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"Your amazing dialogue and cartoons make history come alive and ordinary topics pop out of the page." Andrea, 5th grade teacher from VA |
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Archive for the ‘Comix Creation’ Category
Keeping Up With the SOLs
Written on Thursday, September 19th, 2013 [permanent link]
So this 10th anniversary year of Chester Comix has seen a brand new title (“Lexington, Then and Now” published in February) and will see more new features by the end of December. That’s the easy stuff. This year also features my commitment to go back and redo what must be redone.
“Vital Virginians” was published in the second round of Chester Comix titles, way back in 2004. It’s a book specifically built to help teachers of Virginia Studies in fourth or fifth grade classrooms across Chester’s home state. (uhhh, actually, Chester’s “commonwealth.” I’ll explain another time!!!!) Because it’s a book tied to just one state’s curriculum, it doesn’t sell as quickly as books with broader appeal, such as the Civil War titles or “Wonder Women” or “Comix Economix.”
This year is the first reprinting of “Vital Virginians” since it first came out in 2004. The list of names of important Virginians that little Virginians have to know in Virginia Studies studies has changed. So a revision of the book was in order. I’ve spent September adding a full page on civil rights lawyer Oliver Hill (using panels I drew for a teacher in-service in Newport News two years ago), I dug back into my archives of pieces and parts to fashion a new page on first African-American governor L. Douglas Wilder, and I drew from scratch a whole new page about Linwood Holton, the first Republican governor in Virginia since the Reconstruction Era just after the Civil War.
It’s fun to go back to topics I drew for the Daily Press 10 and 12 and 15 years ago and draw something fresh. I like the way the three new pages weave together in the connections of the three people (for example, Wilder came to the state government as a state senator the same year that Holton became governor). The new edition of “Vital Virginians” should be available in a few weeks. Let a Vital Virginia Teacher know!
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10 Year Anniversary
Written on Sunday, February 3rd, 2013 [permanent link]The business license from the Commonwealth of Virginia came in the mail February 2003. I celebrate a decade of business this month with my 32nd title and a pile of thankfulness to the friends and family who have supported me every step of the way. Chester and I have survived some missteps, hundreds of miles of travel to conferences, and a Great Recession that hit our main target audience (public schools) particularly hard. Why did I keep going?
Most of the people who start their own business fail. A savvy friend who loaned Chester Comix LLC money at the very beginning noted that this was my “Defending Your Life” moment. Check out the movie sometime — it’s a funny look at how important it is to be brave in the face of the conventional wisdom to play it safe and keep your crayons within the lines. And her reference to that movie was a huge compliment that kept me going through some scary times.
They were scary times because I couldn’t see around the corner, not because I was unsure of my own footsteps and the direction I was walking. I believe to my core that I was put on this planet to do Chester Comix. I’ve been doing it the best I can — first as a newspaper cartoonist from 1995 to 2004 and then as my own publisher from 2003 until now. I often think what a weird set of skills it takes to do this work — and marvel at how my life has included training for those skills — how the pieces all brought me to this life I have now . . .
* CARTOONING. I didn’t study art as a major in college — I’ve studied it my whole life. I taught myself to draw by copying Peanuts out of the newspaper. My dad was an art professor, and my parents took me to a lot of art museums as I grew up. Art was not an oddball career choice. It was accepted and encouraged. You’d be amazed at how important that is. When I started to draw my own superhero comix in elementary school, my dad got them copied so I could sell them to my friends. Chester Comix LLC is just a more elaborate form of that work I was doing in 4th grade.
* WRITING. Schools make all of us practice writing all the time, of course. But I went further. I started keeping a journal in 5th grade and was on the school newspaper in elementary, middle and high school and then in college. That’s where I got encouragement to write for a public audience — a big barrier for many people. I picked newspapering because it allowed a broad range of creativity and seemed to have a lot of job security (every town has a newspaper, right?). The Internet crushed that — but not before newspapers taught me to brave enough to write publicly and write well on deadline.
* PUBLIC SPEAKING. I did debate in high school because my friend Amy did. But in the process I found a family of friends there and learned to face a big audience and think on my feet to speak extemporaneously. I think about that training every time I talk about my work in front of 350 kids in a school cafeteria. (And it’s fantastic when kids tell me that I’m much more interesting than other authors who get up and drone on; it’s all due to my debate training at Brookings High School with the incomparable Judy Kroll. Well, that and my love of Steve Martin.)
* RESEARCH. Majoring in History and Literature at Harvard University was a great excuse to buy the books I wanted to read anyway and take time to dig for details in the papers I wrote. My work-study job for four years was inside the school’s rare books library. That love of reading and research is the starting point for every story I tell at Chester Comix. Chances are, over my morning cereal I’m reading a historic academic journal I found in a used bookstore.
* MARKETING. This is an off-shoot of the newspaper work. When Chester ran in the Daily Press of Newport News, VA, I was just as involved in the marketing of the feature as I was in writing and drawing it. I’m comfortable in social media and thankful for all the tools I can wield myself to promote the business now (many of which didn’t exist in 2003!).
* STUBBORNNESS. The key. I spent the summer after my high school graduation working for my father’s weekly newspaper in Ohio. When the staff floundered a few months later, I took a leave of absence from my freshman year at college to keep the paper running until my father’s permanent return to Ohio in the summer of 1986. In that experience I learned hard and valuable lessons about being a small business owner. No one will ever care about your business as much as you do. No one will be addressing samples letters on a Friday night with you. But if it’s what you believe in, you do it gladly.
I believe in Chester Comix. Thank you for all your support over the past decade. I look forward to more storytelling and more success in the next one!
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The Pace of Doodling
Written on Sunday, October 7th, 2012 [permanent link]
Almost every page you see in the Chester comic books was drawn and written on a tight deadline. I’ve spent my whole life practicing that skill: hit some part of the target — and hit it on time.
That’s the curse to the blessing when you get to do what you love for a career. When there is a paycheck at stake, you may run out of time to fine-tune that drawing of an elephant or to find just the right word for “stubborn.” You don’t have to hit the target’s bullseye — but you do have to deliver SOME drawing and SOME words by a certain date. For five years I delivered Chester the Crab adventures that the Daily Press of Newport News, VA, could run Monday through Friday throughout the the school year. It amounted to a giant mountain of one-man content. For four more years after that I did the same kind of educational comic strip for another newspaper in Virginia. Another mountain.
The way to accomplish this deadline art is to keep the Big Picture in mind. Writing a Chester story always meant thinking about all five days of the story at once, being mindful of just how much space I had to fill. (No need to go down a rabbit hole about drawing rabbits just the right way if there’s no room for that kind of detail!) It felt like thinking from the outside in — because if I ran out of time, the first thing to go would be the detail. Draw the outline of a brick building first, to get the idea across; the individual bricks only get drawn if you have time. I still have that dynamic on comics I do on commission — I get a deadline and 24 pages to tell the story of a famous town in Ohio, so I start thinking from the outside in to figure out how fast and well I can fill those pages.
But today, in the corner of my office, in a life of running my own business, lives the exact opposite dynamic — the Doodle.
Most of us remember the Doodle from 5th grade math class or sophomore year German. Many still practice it in committee meetings. After two decades of shooting out drawings like arrows at a target as some for-hire hawkeye, I LOVE going back to the Doodle!
My Doodles help me fill in and expand my old newspaper stories as I convert them for mobile devices. My goal is to double the number of panels from the old print versions. So when I have a spare 10 minutes at the kitchen table, I start a Doodle that may add a panel to the future expanded biography of Patrick Henry. Or I take a cool detail I sketched during a Civil War reenactment with my son and doodle that for a future iPhone version of the Battle of Gettysburg. Here I think inside-out. Because I drew the spine of a story years ago, the big moments of the story are already covered. NOW I can expand a story at any point that seems interesting to me — maybe I’ll draw more panels about the childhood of Clara Barton but focus more of my new Helen Keller panels on her later globetrotting life. Who knows! Each panel I noodle around with now is its own little world.
I’m giving myself the freedom to poke around at the details in each panel. Some of these new panels have taken months to finish. They’re my little basket of deadline-free fun. But don’t worry — I’ll share them soon.
After I add a few more lines to that barn in the background . . .
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