Ben Towle: Cartoonist, Educator, Hobo

I just received a copy of the finished, hardcover Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean and I can tell you, with as much objectivity as I can possibly muster, that it looks really, really fantastic.

I’d like to think that I did a reasonably good job “faking it” as far as the book designs of my last few GNs go, but when you want a design that’s really top-notch, what you need is–not surprisingly–an actual designer.  In this case, it’s the great work of the folks at Black Eye Design that’s on display here.  Anyway, here are a few pics, including an interior spread that’s no longer line screen gray-toned, but instead a be-yooo0-teefull Pantone two-color print job!

Publishers Weekly has a very early review of Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean in today’s children’s book review section:

Rather than rushing past the highlights of Earhart’s career, this quietly moving book approaches her life through the admiring curiosity of a girl who also aspires to escape traditional boundaries. Young Grace has grown up in Trepassey, Newfoundland, the nearest point in North America from which a plane can take off to fly to Europe; it’s also a seacoast community familiar with shipwrecks and other evidence of how coldly indifferent nature can be. In June of 1928, tweener Grace, the dubious townspeople and a mob of impatient newsmen wait for Earhart to finally get her plane in the air for a transatlantic flight… [ more... ]

Due mainly to this recent article in the Winston-Salem Journal, the exhibit of my original artwork from the forthcoming graphic novel Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean has been extended until the 19th of October.  Mainly that’s so it will be open and on display for the downtown arts district’s gallery hop this coming Friday (October 2nd).  If you missed seeing it last month, please come by and check it out.  The pages are displayed in sequence and begin on the lower floor of the DADA building.  From there, they continue upstairs and then conclude across the street in the lobby of the Artists on Liberty building.

In preparation for hanging the Amelia Earhart – Drawing from History exhibit that opens this Friday (mentioned last post), I’ve put together a poster that’s going to be mounted on foam-core and hung along with the pages from the graphic novel.  The jist of the poster is just to provide a bit of introduction to Amelia, and graphic novels in general, to the gallery-going audience who may not be up to speed on graphic novels, and also to describe the process by which a book like this is put together.  Some of the text is subject to change before Friday’s opening, but I’ve linked the thumbnail below to a PDF of the poster for any interested folks to check out:

I saw this turn up on Smitty’s Notes, the local Winston-Salem events newsletter/website, so I guess the press release has officially gone out:

Amelia Earhart: Drawing from History – by Ben Towle

9/4/2009 – 9/29/2009 7:00 PM, at Artists On Liberty Building – The Main Gallery 521 North Liberty Street, Winston Salem

Amelia Earhart: Drawing from History – Original Graphic Novel Illustrations in India Ink by Ben Towle. All of the original art book panels from the entire forthcoming graphic novel, Amelia Earhart – This Broad Ocean, will be on exhibit in The Main Gallery and at the DADA Center for the Arts on Liberty Street during the September 4th Gallery Hop as well as all day during BookMARKS Book Festival on September 12th. An opening reception to coincide with the Gallery Hop on September 4th will be held between 7:00 & 10:00 p.m. with the exhibit on display through September 29th. Mr. Towle is an Eisner-nominated cartoonist and the co-founder of the National Association of Comics Art Educators and holds a Master’s degree in cartooning (“Sequential Art”) from the Savannah College of Art and Design. To purchase these original illustrations and/or schedule an appointment – please contact Jack at area code 503.888.5930

The exhibit is in conjunction with the Bookmarks Book Festival, during which I’ll be participating in a panel discussion with some other regional comics folk (more on that later) and will display all the artwork from Amelia Earhart – This Broad Ocean–that’s right, every single page.  I believe that it will start with page one in the DADA Center for the Arts and then continue on in sequence into the main gallery space in the Artists on Liberty Building.  I’m putting together some ancilary material to display as well explaining the process by which the book was put together.  There’ll be an opening reception on September 4th, coniciding with the downtown arts district “gallery hop.”

A link to this PDF of forthcoming Junior Library Guild selections turned up in my Google Alerts today, so I guess it’s been made public now that Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean has been picked as a Fall 2009 offering by the Junior Library Guild.  The Junior Library Guild is, “… a literary review and selection service for children’s and young-adult books serving school and public libraries, established in 1929,and used by more than 17,000 librarians today.”  It’s great to know that right off the bat there’ll be a few thousand copies of the book hitting the shelves of libraries around the country.  It was a fun surprise to notice that fellow SCAD graduates (and total badass cartoonists) Eleanor Davis and Drew Weing‘s new book, The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook has been selected as part of the same age group’s offerings.  (Only Eleanor is listed, but I’m pretty sure Drew inked the book and–unless I’m confusing this book with something else–maybe the coloring was done by Aaron Renier? it’s colored by Joey Weiser)

With Heroes Con creeping up on us, I thought I’d do a quick post about what stuff I’ll have with me at the show–and use it as an excuse to post some preview pages and the cover from my upcoming Hyperion graphic novel, Ameila Earhart: This Broad Ocean.   So, here goes…

Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean

While I won’t have the book itself for sale, (it’s not due out for real until Feb of next year) I will have some advance reading copies of the book there for folks to look at.  I’ve mentioned the book before, but just in case: Amelia is the next in the series of Hyperion/CCS historical graphic novels for young adults.  The other books in the series so far have been Houdini – The Handcuff King, Satchel Paige – Striking out Jim Crow, and Thoreau at Walden.   Amelia was written by Sarah Stewart Taylor and illustrated by me (based on breakdowns by editor Jason Lutes).  Here’s the front cover (including the interior flap-thing and the spine) and a few spreads from the book.  The advance copies of the book look pretty much just like these pages, but in the final book the “graytones” will be some color other than gray.

Snooker

I was feeling pretty lame about not having a new book out for this year’s convention, but as a sort of stopgap measure, I decided to put together a little print-on-demand book to have available.   I’m too busy these days to spend the many a sleepless night required to continually edition my many mini-comics to have for conventions, but I figured it’d be fun to assemble some of my best material from minis past, combine it with some odds and ends that I’ve done for various anthologies,  tack on some of my patented “rubber arm” superhero pinups, and make a little book out of it.  Since most of my work’s been in black and white, I shelled out for color printing.  So… I’ll be offering Snooker (the title’s a lame reference to Eighball) for $10.00 at the show.  I haven’t received the books yet from the printer, but here’s the cover.  It’s 64 pages, digest sized (AKA “Manga sized”) and full color!

Ditko Panel

I won’t repeat the whole thing, but as mentioned in last post, Craig Fischer and I are going to be doing a pretty extensive panel/presentation on Steve Ditko.

Original Art

As any veteran of Heroes Con knows, sketches are big at the show.  As usual, if you buy anything from me, I’ll do a sketch for you if you ask.  Really, if you’re even kinda-sorta vaguely aware of me and my work, I’ll probably do a sketch for you unless I’m completely swamped.

I’ll also have some original art for sale.  Most of it will be with Brian from A Cosmic Odyssey and he’ll most likely be with Craig Hamilton–so if you can find Craig’s table, you’ll probably find my art there for sale.  I’ll have full pages from my various books as well as a number of new ridiculous superhero pinups, like this one of Alpha Flight:

Hope to see you at the show!

Well, for any of you (three or so) folks following along at home, there it is: the final image that’s come of my various posts on this once-panel now-spread.

Amelia is just about wrapped up now.  I’m anticipating sending off completed files tomorrow; although, I may have to revisit some of my gray layer work.  This is the first time I’ve done a “duotone” book that’s actually going to be printed on two separate Pantone plates, so there’re a lot of subtle nuances to getting the gray underlayer just right that are new to me.  It’s actually more akin to setting up a two color screen print than prepping files for printing as I’ve done it in the past.

I’m dying to post some other pages from the book, but I think I’ll hold off a bit.  With the other Hyperion/CCS books, there’ve been websites set up for the books with sample pages, so I’ll wait until I know if there’re specific pages set up as previews and then post those here as well.

Well, my old friend from a few weeks back, the aerial view of L.A. from Amelia, has returned.  This page has come up previously on this blog in a discussion of layouts vs. finishes, and I’m once again working on it.  No, not just inking that same page… but, before I get into that, here’s an anecdote:

I used to work in a restaurant–the kitchen of a country club–and at one point the chef in charge of the Sunday buffet asked me if I knew how to carve a steamship round (that’s a cut of beef often served on a buffet line), and if not, whether I wanted to learn.  After agreeing to learn how to it was done, another kitchen worker took me aside and advised, “Be careful what you learn how to do.  Once they know you can do it, you’ll be doing it every Sunday.”  Sure enough, I was carving those damn steamship rounds for the following bajillion Sundays.

So what does this “be careful what you let on you can do” business have to do with comics?  Well, the topic of my original post on the Amelia page I linked to above was the middle panel depicting an aerial view of downtown Los Angeles.  Since pencilling that page, though, Jason and I had some back and forths about the subject of spreads and bleeds.

In my first book, Farewell, Georgia, I avoided such things entirely, sticking to a strtict nine panel grid.  But in Midnight Sun I started to make occasional use of bleeds–pages where the printed image goes all the way to the edge of the page–to highlight the vast expanses of ice depicted in the book.  Jason’s layouts for Amelia, as thumbnailed, contained a number of spreads (sets of two facing pages that comprise a single image, spread across the two pages), but I decided to go ahead and plan for possible bleeds in all of these cases by drawing them all on single large sheets of paper, with the image drawn outside the normal page space to accommodate a possible bleed.

Once I started inking, though, it was time to decide which of these, if any, should really be bleeds, and which should simply be spreads.  If you look through issues of Jason’s series, Berlin, you’ll note nary a bleed, so I wasn’t even sure any of them would wind up being bleeds.  As it turns out, though, that middle panel of the L.A. cityscape provided the answer.  It was decided that until that point in the story, all the two page spreads would just be regular old spreads–but that, as Amelia looks down and sees the city below on her first time up in a plane, we’d use this as the first of several full bleed two page spreads…. meaning specifically that the page in question would be rejiggered so that the L.A. cityscape wouldn’t be a panel, but rather the first two page full bleed spread.  So here it is in action, from blue pencil (sorry it’s so hard to see, but that’s exactly the point of NP blue pencil, right?) to pencils, to inks–with gray toning to follow soon.

I’m a bit ashamed to admit, being someone who’s taught an occasional perspective class, that I completely “eyeballed” this drawing.  With so many objects at various angles, and no horizon visible it’s actually pretty easy to get things looking okay by eye.  I see a few bits of wanky perspective here in the final product, but nothing too offensive.

So, be careful what you let on you can draw–you might wind up having to draw it a whole lot bigger.

I’ve heard back from the “powers that be” and although I’ve got a list of revisions a few pages long, it’s for the most part relatively minor stuff… so, I’ve received the AOK to begin inking.  After months and months of penciling, it feels really good to break out the old brushes and nibs.  This first page allowed me to get reacquainted with a whole bunch of tools: brushes, pens, nibs, litho crayon, even doing white rain on black with a razor blade.  I probably won’t be posting pages of this until the book’s done–if even then–but here’s page one, unscanned (obviously) and without grays: