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

Rustling the old leaves

March 17th, 2008

For all the exploring I do with my boys, we still make the classic Locals mistake! We have lived in Virginia for 15 years and still missed some great sites nearby. We’ve travelled hundreds of miles to climb rocks at Gettysburg, view the Cyclorama painting in Atlanta and walk the woods of Shiloh, but we had never stood at Cold Harbor. So a few weekends ago we took a traipse through Civil War sites around Richmond.

We were amazed at how many defensive earthworks survive in the woods. Almost 150 years after they made the difference between life and death for some soldiers, these earthworks still run right behind people’s backyards! I always get a better sense of a story or event when I can walk the land where it happened, and it was chilling and beautiful to see how the defensive earthworks still snake over the land around Richmond

Truman has a great eye for detail, and he discovered that the cannons posted outside one farmhouse used in the 1862 Seven Days Battle were actually cast in 1863, as we could see from a stamp in the barrel. He was . . . horrified!

And this photo is not of Grant’s tomb — it’s his cabin. Truman stands guard over the place where Union General Ulysses S. Grant stayed on a bluff above the James River during the months of siege against the Confederate railline at Petersburg, Virginia, just south of Richmond. It’s part of a pretty park in what is now Hopewell, VA, a place we’ve driven through to get to church for 14 years – and we’d NEVER stopped until after church this rainy Sunday!

Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, Civil War, Confederate, Ulysses S. Grant, Virginia
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Book Review: "Pyongyang" by Guy Delisle

February 27th, 2008

I listed in my Teacher reading list a comic for high-school age and up called “Pyongyang,” but wanted to expand on my one-sentence review of the comic.

With the New York Philharmoic performing a groundbreaking concert in North Korea this week, now is a great time to have students read “Pyongyang,” a 2005 comic by Canadian-born cartoonist Guy Delisle. The concert has provided a splash of media attention to this closed, Communist country, but Delisle’s work provides a lot of simple details that show how a government can grind down people. He proves that in the modern rush to digitize and animate and YouTube, the pencil is still one of the most powerful tools a human can wield.

The grayness of his pencils perfectly suits his travelogue about his time in North Korea’s capital city while supervising an animation project. Most of us who follow the news have a mental picture of this nation controlled by one totalitarian family for the past 50 years, but Delisle provides evidence of a cultural brainwashing that goes even farther than I suspected.

The details are human and built naturally:
Peasants sweep the superhighway that no one uses.
Nothing else can hang on a wall holding a portrait of Kim Il-Sung.
Movies and TV shows continue to glorify resistance to the Japanese occupation in World War II or the American fighting in the Korean War. (There was a massive effort before this week’s concert to tear down a lot of street posters showing the same kind of images, but reporters still saw some of them.)

But the most chilling moment comes when the cartoonist notices there are no handicapped people on the clean streets of Pyongyang. His guide answers, “There are none. We’re a very homogenous nation. All North Koreans are born strong, intelligent and healthy.” And that’s that. Delisle concludes that his guide believes it – the propaganda has sunk in.

The best joke is that the North Korean handlers panic about any photography a foreigner attempts. But they never questioned Delisle’s pencil. Their mistake.

CONTENT WARNING: There is no violence or nudity and only a handful of PG-13 swear words.

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Kempsville Elementary Chalk Talk

February 19th, 2008

How do you hold the attention of 500 elementary students on a rainy day? Show them how a few penlines makes anyone into a superdude! I draw three versions of myself in my Author’s Purpose talks, to show how a powerful imagination can reshape reality (and there is no greater reshaping to be done than to make me into a superhero!).

I had a great time at Kempsville Elementary in Virginia Beach last week. After the opening session in the cafeteria I did break-out sessions with two classes at a time, and we drew up a storm. A brainstorm – there were drawings about Ben Franklin’s kite hypothesis, Thomas Jefferson’s narrow miss of a hangman’s noose and Abe Lincoln’s old magic hat. We even explained why the Powhatan Indians built longhouses out of the reeds and sticks on the ground around them — because no one had invented “Longhouse Depot” for Saturday errands yet.

Elementary students love feeling the power of their own creativity. So did I – so I never gave it up!

Tags: Author's Purpose, Bentley Boyd, Chester the Crab, graphic novels, Kempsville Elemenetary, Virginia Beach
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Comic books that bring history to life!