The Bean Trees

Dan was assigned this as summer reading for AP English next year. He read it in one day, before school even let out. "Must be good," I thought, and gave it a try. Wow, I read it in two days. Couldn't put it down. It is one of those books that instantly takes you into another time and place and other peoples' lives.

Here's the Publisher's Weekly description of the book, since they can explain it much better than I can,

Feisty Marietta Greer changes her name to "Taylor" when her car runs out of gas in Taylorville, Ill. By the time she reaches Oklahoma, this strong-willed young Kentucky native with a quick tongue and an open mind is catapulted into a surprising new life. Taylor leaves home in a beat-up '55 Volkswagen bug, on her way to nowhere in particular, savoring her freedom. But when a forlorn Cherokee woman drops a baby in Taylor's passenger seat and asks her to take it, she does.

I won't tell you any more about it, but I'll leave you with one line from the book,

"In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can."

ABC Challenge: The Origin of Clipboard Girl

This month's ABC Challenge is to somehow use the business card above as inspiration for a work of art. To me, it led to the origin of Clipboard Girl, one of the characters in my comics.

Afterburn

In this age of decompressed storytelling and photo-realistic computer coloring, the comic fans of today don't know what they're missing! Where is the melodrama? the hokey concepts? the absurd costumes? The sketch above is from a John Byrne issue of The Champions from the Bronze Age. What amazes me is the amount of dialogue they get out in the time it takes to take one punch! The scene above, written by Bendis, would take up half an issue.

Excelsior! 'Nuff said!

David Carradine

In the news today is a sad announcement that David Carradine past away. When I was a kid, Kung Fu was my favorite show.

The Blogvangelist

Here's a very interesting article about a teacher who uses blogging in his teaching. Instead of telling his students to "hand their papers in to me, the teacher," he has them post entries and respond to other's posts on blogs created for the class. Their discussion on the book The Secret Life of Bees eventually included the author of the book herself! The students soon found that their blog was the number one result for a Google search on the book, surpassing even the author's website. He believes that the Internet and the right software tools will "liberate students from the anachronistic traditional classroom" and become "self-motivated learners and creators, driven by their own passions.

McCloskey, P. (2009). The Blogvangelist. Teacher Magazine 18(2), pages 22-24, 27-29.

Monkey Business

These comics will appear in an upcoming issue of Fun for Kids magazine.

Can a Mighty Andar/Bighead Team-up be far behind?

This made my day -- I had sent some copies of Eclectic comics to celebrated indie cartoonist Jeffrey Brown. He sent back a postcard note with a sketch of Andar meeting his character Bighead. The note and sketch will go in the next Mighty Mailbag, but I couldn't wait to share it.