I haven’t posted anything from my sketchbook recently, so here’re some hands from the current issues of TIME and Vanity Fair.
Aug 22 2010
Proposals: Out with the Old, In with the New
While there are a few (like maybe one or two) editors who’ve not definitively responded to the Count of Monte Cristo graphic novel proposal I’d been working on a month or two ago, it looks like it’s time to consider it officially dead in the water–or at least, “shelved” for the time being. I’m continuing to work on Oyster War as time allows, but I’m also starting work on another GN proposal based on an idea (albeit a pretty vague one) that I’ve been kicking around for a while: a GN about a line cook who’s a touring musician on the weekends. Things culinary are hot, hot, hot in the prose publishing world, but the domestic comics world hasn’t really touched much on food and cooking as a subject. There are, though, several excellent cooking Manga that have been pretty influential in pushing me this direction: mainly Oishinbo, but also things like Antique Bakery and Iron Wok. I’m not going to divulge too much until I’ve got things more sorted out story-wise, but I decided to move ahead with this as a proposal–instead of any number of other things that I’ve got gestating at the moment–mainly because I finally figured out a way to interconnect the culinary and musical portions of the story.
Now, if you know anything about me personally, you know that I worked in kitchens throughout the 90s and was in fact a touring musician on the weekends. This is not a coincidence. Rest assured, those of you who knew me then, this is a work of fiction. I can’t help, though, but to draw on some of my own experiences from that period as I start putting this together. I am, though, designing the characters in the band as deliberate visual homages to the guys that I played music with back in those halcyon days. I imagine that by the time ink hits paper to do some test pages they’ll look a lot less similar to anyone “real life,” but I’m using them as a starting point. In the preliminary character designs above you can see the main character (nameless at the moment, designated in my notes only as “H.P.” for “hero/protagonist”) on the left in chef gear and then in his street clothes, and his bandmates to the right. I can see now that I’ve got them all together that I really need to rework the two guys with dark hair so that they’re not so similar in basic shape.
Tentatively, the book’s called “In The Weeds,” a phrase that you will know if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant.
Aug 08 2010
I’m a “Character” in Today’s NY Times
My friend (and screenwriter) Angus MacLachlan has a short article in the “Lives” section of today’s New York Times. It’s a true story that takes place in our neighborhood (Angus lives around the corner from me) and the pictured chair lived in my studio for about a year between the events detailed in the story, although it was green then and smelled vaguely of dog pee.
Angus had sent me an early draft of this story in which he’d changed my name to “Dan Toole.” I requested a rewrite with that altered it to “Dr. Magnus R. Steele” but apparently the Times requires writers to use real names for this feature, so it’s back to “Ben Towle” here. They even had a fact checker call apparently. (This fact check guy must have been on a smoke break during the buildup to the Iraq War. [Zing!!!]) Anyway, here’s the article.
Aug 05 2010
Oyster War Page Progress: Inks
As mentioned a few posts back, I’ve picked a page from the current chapter of Oyster War to post progress on as it moves to completion. I’ve now got that particular page inked, so here it is:
As with most everything I draw, this page looked a lot more impressive in my brain, but I still think it turned out reasonably well. I’ve got three more pages to ink and then I’m going to start coloring this chapter. For reference, here’s the pencils of this same page:
Jul 31 2010
Local “Comic Book Reading Room”
Notice anything unusual about the image on the cover of our local monthly rag? I sure didn’t. I gave it a cursory flip-through and then left it on the coffee table. My two year old daughter, though, is apparently far more observant than I; she looked at it and then presented it back to me with an emphatic, “Look, Daddy. It’s TinTin and his little dog Snowy!” Sure enough, in the back right corner of the room is some kind of weird stand-thing, and in it is a book with TinTin and Snowy on the cover.
I have no idea what that particular book is, but you can see just below it a French edition of The Blue Lotus. Sitting on the table front and center is the Essex County collection by Jeff Lemire. According to the picture credit, this some local person’s “comic book reading room.” Now I’m really intrigued. Winston-Salem’s not that big a place and most of the graphic novel-reading types here are known to one another. Anyway, now check out the bookshelf in the back and you can see that it’s stocked with some pretty good GNs. Here’s the ones I think I recognize from the spine:
1) Footnotes in Gaza – Joe Sacco
2) Volumes of Black Jack? – Osamu Tezuka
3) Volumes of the D&Q Yoshihiro Tatsumi collections
4) Black Hole? – Charles Burns
5) Asterios Polyp – David Mazzucchelli
6) Maybe Acme Novelty Library #14 – Chris Ware
7) More TinTin?
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