Ben Towle: Comics, Cartooning, Teaching

Apr 22 2008

I Review Drawing Words and Writing Pictures

By Ben

If you’re signed up for the Publishers Weekly Comics Week email newsletter (and you know you should be!) you’ve probably had this appear in your inbox already, but I’ve written a review of Jessica Abel and Matt Madden’s new comics teaching book Drawing Words and Writing Pictures in the current newsletter. As you can probably tell from the review, I really really enjoyed the book. It’s a major achievement and a great stride forward in the somewhat anemic field of comics instruction texts. From the review:

While colleges, universities and art schools have been busily adding comics-making classes—and in some cases, concentrations or even entire departments—in parallel with the current “graphic novel boom,” good-quality textbooks to use in conjunction with those classes have been hard to come by. As I imagine other comics teachers have, for my classes, I’ve wound up cobbling together bits and pieces for my students, drawn from comics’ scattershot history of “how-to” books—from venerable classics such as Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art and Jack Hamm’s Cartooning the Head and Figure, to more recent works such as Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. None of these books, though, offered a single, complete course of comics-making starting with fundamentals, covering the technical nuts and bolts, and culminating with a finished student-assembled comic book.

It should be no surprise that this is exactly what Jessica Abel and Matt Madden have set out to do with their new book on comics instruction, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, since both have been teaching comics at New York City’s School of Visual Art for many years. (read more…)

Apr 20 2008

Get Ya’ Original Art Heah’!

By Ben

Previous to now, aside from a few sales from folks who’ve contacted me directly via this site and the occasional sale at a convention where I’ve had the foresight to bring along my portfolio, I’ve never devoted much energy to selling my original artwork. Recently, though, I’ve hooked up with the folks at A Cosmic Odyssey and they’ll be handling sales of my original comics pages as well as a few odd non-comics pieces I’ve got that folks might be interested in. Here’s a link directly to my gallery on their site. Be sure, though, to check out some of the other artists represented. They concentrate mainly on comic artists in the South and are currently also representing Craig Hamilton, Ray Snyder, Steve Scott, and Kevin Stokes–with more to come in the future.

Apr 15 2008

My Musical Past – On Indie Spinner Rack

By Ben

The most recent installment of the Indie Spinner Rack podcast (direct link here) is a special episode that features music by cartoonists and one of the songs included is “That Mile” by my old band, Come on Thunderchild. This is a great idea for a show–and one that I’m surprised hasn’t been done before. There are lots of cartoonists with musical backgrounds and/or side projects, the most notable being R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders, the Leisure Suits featuring Peter Bagge, Sof’ Boy artist Archer Prewitt’s band The Sea and the Cake, and James Kochalka Superstar. On this episode you’ll hear Alex Longstreth playing a Magnetic Fields song, a great cut from Scott Pilgrim cartoonist Brian Lee O’Malley, and a cut off of the self-titled Come on Thunderchild record from 1998.

At some point the full story of Come on Thunderchild, and its previous incarnation Electro-Luxe, (with whom I played bass only for the very tail end of its existence) will make its way to The Internets. In fact, I purchased the domain thunderluxe.com a while back with this thought in mind, and COT guitaris/keys-player/singer John Morris and I talked a bit about setting up a site, but with me busy with comics stuff and a new baby and John running his own business whilst also playing in what appears to be about thirty-five different bands in Charlotte, nothing’s really been done on that front…

Anyway… In the ISR episode, the host Charlito speculates that I abandoned music for comics, which wasn’t really the case. I of course wound up pursuing comics post-band, but that wasn’t really part of anything as well-considered as an agonizing “music vs. comics” life-path struggle. Regrettably, though, I have let my musical passion pretty much idle since then. Time-wise, there just don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to squeeze in comics and music, along with the usual day-to-day stuff. I did, though, recently purchase a vintage Harmony ukulele and have been really surprised at how much I’ve been enjoying playing it. At the moment I mainly know a weird combination of faux-Hawaiian songs like “Little Grass Shack” and “Tiny Bubbles,” and stuff I learned to sing to my daughter Marion (who thankfully can’t yet vocalize any objections to my off-key caterwauling) like “Baby on Board” by Homer Simpson’s barbershop group the B Sharps and “Rubber Ducky” (a kid’s song with some surprisingly non-standard chords).

A few images of band-related stuff from the days of yore:

The article above is from a 1995 issue of Billboard Magazine spotlighting the just pre-COT version of Electro-Luxe. Our then-drummer Michael Glaser would unfortunately succumb to a bad case of carpal tunnel and we later added David Kim (AKA “D.K.” or “Da Kid”) on drums. Pictured left to right: me, Randolph Lewis, John Morris, Michael Glaser.

I’m not exactly sure where this was taken, but I think this was maybe a rejected publicity still. Right to left, that’s: Randolph Lewis, me, John Morris, occasional percussionist Chris Krull, and David Kim.

This is on-stage at Charlotte’s Legendary Double Door Inn, where tons of famous folks including JJ Cale, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Buddy Guy and Willie Dixon have performed. If I recall correctly, this was my last performance with the band. Left to right: Randolph Lewis, me, David Kim, John Morris. I’ve actually got a recording of most of this show which includes a handful of newer songs that we put together after our record came out–something to consider putting online if we ever put thunderluxe.com together.

Comics, Music
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Apr 10 2008

Behold, The Inhumans! (Again)

By Ben in General

I’ve recently been working with a comics art dealer who’s going to be helping me sell some of my original art both at conventions and online, and so I’ve been trying to get together some smaller pieces with recognizable characters to have available for these things at less than a full page’s price. I’ll eventually drum up some totally new stuff, but to get the ball rolling I’ve decided to redo a few past images that have come out of my sketchbook and do them on nice bristol board. Here’s one I just completed. It’s a redrawn version of a pinup of the Inhumans that I did for the Heroes Con booklet a few years back:

Apr 05 2008

“Hey, Teach” Guest-Starring Jason Lutes and MODOK

By Ben

So, I found that I did in fact have this mini, referenced in my previous post, saved somewhere. It occurred to me that even if I hadn’t scanned the pages when I originally put the mini together, that I’d probably posted it to my website at some point. Thanks to archive.org I was able to find a version of my site from long, long ago that had this mini posted on it. (It’s kind of crazy to realize that I’ve been maintaining a blog for the past eight years, almost since before “blog” was a word.)

Anyway, despite the painfully amateurish art, here’s “Hey, Teach,” chronicling the summer I taught comics at the North Carolina Governor’s School (you can get the whole thing as a CBZ file down at the bottom if you prefer):