Kate: 0:23
Hello and welcome to a short episode of The Gale Hill Radio Hour. I'm your host Kate Jones, here with the second of two excerpts from my recent interview with cartoonist and historian Bentley Boyd, creator of Chester Comix. This comic book series tells stories from U.S. history with the help of Chester, a Chesapeake Bay blue crab, who serves as the narrator. In this brief segment, Bentley talks about bringing history to life, his Choice Comix concept, and the choices we make as individuals that build history.
<excerpt>
Bentley: 1:02
One of the things that I figured out along this wonderful journey is I’ve been paid by some really interesting places to do a comic book for them, specifically, like I’ve done the official comic book biography of George Washington for Mount Vernon in Virginia. And Colonial Williamsburg had a wonderful street theater thing called Revolutionary City that they did that was really the Revolution from an everyday person’s point of view, right. So you would meet a woman who owned a tavern, and we know she really lived because we have the records of her tavern. So you'd meet somebody portraying her and what difficulty she had during the war because prices went up, she had inflation. You know, war is hard for people doing regular business. You’d meet people who were enslaved who were talking about escaping to the Red Coats because the British Army was offering them freedom. It was a really interesting and accurate way to understand this war that most of us don’t know. We get the top level, right, we get George Washington, but we don’t get Jane Vobe who is one of the characters. So they came to me at one point and said, “Could you do a comic book? Here's the script, we've run this through all of our fact checkers. It’s on the street for any tourist to see, but if the tourist wants to take the story home, we don’t have a way for them to do that. Would you like to do a comic book of it?” And I said yes, but it was so much material and I was trying to figure out how do I deliver the vibrancy of standing on Duke of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg and seeing this story swirl around you, because that’s what was great about the theater thing. It wasn’t up on a stage, it was literally on the street where the tourists were. You know, you were meeting these people shoulder to shoulder. It was immersive theater, and I loved it. And so what I came up with was a Choice comic. I would break the scenes down into one page, and at the bottom of the page, it’s not that you’re changing history, but you know, there’s this debate that swirls around you. And then, well, do you decide to go left with the Patriots or go right with the Loyalists? Or, you know, maybe you’re going left with the Patriots or you go to the right, where you just don’t want to be involved, because that’s one of the great factoids that history now understands about the Revolution, but most Americans don’t. It wasn’t good guys versus bad guys. If you looked at the whole population of America, probably a third wanted independence, a third wanted to stay with the king and the third were just on their farms saying you guys are crazy, leave me alone. So that’s not really like us versus them. It was really like a civil war.
Kate: 3:56
Oh, my goodness. So this is very interesting, Bentley, because you had mentioned what we spoke before the Choice Comix and I didn't really get it, and now I do with that explanation. That is fascinating.
Bentley: 4:10
It’s a lot of fun for me as a creator because I always have told my stories ever since I started Chester in the ’90s, I always told them in present tense. If you read them, you’ll see that Chester is using the verb “is,” right. It’s not that we know how the story is going to turn out. I really have always wanted to put the reader in the middle, because today we are living history and we don’t know how tomorrow’s going to turn out. That’s the sense that I wanted, and the Choice comic just allows me to really crank that up to 11, right, which is, you know, history is not built from the top down, it’s built from all the choices that we make as individuals, and then they sort of grow from the ground up into these big moments.
Kate: 4:53
Wow, how did you come up with Choice, the Choice Comix concept?
Bentley: 5:00
Well. So it’s much like those Choose your Own Adventure chapter books that the kids got, which I remember being very popular in the ’90s. My kids read them. They had like “Star Wars” versions of it where you'd read a couple of pages, not illustrated, and then there would be a little, you know, choice. You’d say, well, if you want, you know, Han Solo to fly to this planet, turn to this page, but if you want him to stay where he is, turn to this page. And I thought that was a great idea, but it was a little clunky. I think the Choice Comix work a little better, because you’ve got the visuals and then at the bottom of every single page you get the choice. And I also make these comics so that you could actually read them start to finish, and they’re still in chronological order. So, in other words, you do jump around a little bit if you want to make the choices, but you could read my Revolutionary City comic, start to finish, and it would just tell you the story in chronological order.
Kate: 5:56
It would make sense.
Bentley: 5:56
It would make sense, right? We’re not going from like 1783 back to 1775. You can just read it straightforward or you can read it as a choice. The choice is at the bottom of the page and you will jump forward different lengths of time but you never jump back. I have not figured out how to go back in time, and so the concept just sat there and I kept thinking like where’s the next one that I’m gonna do? And one of the holes in all of the books that I’ve done was history that that I’ve lived. You know, I had done all this stuff about the Civil War. I’ve covered World War 2, as you mentioned, but I was like you know, I really need to cover the Korean War and the Vietnam War and those are still so sensitive, and I was born in ’67. So you know I remember the last day in South Vietnam with the helicopters leaving the roof, and you know I remember Nixon resigning. I was always very political. I remember watching the Watergate hearings with my mom sitting in the kitchen with her. So getting into history that I remember, it’s… It gets harder for me, right, because now there really isn’t a right or wrong in in telling the story of the Vietnam War. It’s very complicated. So I thought, well, let’s apply the Choice comic to that where, you know, it sort of moves me as the narrator and as the creative voice through Chester, to just say here’s something that happened in Korea or Vietnam and here’s the choice that Americans were trying to make in ’61 or ’65 or 1970. And which way would you go? The Choice comic solved my creative problem.
Kate: 7:52
Oh, that is terrific.
Bentley: 7:53
I didn’t have to decide. I’m leaving it to the readers to decide right.
Kate: 7:55
But is it more complicated for you to do?
Bentley: 8:00
Yes, it is on the front end. Yes but boy, I’m really excited about it. So now the book I’m working on currently is I’m going back to the decade before the Civil War and, remember, I mean I’ve done like six books about the Civil War but I’ve never done a Choice comic about the Civil War. So I’m going back and trying to place the reader in that decade, before the Confederates fire on Fort Sumter, and I’m trying to get modern readers to feel just how crazy it felt to the people living in those days who did not know how it would turn out. And I think if you read that book when I print it, it’s gonna feel a lot like the last 10 years that we’ve lived in the United States in the 21st century. That’s my thesis as a creator is, you know, this polarization, you know the demonization of your fellow Americans, this sense of well, okay, we’re just gonna leave and make our own place because we can’t get along with you people anymore. You know, I see a lot of things around me that remind me of the 1850s.
Kate: 9:06
Yes, it rings a bell, boy oh boy.
<end of excerpt>
You can order Bentley’s books from his website chestercomix.com (that’s comix with an X), on Amazon, or digital versions on his app, available for iPhone and iPad. This is Kate Jones with The Gale Hill Radio Hour. Until next time, thanks for joining us. Please share this brief episode with anyone who wants to learn U.S. history in a fun and painless way.