Posts Tagged ‘Moving and Grooving’

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
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