Chester Comix - Comic books and graphic novels that bring history to life!

Welcome to Chester Comix! Inside this site you'll find fun samples of the way Bentley Boyd uses comix to spark interest in history for reluctant readers! Check what he's drawing now, go with him to weird historical sites across the country, or download a coloring page and put your own words into his drawings! This home page features my most recent news/blog entries. Learn more about my blog. Have fun! --Bentley Boyd

Civil War Cartoonist

August 22nd, 2008

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!!)

Tags: Bentley Boyd, cartoonist, Chester the Crab, Civil War, reenactor
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Book Review: Measuring America by Andro Linklater

August 11th, 2008

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.)

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Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester the Crab, comics, history, Measuring America, metric system, Thomas Jefferson
Posted in History Book Review | No Comments »

An Author’s Week

August 3rd, 2008

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??)

Tags: author, Bentley Boyd, book signing, chalk talk, Charles City County, Chester the Crab, drawing, Fort Belvoir
Posted in Author's Purpose | 1 Comment »

Comic books that bring history to life!