Ben Towle: Cartoonist, Educator, Hobo

Midnight Sun gets a nice mention in the latest Bookslut “Kid P.I.” feature.  I hadn’t really thought about the book appealing to the “young adult” crowd, but I reckon if you can handle a curse word or two (no “F bombs,” though) there’s certainly the historical angle.  Anyway, here’s a bit from the review:

Cool Read: In the graphic novel Midnight Sun, Ben Towle uses the real tragedy of the dirigible Italia, which crashed with its crew on the way back from the North Pole in 1928, to set up his fictional story about a reporter sent to cover the rescue. H.R. is a borderline alcoholic who majors at doing the minimum amount of work in his job and is more than a bit freaked out at the idea of traveling north on a Russian ship into the polar wilderness. (read more…)

Speaking of things young adult, a while back VOYA, (Voice of Youth Advocates) a library magazine about all things young adult, ran a review of Midnight Sun, but I couldn’t link to it because it wasn’t online.  It looks, though, like the Barnes and Noble site is using it, though, so here’s that one as well:

A forgotten piece of history is adapted into an interesting and captivating story in this little graphic novel. The airship Italia was launched in 1928 from Italy, with the North Pole as its destination. It crashed in the Arctic Circle, stranding its captain and several of its crew members, and carrying off several others when the ship is lightened of its load. Towle takes this event, throws in an alcoholic American reporter sent to cover the story along with a few other fictional elements, and creates a compelling story. The black-and-white illustrations are very well done and reveal the undertones of the story clearly. The political tensions of the time are alluded to in the story but explained more clearly at the end of the novel. In the two final pages, Towle talks briefly about the actual crash, and how the story was adapted. The rescue of the Italia crewmen involved five countries, and resulted in the death of many rescuers. This event was related to the tension between Nobile, the captain of the Italia, and the emerging Fascist government in Italy. Readers may find this interesting. The novel itself is enjoyable and suspenseful. Sophisticated teens and history buffs will surely find it a pleasant read. Reviewer: Victoria Vogel
April 2008 (Vol. 31, No. 1)

My work on Ameila has been pretty much on hold this week other than working my way through the Canadian public library system trying to track down some much-needed photo reference. (One hopes their much-touted government health care system is a bit less labyrinthine.) So, I’ve switched gears a bit and have been working on Oyster War–mainly writing, but also a bit of drawing.

One of the “props” I’ll need for the story is this boat. I’m not really concerned with trying to draw a 100% authentic, accurate period vessel, (I’ve had enough of that with Midnight Sun) but rather, I wanted to use an historic vessel as a starting point and see what I could come up with. I’m not even sure what the name of this boat is going to be within the story, but, thar’ she is:

One thing I really like seeing on other cartoonists’ blogs is their process, not just the final images they come up with, so I’ve slapped together some images from my sketchbook that show the “evolution” of this vessel. I started with a civil war tug and went from there. I wanted the final boat to be a bit more recognizably boat-like, so you can see it getting less and less blocky as things progress.

I usually work in colored pencil first, starting with light blue, then orange, then red, then soft (2B) pencil–and finally ink, if it goes that far. For the purposes of rough sketching, Photoshop’s hue/saturation control is pretty effective at lifting out all the non-black colors once the sketches are scanned. I’ll sometimes scan images, remove the colors, change the black to light blue, then print out and start all over again… or just slap some tracing paper on the original image and work on that.

Since it’s now officially Free Comic Book Day, you can cruise on over to www.wideawakepress.com and download Piltdown, the dinosaur/caveman-themed comic book for free as a PDF. If’n you’re one ah’ them youngsters, what with your “manga” and whatnot, and you like to read the funnybooks right on your computer, I’ve made a quick CBZ version of the book you can download here.Besides me, other folks contributing are J. Chris Campbell, Patrick Dean, Dustin Harbin, Josh Latta, Joe Lambert, Pat Lewis, Brad McGinty, Andy Runton and more. I’ll post my giant sloth story here the first page of my giant sloth story here–for the rest, though, you’ll need to download the complete book.

Normally I pretty much skim over the “Comics Briefly” section of Publishers Weekly Comics Week newsletter; I read ComicsReporter and Journalista! pretty regularly during lunch each day, so usually there’s nothing there I haven’t seen before. When looking over this week’s issue, though, I spotted the heading, “Blain U.S. Tour” and wondered: that can’t be referring to the French cartoonist Christophe Blain, can it?

Well, sure enough, that’s exactly what it was about. According to the article, Blain “will be doing a book tour in the United States sponsored by the French Embassy’s Cultural Services Department.” The only events mentioned are an appearance at Portland’s Floating World Comics (I think I’m the only remaining cartoonist who hasn’t moved to Portland) and a book festival in Los Angeles. I’d love to think there’d be more appearances by the cartoonist, but the French Embassy’s site doesn’t have any info on it, nor could I find anything on the website of Blain’s American publisher, NBM.

So, you may be asking yourself, Who the heck is Christophe Blain? Christophe Blain is in my opinion one of the very best cartoonists working today. His work, to me, has exactly the right balance of abstraction and realism; his linework is somehow loose but precise at the same time; his coloring is gorgeous; and his stories are exciting, dramatic and poignant yet at the same time exciting and fun. The series to check out from NBM is Isaac the Pirate, two volumes of which are available at the moment. Hopefully the third is in the works. I believe it’s already out in French. Here’s a typically gorgeous page from the series:

I find it odd that he’s not more known here in the states. (I guess I find it odd that more European cartoonists in general aren’t known here.) I have, though, noted his influence in a few American cartoonists recently, most prominently Nick Bertozzi, particularly in his great online story about Sir Ernest Shackleton. Likewise, British cartoonist Nick Abadzis’ Laika seems to me to have a bit of Blain-vibe to it visually.

Anyway, I’m keeping my eyes open for more dates in the U.S…

Update: 

Courtesy of Chris Pitzer of Adhouse, there’s plenty more info from the original press release over on Chris Butcher’s blog, including the list of appearances, all of which unfortunately are on the West Coast.  Have fun hanging out with Christophe Blain, ya’ damn hippies!

This is another piece, like the Inhumans thing I posted a few weeks back, that I’m putting together with an eye toward the upcoming convention season.  As you can tell, I’m a fan of the old-timey ’80s Frank Miller-style Wolverine who smokes cigars (I almost gave him one here) and fights ninjas.

J. Chris Campbell just sent out this fantastic cover image from the upcoming Wide Awake Press book for Free Comic Book Day:

The title of the book obviously is Piltdown, and here’s the skinny:

Wide Awake Press follows up last year’s successful download comic EATS with an anthology of prehistoric tales. Go to wideawakepress.com on May 3 and download the FREE comic PILTDOWN. Join us on our journey back in time and see what stories surface when artists draw upon thier inner cro-magnon. Dinosaurs, Cavemen and all types of prehistroic beasts gather together for you to discover.

The book will feature my giant sloth story that I’ve posted a few sketches from in the past.  Chris is being pretty tight-lipped about who’s contributed stories, but I’ll post info when the book’s available for free download on the third.

Confederate submariner and Maryland Oyster Navy Captain, Hunter Davidson (original sketch, and sketch with underdrawing removed with Photoshop):

If you’re signed up for the Publishers Weekly Comics Week email newsletter (and you know you should be!) you’ve probably had this appear in your inbox already, but I’ve written a review of Jessica Abel and Matt Madden’s new comics teaching book Drawing Words and Writing Pictures in the current newsletter. As you can probably tell from the review, I really really enjoyed the book. It’s a major achievement and a great stride forward in the somewhat anemic field of comics instruction texts. From the review:

While colleges, universities and art schools have been busily adding comics-making classes—and in some cases, concentrations or even entire departments—in parallel with the current “graphic novel boom,” good-quality textbooks to use in conjunction with those classes have been hard to come by. As I imagine other comics teachers have, for my classes, I’ve wound up cobbling together bits and pieces for my students, drawn from comics’ scattershot history of “how-to” books—from venerable classics such as Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art and Jack Hamm’s Cartooning the Head and Figure, to more recent works such as Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. None of these books, though, offered a single, complete course of comics-making starting with fundamentals, covering the technical nuts and bolts, and culminating with a finished student-assembled comic book.

It should be no surprise that this is exactly what Jessica Abel and Matt Madden have set out to do with their new book on comics instruction, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, since both have been teaching comics at New York City’s School of Visual Art for many years. (read more…)

Previous to now, aside from a few sales from folks who’ve contacted me directly via this site and the occasional sale at a convention where I’ve had the foresight to bring along my portfolio, I’ve never devoted much energy to selling my original artwork. Recently, though, I’ve hooked up with the folks at A Cosmic Odyssey and they’ll be handling sales of my original comics pages as well as a few odd non-comics pieces I’ve got that folks might be interested in. Here’s a link directly to my gallery on their site. Be sure, though, to check out some of the other artists represented. They concentrate mainly on comic artists in the South and are currently also representing Craig Hamilton, Ray Snyder, Steve Scott, and Kevin Stokes–with more to come in the future.

The most recent installment of the Indie Spinner Rack podcast (direct link here) is a special episode that features music by cartoonists and one of the songs included is “That Mile” by my old band, Come on Thunderchild. This is a great idea for a show–and one that I’m surprised hasn’t been done before. There are lots of cartoonists with musical backgrounds and/or side projects, the most notable being R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders, the Leisure Suits featuring Peter Bagge, Sof’ Boy artist Archer Prewitt’s band The Sea and the Cake, and James Kochalka Superstar. On this episode you’ll hear Alex Longstreth playing a Magnetic Fields song, a great cut from Scott Pilgrim cartoonist Brian Lee O’Malley, and a cut off of the self-titled Come on Thunderchild record from 1998.

At some point the full story of Come on Thunderchild, and its previous incarnation Electro-Luxe, (with whom I played bass only for the very tail end of its existence) will make its way to The Internets. In fact, I purchased the domain thunderluxe.com a while back with this thought in mind, and COT guitaris/keys-player/singer John Morris and I talked a bit about setting up a site, but with me busy with comics stuff and a new baby and John running his own business whilst also playing in what appears to be about thirty-five different bands in Charlotte, nothing’s really been done on that front…

Anyway… In the ISR episode, the host Charlito speculates that I abandoned music for comics, which wasn’t really the case. I of course wound up pursuing comics post-band, but that wasn’t really part of anything as well-considered as an agonizing “music vs. comics” life-path struggle. Regrettably, though, I have let my musical passion pretty much idle since then. Time-wise, there just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to squeeze in comics and music, along with the usual day-to-day stuff. I did, though, recently purchase a vintage Harmony ukulele and have been really surprised at how much I’ve been enjoying playing it. At the moment I mainly know a weird combination of faux-Hawaiian songs like “Little Grass Shack” and “Tiny Bubbles,” and stuff I learned to sing to my daughter Marion (who thankfully can’t yet vocalize any objections to my off-key caterwauling) like “Baby on Board” by Homer Simpson’s barbershop group the B Sharps and “Rubber Ducky” (a kid’s song with some surprisingly non-standard chords).

A few images of band-related stuff from the days of yore:

The article above is from a 1995 issue of Billboard Magazine spotlighting the just pre-COT version of Electro-Luxe. Our then-drummer Michael Glaser would unfortunately succumb to a bad case of carpal tunnel and we later added David Kim (AKA “D.K.” or “Da Kid”) on drums. Pictured left to right: me, Randolph Lewis, John Morris, Michael Glaser.

I’m not exactly sure where this was taken, but I think this was maybe a rejected publicity still. Right to left, that’s: Randolph Lewis, me, John Morris, occasional percussionist Chris Krull, and David Kim.

This is on-stage at Charlotte’s Legendary Double Door Inn, where tons of famous folks including JJ Cale, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Buddy Guy and Willie Dixon have performed. If I recall correctly, this was my last performance with the band. Left to right: Randolph Lewis, me, David Kim, John Morris. I’ve actually got a recording of most of this show which includes a handful of newer songs that we put together after our record came out–something to consider putting online if we ever put thunderluxe.com together.