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"My 8 year old son absolutely enjoys Chester-Comix. He is able to relate to our history lessons more now than ever before." Beverly, homeschooling mom |
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Archive for the ‘Author’s Purpose’ Category
Battle of Antietam
Written on Monday, September 24th, 2012 [permanent link]
A week ago I woke up in a Maryland field to the sound of a rooster crowing.
And then the cannon started.
After that came the bugles that I normally hear for reveille. But the cannonfire was a nice touch. I’M AWAKE! I’M AWAKE!! My 15-year-old son and I were camping just north of the Antietam National Battlefield with 4,000 other reenactors for the 150th anniversary of the Civil War battle. The spread of hundreds of canvas tents under the pink morning sky was inspiring. In our four years of reenacting, I’ve never seen more cavalry or more artillery on the field, sweeping to and fro during the afternoon battles for the spectators.
It’s like watching a moving painting. I portray a battlefield cartoonist, so I’m not marching in the lines of blue and gray but standing back on a hill, furiously sketching what it looks like for 400 men to storm a fence held by 250 other men. And I can also zoom down to sketch details that will add depth my own visual storytelling — how does the pot over the campfire look? How does J.E.B. Stuart hold his sword as he charges? And being in the mix of reenactors gives my other senses a chance to record details for me to use later. How hot is it in the wool clothing at midday? How do your feet feel after a day of marching? What does a Civil War mortar sound like when it fires?
Being on the actual field gives me a chance to research outside the box that a movie or TV show presents. The past 20 years have been revolutionary for the increasing number of historical movies and TV shows we get that have told great stories with great accuracy. But movies and TV shows are still a frame, capturing what a director or editor wants you to see — and leaving out the rest of the story. I’ve found that there’s no substitute for being able to stand somewhere to get a sense of the place and the historical event that happened there.
The visuals are a big part of the story of Antietam — the single bloodiest day in American history. Because Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army was caught so close to Washington, DC, a few days after the battle Alexander Gardner was able to photograph the dead men still in the field. Gardner’s photos were the first ever images to show dead soldiers on the field of battle. A New York Times article about the photographs said it was if the “dead had been laid at our doorsteps.” For civilians who still thought the Civil War was a romantic crusade, those photos were an unsettling window to the brutality and waste of the war.
You can read my story about Antietam — which includes info about Gardner’s photos — by visiting the iTune store!
Tags: Antietam, Bentley Boyd, cartoonist, Chester Comix, Chester the Crab, Civil War, reenactor
Posted in Author's Purpose, Civil War, Historical Travel | Comments Off on Battle of Antietam
Your Favorite Hardshell is BACK
Written on Tuesday, June 12th, 2012 [permanent link]
Well, the past four weeks HAVE been a tight squeeze.
Just before I left for a 10-day, 2,200-mile Great American Research Roadtrip up to Boston and across New York and through Ohio, Google notified me that someone somewhere in some dark basement had inserted malware onto this website. My brilliant webmaster, Brian Korte, and I reacted quickly. The internet companies involved did NOT.
It was frustrating to spend weeks in limbo — with so little to tell so many concerned customers who wrote to ask about the health of their favorite crustacean historian. But Brian kept attacking the problem (with the same dedication he put into his own artwork, building beautiful wall portraits out of LEGOS! ). And after he scrubbed the site and files 2,311 times, Google this week allowed us back onto the World Wide Web.
We have boosted security so this won’t happen again. We’ve regained our respect and admiration for the power of the Web — you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s been hacked! And we are very thankful for the patience and dedications of all of Chester’s fans.
I used this blank time in the digital realm to work hard on putting more ink onto paper, so we will have more announcements in the near future about fun new Chester Comix content. STAY TOONED!
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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.
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