cluck cluck mo fuck!

this was going to be a spoke card for a alley cat race here in the dirty but it fell through oh well. I think it's a little over the top, I blame it on watching too much super jail.

tug benson: introduction page 2

poor doggy.

the gospel of tug benson introduction page 1

this is the first page of my tug benson web-comic.

3 am page 5

alright, here's page five of my Tug Benson comic. Hopefully my web-comic site will be up at the end of November, so you can read the story in order.

jiggs

columbia's revolution

by Columbia I don't mean the country, rather the original personification of the USA. I did this for the recess cover.

Oh those poor rich folks!

did this for a new mag in Savannah called recess, it's kind of a throw back for me.

The Pack

Oh Hudson, my lovely lady. My little mill town is so remote and the gravel roads so winding to her center that truckers swear that Hudson floats freely between the Mason-Dickson and the Forty-ninth parallel. There is a thread of truth there.
The fall had brought an early flurry and crippling economic misfortune nation wide. Nearly every man woman and child was employed by the Hudson Valley Lumber Company, the company kept its money in the Western Federal Bank. When the market fell it took every bank in the country down with it. The morning we all heard the news they found Boss Thompson’s body three floors below his balcony. When the workers went in at the morning whistle they found a note and locked doors. The mill couldn’t pay anyone’s salaries, everyone was sent home without a weeks pay. At home they found that the houses that they lived in, which were owned by the mill, were being foreclosed on them and the families were sent out into the unyielding frost. With no money to move to another town, most families took all they owned and set-up tar paper and tin shacks near the dump south of town. So in this way the little town of Hudson moved five miles south of itself.
I had no business driving my heap of a car anywhere. It had a shot transmission, the carburetor had a hitch in its giddy-up, the tires were bald, and the radiator had a runny nose. It was a sorry sight. It wasn’t the cars fault, my Packard had become the manifestation of the deep loathing of the financial advantage I had over most of the citizen’s of Hudson. It was my whipping boy. But a cowboy needs a horse and a college boy needs a ride to his campus. I rode my whipped stallion down to the grayed town center to McCoy Auto, a red brick hovel owned by an old friend named Marks. I haven’t the faintest idea who McCoy is.
If I was kind I’d say he was stout, but really he was fatter than any man should be in times of financial strife. But I knew his spirit; there wasn’t a man more giving. Despite the increasing chill, reams of frail, shaggy men stamped the morning powder with determined feet. The marred snow rose and mixed with the sunlight and covered the queues of men. The glaze of white made the shivering men look like apparitions. They came out to fill the precious few jobs that would crop up. Every morning throngs appeared outside the mill doors to fill positions that were already gone like a name written in water.
When I pulled into the garage Marks was berating the three nappy headed boys he’d hired to sweep glass and mop up grease. They seemed to spend more time next to the radio than behind a broom. He looked like an emphatic preacher before an indifferent throng. They ran their big dirty shoes through the gravel and passed jovial glances beneath Marks’ glowering. One couldn’t blame them, there wasn’t but two cars in the lot, business and therefore dirt was sparse.
“Morning Boss, my Packard’s on its last leg,” I said stepping out of the car.
“I bet that last one’s got a limp in too. You know times are too tough to throw money in pyre like that Packard, you should learn how to tinker around on your own.” Mark huffed out with a grin.
“My father was a mechanic,” I said, “I never inherited that gift from him. I’m all thumbs when it comes to working on machines.”
Marks circled my car and smiled again.
“Roll it in boys and jack it up.” A boy yawned. “If words won’t move you my hands sure will, now get on before I clap them on you,” he bellowed. Lazily, the boys took my keys and drove my car into the garage.
“How’s things Marks?” I looked over his face. Marks’ eyes were sunk into his dark face; streaks of grease lined his white beard.
“Nothing another banker with bad news can’t make worse.” He grinned. “A man with clean shoes came by today. My daddy told me to never trust a man with clean shoes. Those kinds of men could never understand more than dollars and cents and they’ll glad hand you into the street to get yours.”
“You get some bad news today?” I asked
“It’s a bad news year.”
“Hard times give us room to grow I guess,” I shrugged and brushes of the seat of a wicker chair.
Marks frowned.
“Grow into what? The only thing growing are rich men’s pockets and starving men at the soup lines. I was out there yesterday talking to father Tom. He said they’ll have to shut the soup kitchen down if Sunday collection doesn’t pick up. Imagine that, even goes in a recession. If God can’t feed the poor, I don’t know who’s left to help.” He lit a cigarette and smirked out a puff of smoke.
“I guess this is why I come to you for a fix up and not to lift my spirits.”
A black cloud from the west descended on the white touched roved of the mill. The lines of men buttoned up their coats and covered their mouths with rags.
Marks watched the cloud blanket the lines of workers. “How many times will clay footed bankers crumble under the weight of their own greed?”
“Our politicians will see us through, that’s what we elect them for.” I stretched my legs out and watch the boys jack my car up.
“Those politicians got the same ideas about poverty that old time Christians had about leprosy, they assume a bodies responsible for their own predicament. Besides, they don’t know what’s going on anymore than the birds in the trees.”
“That’s that red talk; you’ve been letting too many communists cross your door step.”
“White man been covering us in red so long we finally said, okay, we’re red.”
The bulging lines outside of the mill began to thin as distraught men headed back to their tar paper town. I turned to Marks, who was looking out at the men.
“So what’ll we do Marks, how do you hope against hope?”
He stood up and made his way to the shop’s office.
“Capitalism’s for carnivores son, and most of us weren’t gifted the teeth. I just pray you don’t get that kind of hungry,” he muttered. “We’ll get your car going.
The sun lay low in the sky by the time I rolled away from Marks and the boys. I stopped at an intersection a block away I saw him put a for sale sign in his office window. I was the only car on the road and would have been home in minutes, but I took my time and sped away from the oppressive mill and the somber town. When I got home my parents were eating supper. I watched silently as my father chewed on his steak.

3am page 4

GOD! These take a really long time. I like how they're coming out, but the coloring is way too dark. I think I might revert to a limited palette in the next story, we'll see.

yours for the wild,
Ben

The angler

My grandfather shook the sleep of me early in the morning. It had rained all in night like it does every fall and the fish were rubbing the surface of the sea with their backs. Maybe they were anticipating the whole earth filling to the brim and free for them to move around in.

We were to go fishing. My grandfather was not an avid fisherman , but he felt like a man should feel avid about something. I was unimpressed with the notion, however cynicism is the broth in which adolescence floats about.

We made our way down the slick cobblestone street that spanned the little town. We passed an angler. He was old, maybe as old as my grandfather, but the heavy wind of the sea and a life of plunging his hands into the slit bellies of fish had made his face worn, his eyes sunken, and his nails black and thick. The thick rubber pants were caked with dirt and his dense old sweater was soaked through. We looked passed him and down to the docks, which were normally lined with greyed fishing boats. The storm had found it's way into the dock and had thrown many boats into the dock and onto the large rocks on the bay. Men were hoisting buckets of out of flooded fishing vessels or scavenging what they could from wooden carcasses on the shore.

I noticed the angler was carrying a bag on his and a placard that had likely been on the rear of his lost boat that said "Betty." Most men's livelihoods were bound to the health of their ships.
"We're going fishing!" I smiled at the angler, who was glancing our way.
"I don't think he gives a shit," my grandfather muttered.

I caught nothing that day.

The bike brigade on tour

Also the image called Liam got into a local show at Desoto row here in Savannah

fuckin fuck fucky fuck fucky school

I posted this mostly as an example of why I, Ben Passmore, am over college. This is a color sketch of some character for a insipid magazine in Charleston. I hate it and every moment I spend on it and works like it induce waves of dry heaving followed my dread pulling.

Other than this I've gotten involved with a little zine called recess, I'll be doing a comic and a short story for the first issue, so that's a nice reprieve.

yours

3 am to dewberry page three

alright folks I just finished page three, these are taking a whole heck of a lot longer than I thought, yowza!

page 2 of tug gospel