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

A Fest of Cartoons

November 6th, 2007

Last week’s Festival of Cartoon Art at Ohio State was inspiring! I love the fact that one minute we’re discussing the meaning of language in the graphic novel format, the next minute we’re hearing old poker stories about “Steve Canyon” artist Milton Caniff, and the next we’re listening to a Wagner opera as a music video to a comic based on one of his pieces. WOW! Here are more highlights:

* I met Mike Peters, Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist and creator of the “Mother Goose and Grimm” comic strip. It was like meeting Robin Williams. The guy never stops talking, reacting, connecting. My Author’s Purpose visits are like his — on about 1/5 Peters speed.

* I chatted with Arnold Roth, who did the layouts for the Schoolhouse Rock episode “The Three Ring Circus” (about the three branches of our government. He is a funny, kind man – his sketch of himself in my sketchbook says, “Everything I know I learned from Bentley Boyd.” Ha!

* Seeing the Caniff originals in a campus gallery was wonderful. His Sunday comic episodes from the 30’s were as wide as my arm span. HUGE ART! I love getting close to see how he put the story together. Young readers who love adventure would do well to read Caniff’s “Terry and the Pirates” collections. He is credited for bringing movie-like images to the comix.

* One of the biggest inspirations was my friend Nick Anderson, who is doing amazing digital things for the Houston Chronicle. His political cartoons are in color every day and they’ve given him a staff to produce animated satire on their Web site. He has very funny music video parodies at www.chron.com/nickanderson. Check it out!

Tags: Bentley Boyd, cartoonist, Chester Comix, Festival of Cartoon Art, Mike Peters, Milton Caniff, Nick Anderson, Ohio State
Posted in Author's Purpose | No Comments »

Heritage is History?

October 17th, 2007

I spent a week digging through my Dad’s studio/barn with him this August, cleaning out musty old stuff and cataloging his artwork. (it was a great exercise in primary document research: “Hey, there’s my old Santa statue!!”) I found a goldmine of several boxes of American Heritage magazines.

Well, “magazine” isn’t the right word. American Heritage began publishing in 1954 as a hardbound periodical, and each new issue was hardbound until 1980. Then the magazine went to a softbound edition, but inside all these issues is a wealth of visual information for me. The Web is great for speed research, and I do get a lot of images by searching Google, but that resource is like a lot of the Web: a mile wide and an inch deep. (I can get 6 or 9 hits of the same image but little else relevant to my need on Google image search.) There are a lot of historical images that I’ve only seen in American Heritage and other historical magazines. Those images inform all the history comix I draw. I may have a talking crab on Jefferson’s shoulder, but it’s vital for me to get the buildings behind them historically correct.

Like many other print periodicals, American Heritage has had trouble making money lately. There’s simply too many Web sites out there offering things for free. The magazine stopped its print edition in May. The good news is that it continues to add new things to its awesome Web site: www.americanheritage.com

I have mixed feelings about this dramatic change in our human development. Fewer print books and magazines means fewer trees killed. That’s good. We’ll continue to use the skill of reading, but we’ll do it on a screen. That’s fine. But I worry about how permanent our new history is going to be when it’s nothing but zeroes and ones hanging in cyberspace. What happens when the power goes out??

Posted in History Book Review | No Comments »

Beschloss bellylaughs

October 10th, 2007

I love living in the Historic Triangle — where a fun Saturday night is a TV talking head historian busting jokes about Hubert Humphey! And the audience GETS the jokes!

From time to time I still write for the Daily Press (the newspaper that hired me in 1992 and asked me to create Chester the Crab in 1995 and then gave me a great run of creating five years of daily educational comics). Last Saturday I went to Jamestown Settlement to report on a speech by Michael Beschloss, author and frequent contributor to NBC and PBS.

He was just what history needs. He didn’t talk in droning philosophical frameworks. He kept involving the audience, asking for shows of hands about questions he asked. He spoke off-the-cuff, not from a dense speech. He told funny stories about people. Now, some were hard to believe — LBJ really owned a car that could travel in water and would scare visitors to his Texas ranch by driving at high speed towards a lake?!?! But some anecdotes I had heard before, and I trust Beschloss’ truthfulness. And I’m old enough that I remember Minnesota politician HHHumphrey. So me and the . . . ah, MATURE audience had a good time.

In promising to keep his speech short and “not go all Humphrey on you tonight,” Beschloss told this crowd-pleaser: Hubert had droned on awhile to a crowd and then caught himself going long, so he asked the crowd what time it was.

“Does anyone have a watch?” Hubert asked.

A heckler replied, “How about a CALENDAR?!”

Posted in History Teacher | No Comments »

Comic books that bring history to life!