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?