Ben Towle: Cartoonist, Educator, Hobo

A while back, cartoonist/teacher Andrew Wales was nice enough to send me a big stack of issues of his series, Eclectic Comics. I thoroughly enjoyed the books and am a bit ashamed that it’s taken me so long to drum up a “thank you” sketch to send his way.  Here (with some very quick digital color) is my version of Andrew’s character, the Mystic Yak.  In my version, I’ve cast him as Plato from the well-known Raphael fresco, The School of Athens.

Well, here’s the finished colored version of pg. 20 of Oyster War that I’ve been posting intermittently at various stages of completion.  If I had to do it over again, I’d probably have picked a different page from this chapter to highlight since this page wound up using mostly literal color, not the more expressive/narrative color that I find much more interesting. At any rate, here’s the finished page, along with reposted inks, pencils and thumbnail pages so you can see the whole process start to finish:

I haven’t posted anything from my sketchbook recently, so here’re some hands from the current issues of TIME and Vanity Fair.

While there are a few (like maybe one or two) editors who’ve not definitively responded to the Count of Monte Cristo graphic novel proposal I’d been working on a month or two ago, it looks like it’s time to consider it officially dead in the water–or at least, “shelved” for the time being.  I’m continuing to work on Oyster War as time allows, but I’m also starting work on another GN proposal based on an idea (albeit a pretty vague one) that I’ve been kicking around for a while: a GN about a line cook who’s a touring musician on the weekends.  Things culinary are hot, hot, hot in the prose publishing world, but the domestic comics world hasn’t really touched much on food and cooking as a subject. There are, though, several excellent cooking Manga that have been pretty influential in pushing me this direction: mainly Oishinbo, but also things like Antique Bakery and Iron Wok.  I’m not going to divulge too much until I’ve got things more sorted out story-wise, but I decided to move ahead with this as a proposal–instead of any number of other things that I’ve got gestating at the moment–mainly because I finally figured out a way to interconnect the culinary and musical portions of the story.

Now, if you know anything about me personally, you know that I worked in kitchens throughout the 90s and was in fact a touring musician on the weekends.  This is not a coincidence.  Rest assured, those of you who knew me then, this is a work of fiction. I can’t help, though, but to draw on some of my own experiences from that period as I start putting this together.  I am, though, designing the characters in the band as deliberate visual homages to the guys that I played music with back in those halcyon days.  I imagine that by the time ink hits paper to do some test pages they’ll look a lot less similar to anyone “real life,” but I’m using them as a starting point.  In the preliminary character designs above you can see the main character (nameless at the moment, designated in my notes only as “H.P.” for “hero/protagonist”) on the left in chef gear and then in his street clothes, and his bandmates to the right.  I can see now that I’ve got them all together that I really need to rework the two guys with dark hair so that they’re not so similar in basic shape.

Tentatively, the book’s called “In The Weeds,” a phrase that you will know if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant.

My friend (and screenwriter) Angus MacLachlan has a short article in the “Lives” section of today’s New York Times. It’s a true story that takes place in our neighborhood (Angus lives around the corner from me) and the pictured chair lived in my studio for about a year between the events detailed in the story, although it was green then and smelled vaguely of dog pee.

Angus had sent me an early draft of this story in which he’d changed my name to “Dan Toole.”  I requested a rewrite with that altered it to “Dr. Magnus R. Steele” but apparently the Times requires writers to use real names for this feature, so it’s back to “Ben Towle” here.  They even had a fact checker call apparently. (This fact check guy must have been on a smoke break during the buildup to the Iraq War.  [Zing!!!]) Anyway, here’s the article.

As mentioned a few posts back, I’ve picked a page from the current chapter of Oyster War to post progress on as it moves to completion.  I’ve now got that particular page inked, so here it is:

As with most everything I draw, this page looked a lot more impressive in my brain, but I still think it turned out reasonably well.  I’ve got three more pages to ink and then I’m going to start coloring this chapter.  For reference, here’s the pencils of this same page:

Notice anything unusual about the image on the cover of our local monthly rag?  I sure didn’t.  I gave it a cursory flip-through and then left it on the coffee table.  My two year old daughter, though, is apparently far more observant than I; she looked at it and then presented it back to me with an emphatic, “Look, Daddy.  It’s TinTin and his little dog Snowy!”  Sure enough, in the back right corner of the room is some kind of weird stand-thing, and in it is a book with TinTin and Snowy on the cover.

I have no idea what that particular book is, but you can see just below it a French edition of The Blue Lotus.  Sitting on the table front and center is the Essex County collection by Jeff Lemire. According to the picture credit, this some local person’s “comic book reading room.”  Now I’m really intrigued.  Winston-Salem’s not that big a place and most of the graphic novel-reading types here are known to one another.  Anyway, now check out the bookshelf in the back and you can see that it’s stocked with some pretty good GNs.  Here’s the ones I think I recognize from the spine:

1) Footnotes in Gaza – Joe Sacco

2) Volumes of Black Jack? – Osamu Tezuka

3) Volumes of the D&Q Yoshihiro Tatsumi collections

4) Black Hole? – Charles Burns

5) Asterios Polyp – David Mazzucchelli

6) Maybe Acme Novelty Library #14 – Chris Ware

7) More TinTin?

Well, here’s a first–and only marginally successful–attempt to use my webcam for something other than Skyping with relatives.  I clipped the thing to my above-drafting table track lights and tried to do a time lapse video of my inking a page from Oyster War.  The camera’s too far away by a factor of about two and the glare from the lights is pretty bad, but I suppose it’s worth looking at.

I captured the images every 3 seconds using a simple (and free) piece of software called Perios, which captures an image at an interval you specify and writes it as an individual JPG.  Perios has a built-in AVI exporter, but I didn’t like that it only worked on a currently filming project, so I used PhotoLapse to assemble the files into a AVI movie.  I wound up dropping every other frame, so what’s left is a three minute video of a six hour inking process.  Here’s the video, followed by a scan of the inked page:

I sent this pic around via Twitter yesterday, but I think it deserves a post here as well.  I’m starting to ink Chapter Two of Oyster War and I’ve been streaming documentaries from Netflix in the background as I do.  One of the ones I watched yesterday was Stones in Exile, a documentary about the making of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street.  I’m surprised I noticed this since I’m usually not looking at the screen unless I’m waiting for a bit of ink to dry, but here’s a great still from the film that caught my eye: Anita Pallenberg, then girlfriend of Keith Richards, holding a copy of the TinTin adventure, The Black Island.  Presumably it’s for their son, Marlon, pictured at the right.  It’s of course in French (L’Iile Noire) since Exile was recorded in the south of France, where the Stones retreated in order to avoid taxes (and a sobriety, apparently).  Anyway, this image touches on a number of my favorite things: The Stones, TinTin and attractive Italian actress/model/groupies who are into black magic:

There’s a short survey/interview with me now posted over at the David-Wasting-Paper blog.  This is an interesting blog for two reasons beyond just getting to read what various cartoonists say in their surveys.  First, the questions for each cartoonist are exactly the same.  Second, there are so damn many of them!  I’m survey number 145.  Be sure to dig through the previous surveys if you have time.  There are tons of interesting subjects.  I couldn’t find a way to sift through them other than by using the chronological drill-down menu on the right, but they start in November of ’09, so they’re really not that hard to find.