Travis Daventhorpe Powers Up!

by Wes Molebash

In Wes Molebash’s graphic-novel sequel, Travis Daventhorpe’s ordinary school life continues to collide with extraordinary, video-game-like adventures as he grows into his role as a hero. With his robot companion, Travbot, alongside him, Travis faces challenges that test not only his developing abilities but also his confidence, friendships, and judgment.

Big Idea

Powering up means more than acquiring impressive abilities: it also means learning how to respond to challenges and work with others. Molebash’s graphic storytelling shows how words, pictures, and carefully timed pauses can make that growth exciting and funny.

Discussion Questions

1.How does Travis’s understanding of being a hero change as he faces new challenges? Which scene best supports your interpretation?
2.When does Travis benefit from approaching a problem like a video game, and when might that approach be limiting?
3.What does Travbot help readers understand about Travis? Choose an interaction that reveals something important about their relationship.
4.Find a moment that feels especially fast or slow. How do the panels, dialogue, and artwork create that feeling?
5.How does Molebash balance humor with danger or uncertainty? Does a funny moment make a nearby serious moment more effective? Explain.

Lesson Plan

⏱ 50 minutes📦 Copies of the book or access to selected pages, paper, pencils, erasers, crayons or markers, a timer, and optional three-panel and six-panel comic templates

Learning Goals

Use evidence from words and illustrations to explain how a graphic novel develops character and conflict.
Identify how panel size, panel sequence, dialogue, and silent moments influence pacing.
Create two coherent comic sequences that portray the same event at different speeds.
Revise a storytelling choice after receiving specific reader feedback.

Activity Steps

1.Study a short sequence from the book together. Identify what happens, what Travis wants, and what readers learn from the artwork that the dialogue does not state.
2.Compare an action-heavy sequence with a quieter interaction involving Travis and Travbot. Mark places where readers move quickly, pause, or anticipate a reveal.
3.Plan an invented challenge: Travis and Travbot must retrieve a dropped object before a closing door blocks their way. Establish the goal, obstacle, and outcome without claiming this event occurs in the book.
4.Draw a fast version in three panels, using selective details and brief dialogue. Then draw a slower version in six panels, expanding the same event with reactions, close-ups, or a silent pause.
5.Exchange comics with a partner. Have the reader identify the fastest moment, the longest-feeling moment, and the visual or verbal choices responsible.
6.Revise one panel or line of dialogue and write a brief explanation of how that change affects pacing. Share selected examples.

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS RL.3.3 and RL.4.3 — Describe characters and explain their actions using details from the text.
ELA: CCSS RL.5.7 and RL.6.5 — Analyze how visual elements contribute to meaning and how particular scenes contribute to a text’s structure.
ELA: CCSS W.3.3–W.7.3 — Develop narratives using appropriate sequencing, descriptive details, and techniques suited to the grade level.
ELA: CCSS SL.3.1–SL.7.1 — Participate effectively in collaborative discussions and build on others’ ideas.
Visual arts and SEL: Communicate through sequential images, interpret visual choices, and practice collaboration and self-reflection.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

In Travis Daventhorpe Powers Up!, Wes Molebash makes the reader’s experience of time part of the storytelling. Travis’s encounters with extraordinary challenges lend themselves to bursts of action, while his interactions with Travbot offer opportunities for conversation, reaction, and humor. Readers can investigate how the comic moves between these modes: a few panels may carry a large action forward, while several smaller moments can stretch a brief hesitation. Pacing is therefore not simply how quickly someone reads; it is how the creator directs attention and builds expectation. For a Pace-Write-Read study, treat each selected sequence as a set of craft decisions. What does Molebash show rather than explain? Where does a reaction deserve its own panel? How much dialogue can an action moment hold before it feels slower? Students can read a sequence, describe its effect, and then test a similar technique in their own comics. Because graphic novels combine visual and verbal storytelling, students can demonstrate sophisticated narrative thinking even with simple drawings. Use the elements below as investigation prompts rather than a checklist of devices that must appear in every chapter. Ask students to support observations with a page or panel from their classroom copy; if a device is absent from a selected passage, they can explain how adding it might change the pace. For grades 3–4, emphasize oral explanation and clear panel sequences; for grades 5–7, add precise craft vocabulary and written justifications.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
Pacing	Compare a Travis action sequence with a conversation involving Travbot. Ask which choices make each feel quick, stretched out, or interrupted rather than assuming that more panels always mean faster action.
Plot	Track one challenge through Travis’s goal, an obstacle, his response, and the result. Notice which of these stages receives the most page space and explain why.
Prosody	Read an exchange between Travis and Travbot aloud, using lettering, punctuation, and facial expressions to guide emphasis. Try a second delivery and discuss how the changed pauses alter the scene’s mood.
Word	Choose a short line from an action or humorous moment and identify its most important word. Substitute a longer or less precise expression to test how word choice affects speed and impact.
Concept	Explore how Travis’s combination of everyday life and video-game-like heroics creates the book’s central storytelling premise. Ask how that combination allows Molebash to shift between relatable problems and spectacular challenges.
Voice & Worldview	Find language or reactions that reveal how Travis interprets a difficult situation. Discuss how a different character’s outlook could make the same event feel more frightening, funny, or manageable.
Point of View	Distinguish the character whose experience guides a scene from the visual angle used in a particular panel. Examine what readers know about Travis through his words and expressions, and what remains uncertain.
Setting & Place	Compare how an everyday location and an extraordinary setting are established. Identify which background details readers need immediately and which invite a slower look.
Original Characters	Study how Travis and Travbot are recognizable through design, behavior, and speech. Have students invent a supporting character whose particular habit would complicate a challenge for this pair.
Dialogue	Compare a brief exchange with a more crowded speech-balloon sequence. Ask what each conversation contributes to the relationship or conflict, and how much reading time it adds.
Details	Locate a small gesture, expression, or background detail that adds information about Travis’s situation. Discuss whether it rewards a pause, prepares a later moment, or makes a joke clearer.
Descriptions	Choose a panel in which the artwork supplies information that prose would need to describe. Write that description, then consider why Molebash may let the image carry it instead.
Firsts	Examine the first appearance of Travis, Travbot, or a new challenge within this volume. Identify what that entrance establishes for a returning reader and what it helps a new reader infer.
Immediacy & Engagement	Find a panel that puts readers close to Travis’s immediate problem. Explain how the framing, expression, or unfinished action encourages readers to continue.
Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Identify an event presented moment by moment and look for transitions that move past less important time. Discuss why Travis’s crucial choices deserve scenes rather than a quick report.
Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Choose a challenge and separate the danger itself from the information the reader is waiting to learn. Track how Molebash delays or reveals that information to create suspense or surprise.
Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Inspect transitions for a move to another time or an unresolved stopping point; do not assume all three devices occur. If a passage stays chronological, imagine how a flashback to an earlier Travis experience would interrupt or deepen it.
Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Examine what readers know at the end of a page or chapter and what they discover next. Ask whether the break withholds an outcome, prepares a joke, or signals a change of scene.
Pace & Creativity	Redraw a Travis-and-Travbot moment with a different number of panels while preserving its essential event. Compare which version best serves action, uncertainty, or humor.
Play	Look for ways the adventure invites the pleasure of imagining abilities, challenges, and possible solutions. Let students brainstorm several playful responses to one obstacle before choosing the response that best fits Travis.
Performance	Stage a short exchange using dialogue and poses from the panels. Have a student director decide where performers should pause so the audience can register a reaction or joke.
Personality	Compare how Travis and Travbot respond to the same situation. Discuss how character-specific reactions shape the amount and kind of time the story spends on that moment.
Humor	Find a humorous exchange or visual gag and identify its setup and payoff. Test whether removing a reaction panel or changing the order would weaken the joke.
Pause	Look for a silent or minimally worded panel near an important reaction. Ask whether the pause creates room for worry, understanding, embarrassment, or laughter.
Poetry / Poetic Devices	Inspect sound effects and dialogue for onomatopoeia, repeated sounds, or figurative comparisons. Explain how any example you find adds sound or emphasis without treating the book as a verse narrative.
Repetition	Look for a repeated expression, visual arrangement, or type of reaction involving Travis or Travbot. Discuss how repetition establishes an expectation and how a variation might become meaningful.
Rhythm	Trace the alternation of action, speech, and reaction across a short sequence. Read or tap out that pattern to notice how a quiet beat changes the surrounding action.
Punctuation	Examine how punctuation works with lettering and expressions in a selected exchange. Replace one punctuation mark and explain how the implied delivery changes.
Questions	Separate questions spoken by characters from questions readers carry forward, such as whether Travis’s plan will work. Track how long one reader question remains unanswered.
Compare-Contrast	Compare an everyday difficulty with an extraordinary challenge Travis faces. Consider how differences in stakes, imagery, and pacing coexist with similar feelings of uncertainty or determination.
Objects	Select an object that Travis or Travbot uses, notices, or responds to in a scene. Follow how its placement and handling help readers understand the action without extra explanation.
Threes	Check a selected sequence for three actions, reactions, or attempts that form a pattern. If no such pattern appears, create a three-beat alternative and evaluate whether the third beat should repeat, escalate, or surprise.
Lists	If a passage groups tasks, options, or information, study how the grouping affects reading speed. Alternatively, have students turn one challenge facing Travis into a brief checklist and compare its efficiency with a dramatized scene.
White Space & Negative Space	Inspect the gutters between panels and the open areas within them. Discuss how these spaces separate moments, isolate a reaction, or help the reader locate important information.
Art & Graphics	Analyze how expressions, motion cues, lettering, color, and panel framing work together in one Travis action sequence. Explain something the art communicates that would be lost in a dialogue-only transcript.
Interactives & Gamification	Use Travis’s video-game-like adventure to discuss goals, obstacles, abilities, and feedback. Distinguish a comic that evokes games from an interactive game in which the reader actually controls the outcome.
Placement	Follow the intended reading order through a page, noting the positions of balloons, characters, and important actions. Discuss how placement helps a reader encounter a setup before its payoff.
Form	Explain what the graphic-novel form makes possible for Travis’s story, especially simultaneous visual information and sequential reveals. Adapt one short scene into prose to compare the pacing tools available in each form.
Dummy	Create a rough folded-paper mock-up of a student-invented Travis-and-Travbot scene. Place the uncertain moment before a page turn and the outcome after it, then test whether that arrangement strengthens anticipation.
Passion	Identify subjects the story presents with energy, such as imaginative adventure, technology, games, or friendship. Ask students how choosing something they genuinely care about could strengthen the details and momentum of their own comics.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-It! task: Same Challenge, Different Clock. Minutes 0–3: Reread a short Travis-and-Travbot sequence and identify one way Molebash controls the reader’s speed. Minutes 3–5: Introduce a student-invented scene—not an event claimed from the book—in which Travis and Travbot must retrieve a dropped object before a door closes; students choose an outcome consistent with their interpretation of the characters. Minutes 5–10: Draw the scene in three panels, making the goal, obstacle, and outcome immediately clear. Minutes 10–15: Retell exactly the same event in six panels, adding a close-up, a reaction, and a silent beat to stretch the uncertainty without changing the outcome. Minutes 15–18: Partners read both versions and point to the specific panel where time seems to slow down. Minutes 18–20: Revise one choice and complete the reflection, 'I changed ___ so the reader would ___.' Simple stick figures are sufficient; assess sequencing and intentional pacing rather than drawing skill.

Classroom Activities

Power-Up, Slow Down

Students investigate how Molebash controls reading speed, then create two versions of a short comic featuring Travis and Travbot. Both versions show the same invented challenge, but one races through the action while the other stretches a moment of uncertainty. Partners compare how panel count, dialogue, visual details, and pauses change the experience. Label the comics as student-created scenes rather than events from the book.

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