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"It has taken 50 years and a crab to give me an understanding of American history and enjoy it. Thank you!" Burton, grandfather from Williamsburg, VA |
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Posts Tagged ‘comic book’
Moving and Grooving!
Written on Monday, January 26th, 2009 [permanent link]
There’s a new Chester Comic! Check in the MY COMIX area off the homepage to go to the area where you can see two sample pages and get a good sense of what each page covers in this grand race across hundreds of miles and hundreds of centuries! It is an attempt to give today’s kids a sense of how transportation has changed over time. This book is full of races, jokes and pounding hoofbeats. This book fits well into the social studies concept books I’ve already done: “Comix Economix,””American Symbols,” and “GOVERNMENT.” (And if you check out my new order form, you’ll see you can buy just one copy of each of those four, if you’d like.)
The cover joke this time is the never-bef0re-seen Chestermobile! This mean machine is 1940s Batmobile + Chester logo + my own PT Cruiser + googly Chester eyes I always thought would look good on an aqua VW Beetle . . .
The first chapter of the book has Chester and his friend Christie racing not only across the land but through time as well. As they go, jumping from one form of transportation to another, they gradually find themselves swallowed up into the modern sprawl we now call THE MEGALOPOLIS!!!! Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!
In the second chapter, I shift gears. Instead of showing a race across the land and through time, I give Chester and his friend Tamara different tasks that carry them just across the land in 1902. What transportation carries them the fastest? How complicated is it to get from one place to another back then? You get the answers on the way to the story punchline — a Teddy Roosevelt moose joke!
The third chapter is about the Wright Brothers. As is typical of Chester pages, there’s a LOT going on in this one. For example, on one page you get an action shot of a German daredevil falling to his demise, you get the Wrights, you get a plug for library research and then you get the science of wing lift. THEN you get a pop culture reference to a song by a Canadian pop rock band from around 1980! WHEW!
The last chapter is about the growth of our road system into the Interstate Highway system we take for granted today.
I hope “Moving and Grooving” travels to your shelves soon. Let me know what you think!
Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, comic book, graphic novel, highway, history, Moving and Grooving, social studies, transportation, Wright Brothers
Posted in History Teacher | No Comments »
A fantastic review!
Written on Monday, December 1st, 2008 [permanent link]
Chester Comix just got a fantastic review on this web page devoted to helping educators find useful comic books for their reluctant readers! This is a great site for you to bookmark after reading this fun review. (At one point they note all the social studies concepts I’m packing in, and they add, “yet Boyd does it so effectively and with such good humor (using Star Trek analogies along the way, even) that I barely realized that I was learning new things as I was reading.” That’s the idea!!!
http://graphicclassroom.blogspot.com/2008/11/comix-with-content-government-by-people.html
Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester Comix, comic book, Graphic Classroom, reluctant reader, social studies, teacher
Posted in Graphic Novel Review | 2 Comments »
Comic book review: "Buddha: Kapilavastu," by Osamu Tezuka
Written on Monday, September 8th, 2008 [permanent link]
AGE APPROPRIATE: 11th grade and up (nudity and violence)
COLOR: no
PAGES: 400
I’ve spent a lot of my free reading time this summer digging into ancient India. One of the biggest school districts in Virginia has begun to teach ancient India to elementary students, and I’d like to draw a comic book about it this fall. As I have waded through library books and old National Geographics, I also looked for any other graphic novels on the subject.
I found an 8-part epic about the life of Buddha, written and drawn by Japanese manga forefather Osamu Tezuka! I’m not a fan of manga comix, so this was a chance to learn not only about the life of the founder of Buddhism but also to try swimming in a form of comix that is very popular with American teens.
There is a lot of vitality to Tezuka’s storytelling. He’s called “the Japanese Walt Disney,” and “Buddha: Kapilavastu,” the first of his 8-volume series, has a lot of action and silliness – in many cases the animals LOOK like they came from the Walt Disney studio. It amazes me as a cartoonist that even within a scene or even one panel Tezuka draws some characters seriously and others in very cartoony fashion. He even puts himself into some panels — with scribbles over his head identifying himself! The unevenness between his panels showing the scenery of India and panels showing goofy sentry jokes and panels dropping modern references make for a strange ride. And American audiences may be unsettled by the casual nudity of a mother and a small boy or the violence (blood is shown black since the comic is not in color). But maybe this all-but-the-kitchen-sink approach is the appeal of manga – Tezuka certainly uses all the elasticity of the art form (sometimes characters bounce off the panel borders or break them into pieces).
But if it’s good manga, does that make it a good telling of the life of the founder of one of the world’s great religions? The person who becomes Buddha is only born in volume 1! He appears on only a handful of the 400 pages, in only two of the 12 chapters. So I learned much more about Tezuka as an artist than I did about the historical Buddha. The rest of this first volume is filled with the antics of fictional characters — some of whom don’t survive this volume and so have no impact on the life of Buddha. Some of their stories deliver messages about the caste system in India, but it’s also clearly filler — Japanese manga comix are often published weekly, so there’s much more volume to their stories than you find in American comix.
So the bottom line is: do I think the path to enlightenment can be found on my way to paying $15 for each of the next seven volumes in the story????
Tags: Bentley Boyd, Buddha, comic book, graphic novel, history, India, manga, Osamu Tezuka
Posted in Graphic Novel Review | 1 Comment »
