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"My favorite is American Symbols. I like how you show what the Statue of Liberty stands for." Bennett, South Carolina fifth-grader |
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Archive for the ‘Author’s Purpose’ Category
CIVIL or WAR?
Written on Sunday, August 25th, 2024 [permanent link]American democracy is not made out of the marble pillars in Washington, D.C.
American democracy is not measured by the strength of our No. 1 economy or our No. 1 military.
And it’s not guaranteed by what the Founders wrote 250 years ago on pieces of paper.
Our self-government is nothing more solid than an idea.
It’s like Tinker Bell: if we believe in our representative government, then it lives on. If we stop believing in it, it fades away among our personal daily distractions of shopping for groceries, answering e-mails and getting the kids to practice.
Many Americans have felt this fragility in the most recent 10 years of American history. I hope it’s some comfort to say: we’ve been here before. History records that our self-government has failed twice since the Declaration of Independence. The first form of our democracy outlined by the Continental Congress failed within 10 years, which caused the redo in Philadelphia in 1787 that gave us the U.S. Constitution. Then our government and society fell apart in the 1850s, and it took a civil war to rededicate what our self-government meant.
Since 1999, I’ve tried to tell historical stories as if the reader is living through them in the present tense. Because no tomorrow is guaranteed. No success is guaranteed. We all have choices to make today that will lead to other choices tomorrow. And then someone else later will look back and call our choices “history.” In 2023 and 2024, it felt time to take a closer look at the choices Americans made in the 1850s that chipped away at our representative democracy until finally someone chose to fire artillery at a U.S. Army fort in South Carolina.
My new “CIVIL or WAR?” is my third Choice Comic and is meant for readers a bit older than my “Civil War, vol. 1” and “Civil War, vol. 2” books speak to. Here is where a middle school or high school student can consider the hard questions that we all still grapple with today: What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States? How big or small should a group of voters be to feel like self-government really answers to what we want? How do we balance the wants of the majority of citizens with the civil rights of the minority of citizens?
I hope you enjoy the storytelling. Because “history” never ends . . .
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Buckeye Blitz!
Written on Wednesday, December 13th, 2023 [permanent link]I am closing the 20th anniversary year of Chester Comix LLC with a gift to myself.
In 20 years and 38 books, I’ve covered the big stuff that kids need to know in school. The Civil War! George Washington! World War II! The Civil Rights Movement! Harriet Tubman! I am now free to draw quirkier things and fill in the odd and the less well-known stories between the big stuff. It’s a delicious freedom to draw whatever history interests me the most.
Chester began as a Virginia history storyteller. As I grew the business, the blue crab expanded his range and told a local history in Massachusetts and published a North Carolina history comic. The smartest busines right now would be to work on a state history of California or New York—nice, big markets with lots of well-funded public schools full of teachers who could use a comic about their state history!
But at this anniversary moment, I found that my patriotism for my home state was too strong. It was time to tell the story of Ohio and weave my own story into it. Since I moved back in 2015, it’s been a joy to search out the local details of hundreds of years of Ohio history. I’ve enjoyed wandering through Ohio towns that I never set foot in before. History is always informed by what we see and feel today, and I have also been inspired to do this new book by observing new history unfold over these eight years back in the Buckeye land.
I felt this so strongly that I made myself serve as Chester’s companion this time! I’ve never done that before, but this project was too perfectly personal. One example of that: After I moved back, my hometown newspaper was kind enough to do a profile of me and my historical cartooning; the story ran on the same day that the paper’s front page announced that the second-to-last big factory in my hometown was closing.
Now OHIO: Crossroad of the Nation is published. Will this book sell? Over 20 years, I’ve gotten only one Ohio museum to carry Chester Comix. Will this be the book that cracks open this market?
Here’s the secret: I don’t care! Bad business, I know. But I am already happy that the book exists. I’m sending copies to friends and family. It’s a gift back to all the people who contributed to this wonderful life I’ve had. And it’s a gift to myself. Any sales of the book now will be as delicious as putting a chocolate covering over a ball of peanut butter.
— Hey! I just got an order from a museum in New Concord, Ohio! WOOOOOT!!!
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Chester Comix at 20
Written on Sunday, February 5th, 2023 [permanent link]Proving just how hard his shell is, Chester Comix turns 20 years old this year.
My Chesapeake Bay buddy first showed up in 1995 in the Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia, but the business that sells his adventures to young readers across the country started in 2003.
The business has survived the Great Recession. And the COVID crash. And some personal crashes. It surviving moving the whole shebang from Virginia to Ohio the fall that my dad was in hospice. That was a lot of boxes of inventory in THREE truck trips.
There has been plenty of joy. I met Weird Al and Doris Kearns Goodwin and handed them signed copies as thanks for inspiring me. 
In these 20 years, I’ve spoken in classrooms from Boston to San Antonio, from Ohio to South Carolina. I loved driving all around the MidAtlantic with my boxes of books and speaking props and a really bright felt crab hat. I even found myself hauling boxes of Chester Comix across rain-soaked sidewalks in NYC one day. The cardboard boxes are a constant.
When I began, there was only one other cartoonist in the United States regularly creating history comix. Now history comix are published regularly, by a slew of artists of all generations. Your local comix shop probably has a whole shelf of these titles. It’s not just Batman and Spider-Man anymore. I like to see what the kids are doing, and I buy what I can to support them. Some of the history comix, like “March,” are true milestones in our culture. It feels like the comix scene has grown way beyond me, that it has left me and Chester behind.
But then a new fifth grader finds Chester Comix, and he lights up. And his mom or his teacher thanks me. And I light up again. And I draw some more. I’ve published 38 books in 20 years.
I’m proud of my small contribution to the rich diversity of comix storytelling you can find in 2023. The core Chester Comix idea wasn’t that revolutionary—it is a nonfiction version of the Classics Illustrated comix made for reluctant readers in the 1950s—but along the way I did create something I’ve never seen anyone else do: Choice Comix! That still feels pretty special, and I plan to keep making more of those.
The first generation of Chester readers are now doctors and professors and soldiers and parents themselves. I’m on my third generation of young readers. What a tremendous blessing.
Thanks to everyone who has helped carry me across the waters when they got rough. The loans. The extra marketing pushes. The reassurances and the quiet patience. The travel to the conferences and speaking engagements. The recommendations to your child’s school. Thanks to Chuck Durfor for taking the fun photo you see here!
And, yes, thanks to you folks who hauled some of the boxes.
I love you all.
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