Earlier this month I spent a day at Mantua Elementary in Fairfax County - a wonderful neighborhood school in a wooded, older and quieter section of bustling Northern Virginia. My presentation needs are simple because I travel with my own overhead projector, but Mantua’s library was tricked out! There was a digital projector for me, several computer stations and even a scanner (the tech I use all the time to get my hand-drawings into a digital form). It was tantalizing (I’ve used whiteboards at schools and shown my PowerPoint to civics groups) but I stuck with my old overhead because it allows me to work the magic of drawing and still face my audience.

The funniest tech interaction was between me and the signers who came to two of my four sessions. The school has several hearing-impaired students, one who needed me to wear a mike so he could hear. It all went well - I asked the hearing-impaired students some questions directly as I did my Phil Donahue routine in and around the audience. But the poor signers had to figure out what to do with my active style. I literally walked circles around one signer. The other one decided to trail me when I went to the back of the audience for one questioner, and she and I got back and forth just fine.

And the snowfall that day gaveth and tooketh tech away: school wasn’t cancelled, but I spent too long talking to teachers after my presentations and got stuck behind the afternoon bus line. A PT Cruiser’s car wheels won’t get me around big buses in the snow! So I just stayed in the library - where some of my earlier audience members discovered me and gathered around my Mac laptop to see me coloring one of my new cartoons. That was a fun day!!

I’ve spoken to school groups for more than a decade. Each visit energizes me as much as it does the students and teachers I meet. Last week I was up in Fairfax County, Virginia, for a whole day at Mantua Elementary and had a great time talking to students about rough drafting, language, symbolism and my Author’s Purpose in creating Chester’s adventures — and I think I even held the students’ attention from the snow falling outside!

Now I’m going to work with WorldStrides to connect to school groups VISITING Virginia! I worked for this great Charlottesville-based company last spring as an on-site coordinator, steering school groups to their destinations in the Historic Triangle and making sure their hotel stays were pleasant. Now I’m offering an evening program for WorldStrides client groups called “Hysterical History” for school groups looking for something to do after the museums close.

We’ll brainstorm ideas as I cartoon about the historical stories they’ve witnessed that day. We’ll talk about what the early American experience says to our lives now. We’ll talk about Why things happened. And we’ll draw a big nose on George Washington. It’ll be fun! I have five school groups scheduled for the spring already, so if you’re coming to Virginia with WorldStrides, ask about my “Hysterical History” program. You can find out more about this school travel company at www.worldstrides.com.

You know a forum on democracy is cool when they include the cartoonists! A few weeks ago PBS gathered about 50 American leaders to Colonial Williamsburg to debate a 21st Century description of American citizenship. Mixed in with the founder of the online Craigslist and the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, was Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Mike Ramirez and Kansas comic book publisher Alonzo Washington. I wasn’t there as a cartoonist but as a reporter for the Daily Press, where I have worked to varying degrees since 1992.

The three days put air under my feet and ideas in my head. Democracy matters! And these people practiced it with great care and vigor. Sometimes it got heated as they discussed immigration and health care and service to the larger community, but they also did the one thing that seems to be a vanishing skill in our loud media society: they listened to each other.

We live in an age when opinion is bursting out all over, thanks to cell phones and blogs. We’re yakking and yakking. But democracy happens only when we listen and then decide in a group way which is the favored solution to the problem at hand. Some people aiding this conference are pushing hard to exercise democracy in this new century. This session at Colonial Williamsburg will air on PBS early in 2008, but if you or your civics students want to read about it now check out

www.pbs.org/newshour/btp/did2007.html

Extra credit: check out the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University. Prof. James Fishkin has a new way of political polling that involves online debate and Q-and-A with experts, and he told this CW session that the numbers are clear: the more people learn and study an issue, the more their opinions change! It’s exciting stuff to realize that we the people CAN have the power!

cdd.stanford.edu/

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!

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??

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?!”

Welcome to the new Chester Comix website!

It will be much more interactive than the previous version, with photos, fun stuff, new teachers guide material and a weekly blog posting from me about the latest in history and graphic novels. It’s an exciting time for this unique American art form, and I’ll share each new step of the way with you! For example, I’m looking forward to being at the Ohio State University’s Festival of Cartoon Art in October for a three-day discussion of graphic novels and nonfiction storytelling. Ohio State has one of the biggest collections of cartoon originals in the United States and hosts an academic conference every three years. I last went in 2001, just weeks after 9/11. It was a powerful session for reaffirming American values and an American art form.I’ll let you all know what happens at this one! In the meantime, keep checking back here for the latest updates on my work and the way comix can boost literacy and test scores — I’ll soon have charts showing how my books meet each state’s social studies standards!

Have fun reading!

Bentley