Synopses & Reviews
Based on their extensive research into personal accounts of the Oregon Trail, comic authors David Lasky and Frank Young have created a graphic narrative of one family's epic journey. The main character is an 11-year-old girl whose family sets course for the West to seek new opportunities and to escape the eastern city where they had been living. Oregon Trail reveals all of the planning, equipment, and logistics that went into traveling across an untamed continent in the 1800s. In addition to its visualization of the family's journey, the book features a series of two-page spreads detailing a visual inventory of everything the family took with them, including the parts of a covered wagon and a personally annotated map of the trail. Readers get a ground-level feel for what it was like to be part of this storied migration west-not a dry recitation of dates and facts, but an immediately memorable living history.
Review
"There is plenty of historical information packed into these energetic pages, but kids are so busy being entertained they won't resist being educated at the same time - heck, they won't even notice!"
Barbara Lloyd McMichael, The Bellingham Herald
Synopsis
Join one family's epic journey by oxen-drawn wagon train along the Oregon Trail in this thrilling historical graphic novel for young readers. Narrated by eleven-year-old Rebecca Weston, this is the tale of a historic trip across more than 2,000 miles of untamed land with remarkable encounters with wildlife, Native Americans, and natural wonders.
This brilliant graphic novel reveals all of the planning, equipment, and logistics that went into traveling across an untamed continent in the 1800s as well as the hardship, heartbreak, and happiness they experience along the way. The dynamic comic style of illustrator David Lasky reveals epic landscapes of the west and a visual inventory of everything the family took with them, including the parts of a covered wagon and a personally annotated map of the trail. Readers feel intimately what it was like to be part of this storied migration west--not a dry recitation of dates and facts--but an immediately memorable living history. Come along and experience firsthand one of the great American adventures--a brave family in search of a better life.
About the Author
David Lasky is a longtime comic illustrator and writer based in Seattle. He self-published
Boom Boom with a grant from the Xeric Foundation in the 1990s. He contributed a series of comic-strip biographies of musicians (Beethoven to Dylan) to the now-defunct
Pulse magazine. His biography of Richard Feynman was included in the anthology Two-Fisted Science, and his collaboration with Greg Stump,
Urban Hipster, was nominated for Harvey and Ignatz awards (truly high praise in the comics world). Lasky teaches cartooning at the Art Institute of Seattle.
Frank Young was managing editor of Comics Journal, considered the NY Times Book Review/Publisher's Weekly of the comics world. Young is collaborating with Lasky on a graphic narrative biography of the Carter Family Singers (Abrams 2010).