sneak peek

Occupy Louisiana

I've been doing some poster for OccupyLA, which is a group of students at UNO working against the large cuts UNO has been subjected to.

Sunday Sunday Sunday!

What do we do at an anarchist picnic? Whatever we want.

Saints VS Cardinals

Hey folks!

I whipped up this flyer for a CCAA run event. We're showing the game as a way to talk about SB 1070.

Some pencils for a writer. The story follows a journalist for a daily newspaper that reports on the extraterrestrial sightings.

Three pages for writer McConville, for a UK anthology.

Here's a couple pages I did for Moore.

Lil bit

here's a small of one of the pages I'm doing for Rory. I don't think he'll mind. I based the cemetery on Bonaventure in Savannah, GA, where I lived for four years.

Lil Louie

Here's some character sketches for a three page comic I'm doing for writer Rory Mcconville.

It's about a Tom Thumb type fella, who out wits a thug and his toady.

goin native

during my jaunt into Canada I whipped up a few ink drawings for a show coming up in November.
Here's a few of them, I'll post more later.

1st page of chpt. 6

In Tha T!

Just gorged myself on all you can eat sushi and club soda!

The Berk

After two long car rides I'm in Mass for a couple days to see mom and wander around my hometown for a day or two.
Mom's let a lot of the indigenous flora grow up on her property so it's covered in sunflowers, wild carrot, raspberries, Strawberries, thistles, and heaps of plenty other forgeable plants. It looks like a wild fairy land, an I don't use that phrase lightly.

Fairies are no joke.

I remembered that she had a stone dulcimer that Nana had given her and she wanted Kate and us to have it, so I might add it to our ever expanding pile of noise makers that we can't really play well. God help us when we move again.
If I can get a ride up to Stockbridge, a rural town of Rockwell fame, I'm going to sneak around my old reform school campus. It's bee abandoned and torn up, but as some of you know my next book is set there so I have to snap lots of pictures before they tear it all down.

Chapter 5 of Tug Benson is really stumping me. It's going to feature Willy Pickens, the busker from chapter one and a new character (yes another one, my writing teacher is cursing my name somewhere.) that was introduced a little in chapter four. Most of the book has been a downer and at chapter 5 it starts to pick-up when this new character starts to monkey wrench Whitworth and Gompers. I want it to really look and feel different from the first five chapters.

I'll post some sketches in a bit, as I've committed myself to doing lot's of mock-ups of the chapter until I'm satisfied.

until then ride free!

board

I know, terrible photos. I just wanted to show it off real quick before I sent it off to the gallery.

deleted scenes

So I spent all day yesterday reformatting all my big hooking comic pages and dropping them into my mini-comic template, which just involves buckets of wrist cramps and watching the rainbow pinwheel spin. At the end I realized I had miscounted the page amount when I made the dummy copy so I had three blank pages in the middle of my comic. So basically I spent 12+ hours on my book and in order to fix my mistake I’d have to spend another 12. So I did some quick coffee fueled thinking and decided to just add three brand new pages in the middle and keep it all formatted as is.

What I did was add a short scene of Eddie in his room. It’s after he walks defeated from Whitworth’s mansion. The three pages start after this one.

I don’t think I’ll include these pages into the final book, but it I think they’re kind of cool for the mini-comic.

Zine almost done!

cover

cooking cooking cooking.

We spent ten hours yesterday waiting for Kate's hand to get stitched up and then it turned out that it had been way to long and they couldn't stitch it anymore! ARGH!

So we're a little baked today. On the up side I got to use my wilderness first aid book (well actually I stole it from Brand-on. Thanks buddy!) and do some sketches for the new book. I'll post those in a bit maybe.

inset for cover-page.

new zine comin.

Cooking along on a big Tug zine for prospect 1.5 that's going to be going on in September here in NOLA. It's great that despite the scarcity of a lively art scene in many southern cities New Orleans maintains large events and tons of galleries.

The image up top is the cover page for the new zine, it's based off of Norman Rockwell's painting Freedom From Want. Of course the plates and food have been changed to the town, Whitworth's mansion, the hooverville, and the factories. The drawing also depicts the social and economic hierarchy, with the bosses and police at the top and the workers at the bottom. It's the most conceptual drawing I've done in a while. I know going to say, "But Ben, Freedom From Want was painted in forty three, that's ten years after your story. Rockwell started painting professionally well before the 20's and his subjects have always depicted romanticizations of american life, so it still seems appropriate to spin of his visual themes.

Something I'd always wished I touched on was the disparity between the depiction of america in entertainment and the harsh reality during that time. Maybe it's not too late.

they'll be lots of these.

Here's another drawing that accompanies an article for our Bp spill news paper. Basically the author is pointing out that the BP Logo looks like a green buttonhole. Trust me, there are also hard hitting pieces of journalism in the newspaper as well.

Shaw looses his winker.

I'm working on the last page for this chapter now. I managed to be only four pages over my goal finishing at 29 instead of a 25.
I'll be taking a month long break to go on the road for a bit. Nothing to ambitious, we're planning to go up to Canada and see some friends. Though we'll have the cats in tow. I'd feel bad leaving them if a storm hit, wiped out our house and covered the kitties in toxic sludge. So, um, Canada will be a hoot!

The Struggle Continues

There were for an article about the 11 dead rig workers.

Things are coming together here in NOLA around actions against BP, there's a lot of groups chalk full of active members. We're seeing more and more people coming in from out of town, that want to use their skills and experience to help take direct-action against corporate control and government negligence. This is cool as long as their here to help and not assume we need them to run the show. NOLA is our city.

The local anti-authoritarian group is making a newspaper dedicated to distributing info on the spill and the issues surrounding it, as well as the anarchist perspective on corporate occupation of the gulf and our community. It'll be called the Raging Pelican. There will be a wordpress version eventually here: http://ragingpelican.wordpress.com/. There' nothing there yet so don't bother looking.

I've been helping out the mag by doing some spot illustrations.

This was for an article called "Lessons Learned," that surveyed the many insistences were BP has chosen to avoid taking responsibility for crisis' it has created.

Here's a video of a little 70 person protest/rowdy walking tour/water-balloon fight that was put together July 6th.

other than that, I drew my first explosion!

Oh tyrannicide, will you never not be edifying?

doin stuffs

Soz I don't have much to tell you, but it's been a while since I last posted some stuff so here it goes.

Heroes Con! It was a hoot. Kate and I slept on floors and in backyards, ran around back alleys, and even managed to fit the convention in. I meet Ken Dahl(aka Gabby Shulz) for the first time. I knew his work was sweet, but who knew he was such a nice guy? We talked to him for while trying to get him to visit us in NOLA, which is a hard sell due to the oppressive heat, a crime rate that leaves Juarez in the dust, and our biblical style disasters. Anyway, it's crazy awesome here and everyone should come before we're over run my mole people or lazer-eyed vampires or magma rain. I gave AD house one of my zines to consider, not holding my breath waiting for their call though. I also met Joseph Lampert, who is all types of badass. I foresee myself ripping him off in the near future. I also got to look at Guy Davis from over the steep sweaty humps of fan-boys and gals, no hope in getting to talk to him though, sigh. One day my prince will come.

Also I've been doing a short for B. Clay Moore of Hawaiian Dick and Battle Hymn, which has been going real well. Here's a tiny tiny sample of a panel.

There's a lot going on here in NOLA around the spill. Like most disasters two groups emerge, those reacting to the spill as a single event and those reacting to the dynamics around the spill as well as the spill itself. I've taken this opportunity of sorts to apply my limited skills to a group comprised of activists reacting to the dynamics around the spill. New Orleans is scrappy and seems to ban together fairly easily (save for the handful of moneyed folks of course.). We've had one very successful event. I sense the world famous american indifference creeping in though. Our group is planning many other public participatory actions but I fear this won't be very well attended. The gulf fills up with black goo and people just want to go shopping, eat, and fuck in peace, business as usual. I don't know what's a harder fight, the abolishment of indifferent selfish government and companies or of indifferent selfish people.

Anyway, expect more fun stuff from Tug. I was thinking today that my book is comprised mostly of assholes in various forms.

for example:

what a dick! If it's an conciliation most of these guys get what's coming. That's the "fiction" part of this historical fiction comic. ha!

colored some pages.

Here's a couple pages I colored for a zine I pasted around at the Heroes con. Had a lot of fun, slept in a tent, saw a lot of great art, and met some awesome artists. I spent the night before we made the long drive putting together zines to give to publishers. as it turns out there aren't many publishers at Heroes, so now I know.

new favorite quote.

"There is but one way to know the truth, and that is not a golden one. It is fraught with toil and sacrifice and perhaps ridicule. The seeker of the truth must be fearless, he must not be afraid to enter the innermost holies of holies, and to tear down the veils of superstition that hang about any human and so-called divine institution. It is the truth that makes men free. If the truth tears down every church and government under the sun, let the truth be known and this truth only will be known when men cease to swallow the capsules of ancient doctors of divinities and politics; and when men begin to seek the truth in the records of history, politics, religion, and science."

Charles Austin Beard, 1898

Killruso inked

killruso

Oh the magic hot mess that are my pencils. I'm working on a drawin of Robinson Coruso killing a coconut for a bud.

Missing the west coast. Anybody want to drive me there? Will provide all the drool.

Zounds.

Just finished the page at the top, which'll pop up a little while later. The bottom page is the latest as of Monday.

The great New Orleans hot-press bristol drought of 2010 is finally over. For some reason the only art supply stores like to pull all the 14x17 pads from the shelves just to raise my blood pressure. I went to my usual paper spot and the owner told me they'd decided to buy this kind of gimmicky stuff that was vellum on one side and, I dunno, some kind of bullshit on the other. Sons-a-bitches. This is my life people, sitting around in my underwear and ranting online in the morning about paper. I got to get outta here.

Anyway, if you're keeping up with Tug let me know what you think of it. I'm always looking for critiques.

Goar!!!

I got burned out drawing klan members so I did a few quickies for my buddies daily music site. Teh brutal no? I'm most proud of the rainbow scream.