Hazardous TRAILS!

Look! It's a brand new Hazardous Tales poster! Click on the image to get a larger, easier to read view.

Librarians who go to next month's ALA convention will be able to get this poster at the Amulet booth. I'm very excited about this. I've had two books get posters before, my first book, THE DEVIL YOU KNOW, and RAPUNZEL'S REVENGE. Both of those books have had good luck, so hopefully this poster will be a good luck charm for DONNER DINNER PARTY.

I hadn't ever studied the Pony Express before--wow! There are a lot of great stories there. Check out a book on the Pony Express next time you visit your library, you won't be dissappointed!

This Hazardous Week, May 14, 1804: Lewis and Clark's Keelboat

I posted this LEGO keelboat on my own site (www.spacestationnathan.com) a few years back. It has long since been disassembled. I have been feeling the need to build a new and improved version, lately. There have been a lot of great torso paint jobs released in the past few years (Pirates of the Caribbean, the recent Series 10 Collectable Minifigure Revolutionary War soldier, to name a few.) Some day I'll build a Keelboat v.2, and when I do I'll post it here.

BTW, Captain Clark's "jentile brease" is not a typo on my part. Captain Clark was a creative speller in his journals. "Jentile brease" is an exact quote.

This Hazardous Week. May 5-11 Japanese Balloon Bombs

The Pigeon

I don't have a comic for you this week. April has been a very busy month. I've spoken at TWENTY schools--in Kansas, Virginia, Maryland, Washington DC, and my own state of Utah. 

While in DC, I had one unscheduled afternoon. So I made it my mission to get a photo of this guy:

This is Cher Ami, a one-legged stuffed pigeon who can be found in the WWI cabinet in the Museum of American History at the Smithsonian.

I guess now is as good as place as any to reveal it, Hazardous Tales #4 is about World War One.

This pigeon is a bonafide WWI hero. He helped save a group of American soldiers known as the Lost Battalion. How? Well, you'll have to look him up. I don't want to spoil his adventure here. Will Cher Ami be appearing in his own comic soon? Chances are pretty good.

Hazardous Tour!

No comic this Monday, but I do have some fun slides to show. These are from my brand new history presentation, which I'm debuting this week!

The center of the presentation is the idea of history as a MAZE.

Inside the history maze, we meet many people--here are two VERY interesting guys. They are key players in the Haitian Revolution:

I will be doing my new history presentation and signing books all this week! You can see me:

Monday, April 22, 4:00-6:00--Jabberwocky Books, Fredericksberg, VA

Tuesday, April 23, 4:00--BBGB Books, Richmond, VA

Wednesday, April 24, 3:00--The Children's Bookstore, Baltimore, MD

Thursday, April 25, 10:30 signing, 7:00 panel on graphic novels, GROWING UP WITH GRAPHICS with Eleanor Davis, Andres Vera Martinez, and Mark Siegel moderated by Michael Cavna from the Washington Post! This is for ages 15 and up.

The Official Kansas Apology Ceremony

As you know, the first edition of BIG BAD IRONCLAD! had a humongous error in the endpaper. We accidentally had Kansas colored as a Confederate state. This was not something we could just sweep under the rug.

The good librarians at the Lackman branch of the Johnson County Library system in Kansas, brought me out to apologize in person for this grievous error. Here are the photos of that ceremony.

This is the Table of SHAME--also the Table of CORRECTION. On it, there is a poster-sized version of the endpaper, with Kansas a neutral white (not the erroneous Confederate Gray), a stack of hand-bound BLEEDING KANSAS mini-comics--EXCLUSIVE to this event, a stack of the hilariously over-sized Hazardous Tales bookmarks (larger than the actual books) and our Unionizer marker.

After an official statement by me (followed by a loud BOO-ing of my mistake) I gave an hour-long presentation on the Bleeding Kansas history, Lewis and Clark in Kansas, even a bit about the lone member of the Donner Party who died in Kansas--all Kansas history tales. We then moved on to the Unionizing of the map.

Everyone got a chance to color in a small piece of Kansas. We actually had two of these maps to accommodate everyone.

The librarians gave me an official "FREE STATE" hat to wear, to remind me that Kansas was indeed a FREE STATE.

At the end we had two maps, one for the library and one for me, showing Kansas as a UNION state.

We then brought the presentation to several Kansas grade schools in the area, where there was even more BOO-ing. All in all, it was a great apology tour. I think me and Kansas are square now.

A big thanks to everyone who came to the events. I'd especially like to thank Chris and Barbara at the Lackman library who took care of me, and everyone involved in the set up.

Bleeding Kansas, Part 6, The End

And here is the final page of the Bleeding Kansas story. I hope you enjoyed it and learned some fascinating Kansas history.

Tomorrow, I'll have a photo recap of the Kansas Apology tour. Then we'll go back to the once-a-week Hazardous Monday posting schedule.