Ben Towle: Cartoonist, Educator, Hobo

As part of this year’s multi-blog Summer Blog Blast Tour, there’s an extensive interview with me posted over at Colleen Mondoor’s literature blog chasingray.com. This is the most extensive interview I’ve done about Midnight Sun, and probably the only really in-depth interview I’ll do specifically about the book since the it’s been out for a while at this point.Colleen is a scholar of northern exploration and, because of her background in both this and in general literature, she hit me with a number of pretty interesting questions that aren’t typical the usual line of inquiry one usually gets from interviewers from the comics press.

I’ve read some of the interviews you have done online and I think I have a decent understanding of how you found out about the Italia (via a personal curiosity/interest in dirigibles) and why you decided the book really only worked as historical fiction, not nonfiction. (And I completely understand what you were saying there.) I do wonder though why you didn’t completely fictionalize it - why not just make up a dirigible and give it a different reason for being up there and not even consider the facts of this particular disaster? (The Andree flight was in 1897 so balloons and dirigibles were not unknown in the polar regions for several decades.) Why did you decide to keep your downed craft the Italia? [ to the rest of the article… ]

I think last year’s lineup included Eddie Campbell and Gene Yang, but it looks like this year I may be the only cartoonist on the roster.  There’s a pretty solid group of prose folks on the roster, though, so keep an eye out this week.

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.

This is an in-progress character design for Oyster War.

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)

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.

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.

Normally I pretty much skim over the “Comics Briefly” section of Publishers Weekly Comics Week newsletter; I read ComicsReporter and Journalista! pretty regularly during lunch each day, so usually there’s nothing there I haven’t seen before. When looking over this week’s issue, though, I spotted the heading, “Blain U.S. Tour” and wondered: that can’t be referring to the French cartoonist Christophe Blain, can it?

Well, sure enough, that’s exactly what it was about. According to the article, Blain “will be doing a book tour in the United States sponsored by the French Embassy’s Cultural Services Department.” The only events mentioned are an appearance at Portland’s Floating World Comics (I think I’m the only remaining cartoonist who hasn’t moved to Portland) and a book festival in Los Angeles. I’d love to think there’d be more appearances by the cartoonist, but the French Embassy’s site doesn’t have any info on it, nor could I find anything on the website of Blain’s American publisher, NBM.

So, you may be asking yourself, Who the heck is Christophe Blain? Christophe Blain is in my opinion one of the very best cartoonists working today. His work, to me, has exactly the right balance of abstraction and realism; his linework is somehow loose but precise at the same time; his coloring is gorgeous; and his stories are exciting, dramatic and poignant yet at the same time exciting and fun. The series to check out from NBM is Isaac the Pirate, two volumes of which are available at the moment. Hopefully the third is in the works. I believe it’s already out in French. Here’s a typically gorgeous page from the series:

I find it odd that he’s not more known here in the states. (I guess I find it odd that more European cartoonists in general aren’t known here.) I have, though, noted his influence in a few American cartoonists recently, most prominently Nick Bertozzi, particularly in his great online story about Sir Ernest Shackleton. Likewise, British cartoonist Nick Abadzis’ Laika seems to me to have a bit of Blain-vibe to it visually.

Anyway, I’m keeping my eyes open for more dates in the U.S…

Update: 

Courtesy of Chris Pitzer of Adhouse, there’s plenty more info from the original press release over on Chris Butcher’s blog, including the list of appearances, all of which unfortunately are on the West Coast.  Have fun hanging out with Christophe Blain, ya’ damn hippies!