. I saved a lot of my toys because I didn’t have many toys growing up. I valued what I had. I was really proud that I had requisitioned not just a full company of green Army men but also a plastic green Army truck, two plastic howitzers, and two TANKS! I was EQUIPPED! I had some GI Joe figures, too (yes, the full-sized ones; that’s how old I am), but to do a whole battlefield action the green Army men worked better. I even once used them as my actors in a short film that I did in a summer camp.

In the 1970s, my friends and I didn’t think much about the Vietnam War — we play-acted World War II. It fascinates me that World War II still has a firm hold on the imagination of my sons’ generation. My World War 2 Tales book sells very well. Why? Why not more play-acting about current global conflict? Why not more throw-backs to earlier fights (does anyone play Cowboys and Indians anymore?). I think the answer is traceable to another event that hit me like an explosion when I was 10: the first Star Wars movie. A lot has been written about how the Star Wars storyline is just a space retelling of World War II, so I won’t repeat that. But I’m not sure people see how the continued popularity of Star Wars (and even the way the prequel trilogy echoed the political dynamics of Europe in the 1930s) reinforces the 10-year-old’s attraction to the WW2 storyline. Our culture has handed down WW2 as one of the simplest examples of good vs. evil that a young man will ever find in the history books. You look at the sales of videogames over the past 15 years, and you’ll see Star Wars takes a lot of the top spots in the fantasy genre and WW2-based games take a lot of the spots for nonfiction-based games. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

But with all the videogames out there, would any boy actually still play with the real plastic green Army men??? For me, there doesn’t seem to be much point in keeping green Army men now that the Toy Story movies put them firmly back into pop culture. (Heck, you can find a slew of photos on the Internet of people dressed as their favorite Army man pose for Halloween!). I kept a few for nostalgia, but I thought it was worth a shot to transfer them to Alpha Base — my niece and nephew’s home in Alabama. Their parents were both military, and the transfer included a C-130 plane that I picked up when my boys were young (my brother was a navigator on C-130s!).

The day the package arrived, my sister-in-law sent me this:

“The kids (Matthew) are thrilled with the tanks and soldiers (how many does one boy need?!?!).  Zadie is a little disappointed that there are no “girl” things in the box! I tried to convince her that Mommy was once a “soldier” but I don’t think she believes me. I showed her a book from our shelf about women in the military, and she looked at it for a minute and then she decided: OK! Seriously, it’s pretty cute watching Zadie make blasting sounds and fly the C-130. Matthew is pretty cute, too!

Regardless, my vacuum cleaner thanks you!  :-)”

But I kept pinning the discussion to reality — the things I’ve learned from my 12 years of working with educators to make comix they can use in the classroom. And unfortunately, some of that reality kept hitting me between the eyes at my booksignings this summer. For way too many boys in my target audience, it is still a badge of honor to say:

“I don’t read.”

I mean it. These 8- to 12-year-old boys that I talk to don’t act sheepish about it. They say it matter-of-factly or even aggressively — “I don’t read!” They say it like they are proud of it. They say it like saying “I like to read” would get them kicked off the football team or laughed at as they chat with friends over the XBox.

The funny thing is that a lot of these boys DO read. They read magazines they like. They process plenty of text info on the games or websites they visit. They text with each other on phones. They even read history comix starring a blue crab. But they can’t ADMIT that they like to read. It’s a sobering thing for me to hear from them after all the focus put on boy reading in the past decade:

* All those celebrity reading posters in the library

* all the emphasis placed on literacy by the No Child Left Behind federal law

* all the cool NEW ways to read (such as the KINDLE!)

* the awesome Boys Read effort

* and all those thousands and thousands of Harry Potter books!!!!!

Maybe these preteen boys are pushing back against all these efforts — the more Mom or the Teacher pushes reading, the more the boys resist?? There’s a lot of reasons. There are a lot of distractions these days! We’ll end with good news. I continue to hear great things from parents and teachers about how much reluctant readers love my books once they read them, but I’ve taken to cautioning a buyer at the point of sale. Don’t force the books, I urge. Leave Chester Comix lying around the kitchen table or in the bathroom or stuck in the seat net of the minivan. Let the boys choose to read in a quiet moment when no one is looking.

Really. I don’t mind Chester being in the bathroom!!!

I was honored to be invited to this week’s Talk20 at The Corrugated Box Building. But I was nervous about making any sense with only 20 seconds per.

Yes, yes, I’ve spoken in public plenty. It’s a big part of my business! But speaking to elementary school students for 45 minutes seems much easier — there’s time to recover a flub or to cruise through some well-practiced patter or to follow an idea that pops up because of a student question or suggestion. A 45-minute talk is a like a wandering walk with my dog. This was going to be a rollercoaster ride.

They tell me the crowd laughed. I couldn’t tell because the wind was whipping by as I crested the coaster hills. Five minutes? It felt like 60 seconds max.

Here’s what I meant to say (and maybe I did make these points; who knows??! We’ll have to see what the video shows once we post it): It’s taken me 33 years to build this wonderful life I have and to get a mastery of the white space I use. People assume it’s easy for me now after all that practice, but I’ve picked an artform with real tension built into it. The historian part of me wants to add MORE WORDS all the time, but my artist part has to resist and remind the historian that it is always better to SHOW THAN TO TELL. I’m glad I’ve had the chance to explore that fight between word and picture. I’m glad I can make money by communicating ideas through art. Rarely was there a lightning bolt moment that showed me the way. I’ve gotten here by a long, patient exploration of doors — some were wide open, some only cracked a bit, some were closed completely until I turned the handle. It’s not easy to make a career of being an artist, but it can be done. I’ll keep exploring that blank space again tomorrow.

Hmmm, I think that was another 5 minutes right there . . .

The good news is that when I wasn’t speaking I learned a lot from the other artists — muralist Ed Trask reminded me of bold artists that used to hang out at my house because they were my Dad’s students, and culinary artist Ellie Basch reminded me of my sister! And many of the 102 people in attendance seemed glad to get the free comix I handed out and signed for them after the event. And I can’t wait to be in the audience for the next one!!!

President’s Day was the release party for my new George Washington biography! Mount Vernon was fee free that day and had more than 15,000 visitors. My booksigning table was positioned right where the crowds came up from their new underground museum — so this was the first signing I’ve ever had where I was in real danger of being trampled!!!! It was a steady view of torsos for 4 hours, and I signed a LOT of comix . . .

This is the cover of the book — I’m glad Mount Vernon’s staff chose this idea. It was FUN to draw. I think this and the “Revolutionary City” comic I did for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation are the best history comix I’ve made so far (the GW book is my 29th title!). Can you tell which of the soldiers going in to battle with George is supposed to look like me?? That’s one of the fun things about making your own story — you get to sneak in guest appearances.

For fun, my friend Wendy suggested I also take a picture of all the research I use to make a comic. So here is a look at MOST of the material that informed my writing and drawing of “George Washington Leads the Way” — I did use Internet resources as well, and the historians at Mount Vernon added some important points as they reviewed the drafts. But this pile of paper gives you a good sense of the second step of the author’s process: RESEARCH!

My George Washington biography for Mount Vernon is being printed RIGHT NOW! As we wait for its release during his birthday celebration in February, I thought you’d like to see some of my rough sketches for the cover.

You see that my sketches don’t get too detailed. They are mainly a guide to location and layout. I’m using a simple, over-the-counter black felt pen to make the lines on a regular piece of typing paper. Look at how I scratched just a few lines for the background troops. I don’t need to draw the details of their uniforms — I’ve got that in my head and will make sure the details get drawn with a nicer pen on nicer paper when I do the final draft.

You can see the main idea that spreads across the different proposals: to show Washington as a MAN OF ACTION. Having the action come right at the reader is a tried-and-true practice to pump up the sense of motion and drama. Of course you see the difference between my head-on view of Washington crossing the Delaware with the famous oil painting showing him in a boat from the side. And the cannon shot of the third sketch seemed the most daring! And hard to pull off, because who has ever really seen a cannon shot from that point-of-view THAT CLOSE? How would I really draw and color that?!?! (And then I started to really miss Martha — and most Americans don’t know that she spent time with George during the harsh Valley Forge winter. So I thought I’d try a cover that combined the drama of Valley Forge with the close relationship the two of them had.)

Which cover do you think the Mount Vernon folks picked?? You can go to Chester’s Facebook page to see; I’ll also post it here in a week.

Different formats mean different stories. The Chester history adventures that I’ve published in book form for the past seven years were all designed to work as one-week-long episodes in a newspaper. (Look “newspaper” up on Wiki, kids.) I’m proud of how much action and information I packed into those episodes, but it’s time to update those stories and see how they sing in another format. Kids are reading lots of things outside the covers of a book.

Students, teachers, and parents can now put Chester in their pocket. The first three Chester story apps are available in the iTunes store for your iPhone, iTouch, or iPad! (Click the black app logo on the homepage to get to my links to the iTunes store.) It’s just 99 cents to get an expanded biography of Harriet Tubman or a more detailed story of the Battle of Antietam in the American Civil War or the Battle of Britain in World War II.

When I cut up the panels of the old newspaper stories I got about 40 panels per story. I’ve drawn new material to double that length for my first three smartphone stories. Without the space restrictions that print puts on me, I could add the kind of details that make the history of human beings so interesting. Now there’s a scene to Tubman’s story in which she helps free a man in the middle of a riot in New York! The Battle of Antietam story now does a better job of showing in pictures how the Sunken Lane went from a Confederate stronghold to a Confederate deathtrap. And The Battle of Britain has more of Winston Churchill’s inspiring speeches — and links to webpages where you can HEAR Churchill give the speeches during the heat of battle! So it’s good to have the Tubman biography in the Wonder Women book because there a young reader can get a quick overview of her life and compare her to other bold women of 19th Century America. But it’s good to have the app, too, because it’s got more action!

I hope to keep printing comic books about history — I’m finishing up the World War I book now and am in the thick of drawing a bio about George Washington for Mount Vernon — but I’m also excited to pick my most action-packed stories from the past 11 years and morph them into mobile apps. Next up: The TRUE Story of Pocahontas!

I’d love to get your feedback on these apps!

PS — There are discounts for educational institutions that buy multiple copies of the iTunes apps. Check out http://www.apple.com/education for more information!

PPS — Yes, I know the Droid is selling well. I hope to take the apps I make for iTunes and move them over to the Droid in the next few months.

PPPS — After I get 5 or 6 apps published, I’m going to circle back to add important educational bells and whistles to these — the first being sound. I hope to add an audio track in English and an audio track in Spanish so that struggling readers can get some help as they scan through the story visually. Look for that in 2011!

Wow. A milestone! The First Time I Saw One of My Books in a Used Bookstore.

Today, at the popular Book Exchange on Jamestown Road in Williamsburg.

Maybe a good thing? It means my stuff is out there, people are trying them. Not everyone will like what they read. Comix are a hard art form to navigate if you haven’t read any since Archie and Jughead when you were 7.

But I couldn’t stop staring — like finding one of my homemade cupcakes in the trash at the company picnic, with one bite out of it. I know in my head that used Chester Comix are out there — you can see them advertised on Amazon. But I’ve never physically come face-to-cover with one in all the used bookstores I love to cruise.

I resisted the urge to pull a Paddington and write a note to stick inside it: “Please take care of this book.”