Ben

Author's details

Name: Ben Towle
Date registered: 11/30/-0001
URL: http://www.benzilla.com

Latest posts

  1. Faves of 2014 — 1/8/2015
  2. Gallery of Pages From My Most Recent Sketchbook — 12/20/2014
  3. A Gallery of all my Aquarium Drunkard Musician/Band Drawings — 12/15/2014
  4. Books about Comics: Some Short Reviews — 11/24/2014
  5. Interview: Comics and Teaching — 11/22/2014

Most commented posts

  1. Mockingbird Tattoo Designs — 37 comments
  2. Service Review: Ka-Blam Print on Demand — 33 comments
  3. The Comics Journal Message Board: A Requiem — 32 comments
  4. Craft: A Review of the New Koh-i-nor Rapidosketch Pen — 27 comments
  5. Ugliest Dog in the World? — 22 comments
Share |

Author's posts listings

Jan
08
2015

Faves of 2014

Categories:

by

FESTIVAL

I don’t really have the time  available to do as extensive a “best of” list as I’ve done in some past years, but just for fun here are a few of my favorite comics- and drawing-related things from last year. Note that I’m listing my favorite things, not the best things; these are just things that …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Dec
20
2014

Gallery of Pages From My Most Recent Sketchbook

Categories:

by

IMG_20141220_112839

I’m a firm believer that working regularly in a sketchbook is a really beneficial practice for artists. I know there are some really phenomenal cartoonists who pretty much only draw when they’re working on an actual project, but I’m just not at that level skill-wise. For me, that’d be like just showing up for the game, …

Continue reading »

Tags:

Leave comment

Dec
15
2014

A Gallery of all my Aquarium Drunkard Musician/Band Drawings

Categories:

by

b_booker

One of my (many) trouble areas art-wise is facial likenesses. If you follow my work you probably recall that in 2011 I set about trying to improve in this arena via a weekly “portrait night” drawing–you can see the end results in a gallery here. After that concluded, though, I wanted to find a way to make …

Continue reading »

Tags: ,

Leave comment

Nov
24
2014

Books about Comics: Some Short Reviews

Categories:

by

Untitled-1

Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present by Dan Mazur and Alexander Danner I’ve been pretty vocal on my Twitter about the lack of a solid English language history of Franco-Belgian comics, so I was delighted when I caught wind of this book. It actually bites off a significantly larger geographic chunk than just French language comics, …

Continue reading »

Tags:

4 comments

Nov
22
2014

Interview: Comics and Teaching

Categories:

by

I was recently cleaning out a bunch of old documents that had accumulated in my Google Drive and I stumbled on this interview that I did a while back about teaching with comics. I honestly don’t remember what it was for–it may have just been an email interview with a graduate student, or something similar–but …

Continue reading »

Tags: ,

Leave comment

Nov
05
2014

Oyster War Is Now Complete. A Few Thoughts:

Categories:

by

davidson_01

(An early sketch of Davidson Bulloch) I can’t exactly remember when I started working on Oyster War–I found some initial character drawings in my sketchbook from as long ago as 2008–but I posted the last page, page 128, earlier this month. I say in this post’s title that Oyster War is “complete,” but that’s not entirely …

Continue reading »

This post has no tag

12 comments

Nov
01
2014

Marvel’s 25th Anniversary, 20/20, and Jim Shooter in the Letters Page

Categories:

by

The-'Nam---02---Dust-Off---24---BB

I’ve been reading Michael Golden’s great 80’s Marvel Vietnam War comic, The ‘Nam–something I should really devote a whole blog post to when I’m done–and I’ve been fortunate enough to get a hold of the actual issues, rather than the collected edition. In addition to having the original coloring, the issues also obviously include non-story …

Continue reading »

Tags:

Leave comment

Sep
17
2014

SPX 2014

Categories:

by

01

You’d think with me now being pretty much done with Oyster War I’d have time for a big, extensive SPX 2014 wrap-up, but I’ve actually got to jump right into several other comics (and other) projects pretty quickly. But, I did want to do just a quick post–mainly just to show off some of the …

Continue reading »

Tags:

Leave comment

Sep
14
2014

Think of a City

Categories:

by

tumblr_nbu4u4gne31spy5pdo1_r1_1280

Here’s my contribution to the wonderful Think of a City collaborative project. The idea behind the project is that each artist participating draws a cityscape or scene that takes place in a city with his or her contribution containing one drawn element and one color from the previous artist’s submission. There’s some pretty amazing artwork …

Continue reading »

Tags: , ,

Leave comment

Sep
11
2014

Talking Comics Terminology on the Deconstructing Comics Podcast

Categories:

by

dcp

I was recently a guest on the Deconstructing Comics podcast discussing my recent (and surprisingly controversial?) blog post about using film terminology to discuss comics. I’m hoping that the hour-long conversation here gave me a bit more room to make my case in a more nuanced and thorough way than in the original post. One …

Continue reading »

Tags: ,

2 comments

Older posts «