Ben

Author's details

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

Latest posts

  1. On Comics Sound Effects — 2/16/2015
  2. Faves of 2014 — 1/8/2015
  3. Gallery of Pages From My Most Recent Sketchbook — 12/20/2014
  4. A Gallery of all my Aquarium Drunkard Musician/Band Drawings — 12/15/2014
  5. Books about Comics: Some Short Reviews — 11/24/2014

Most commented posts

  1. Service Review: Ka-Blam Print on Demand — 33 comments
  2. The Comics Journal Message Board: A Requiem — 32 comments
  3. Craft: A Review of the New Koh-i-nor Rapidosketch Pen — 27 comments
  4. Ugliest Dog in the World? — 22 comments
  5. Welcome, Marion Keith Towle — 20 comments
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Author's posts listings

Feb
16
2015

On Comics Sound Effects

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owfinal

I–along with writer/cartoonist Ryan North and visual linguist Neil Cohn–was recently interviewed by Greg Uyeno for Slate‘s Lexicon Valley  language blog. The subject of the article was how sounds and sound effects work in comics. You can read the whole article here: KATCHOW! How to Write Sounds in Comics Greg wound up highlighting parts of our discussion …

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Jan
08
2015

Faves of 2014

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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 …

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Dec
20
2014

Gallery of Pages From My Most Recent Sketchbook

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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, …

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Dec
15
2014

A Gallery of all my Aquarium Drunkard Musician/Band Drawings

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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 …

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Nov
24
2014

Books about Comics: Some Short Reviews

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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, …

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Nov
22
2014

Interview: Comics and Teaching

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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 …

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Nov
05
2014

Oyster War Is Now Complete. A Few Thoughts:

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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 …

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Nov
01
2014

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

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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 …

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Sep
17
2014

SPX 2014

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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 …

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Sep
14
2014

Think of a City

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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 …

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