May 15 2008
This is another in-progress character for Oyster War. My nib inking skills in general and my hatching in particular are pretty poor at the moment as you can see, but hopefully by the time I get around to actually drawing pages for this book I’ll be up to speed.
May 07 2008
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)
May 06 2008
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.
May 03 2008
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.
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