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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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Posts Tagged ‘Author’s Purpose’
Green Army Men and the March of History
Written on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 [permanent link]
Of course I had green Army men when I was a kid!
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?!?!). Â 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! Â :-)”
Tags: Author's Purpose, green Army men, history, Star Wars, storytelling
Posted in Author's Purpose, History Teacher | No Comments »
The First Remainder.
Written on Thursday, September 30th, 2010 [permanent link]
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.”
Tags: Author's Purpose, Bentley Boyd, bookstore, Chester Comix, Revolutionary City
Posted in Author's Purpose | 4 Comments »
Anti-British?? Not on ye life!
Written on Monday, August 30th, 2010 [permanent link]Today I got a great chat message from friend of mine working a historic site bookshop at Jamestown: “British couple just bought ‘Revolutionary Rumblings,’ ‘War for Independence,’ and ‘Revolutionary City‘ – they loved that it wasn’t just pure ‘anti-Brit propaganda.’ They said they are used to that in American accounts of the war.”
That is a very high compliment to me. I’ve studied the American Revolution since I was a 10-year-old during the Bicentennial, and I view the conflict as a civil war. American colonists spent the years between the French & Indian War and the Boston Tea Party asking to be considered full British citizens. It was the King and the English politicians’ refusal to grant full British political rights to their colonists that led to war. The shifting of the political wind in the 13 colonies happened very suddenly between January and June of 1776 — Full, declared independence from Britain was a move that came a year AFTER the first shots fired in Massachusetts! We held onto our British-ness for a long, long time.
I try to approach all history with a broad view. There are very few dastardly villans and shining heroes in real life, and I resist storytelling that shows real life historic figures that way. Look how complicated Jefferson was! But so was Patrick Henry and James Madison and John Adams and . . .
I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about my point-of-view in my comic storytelling — most of it about the 1860s Civil War stories, of course. Amazing how that debate rages on. I own up to my point-of-view. Every human storyteller has one. To pretend otherwise is a lie. There is no one right way — one “unbiased” way — to tell the life of Washington or Lincoln or Roosevelt. I can be accurate with facts, but at some point I have to choose which facts and events to include in a story, and those decisions come out of my point-of-view. But I don’t just shoot from the hip — I’ve learned that my storytelling is better if I listen first. So I listen to as many different points-of-view as I can before I make my Author’s Choices. To those who have objected that I’m changing the historical stories they grew up with, I reply: I’m not changing history, I’m just including EVERYONE’S story now.
And when I listen to 1775, I hear a lot of debate that still echoes through our politics today. That must mean there’s no one right answer 😉
Tags: American Revolution, Author's Purpose, Bentley Boyd, British history, point of view
Posted in Author's Purpose, Colonial Williamsburg, History Teacher | No Comments »
