Ben Towle is a five-time Eisner Award nominated cartoonist with a lengthy bibliography. His first book, Midnight Sun, was published by SLG Publishing in 2007 and is a historical fiction tale inspired by the real-life crash of an airship expedition in 1928. Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean is also a work of historical fiction. Published by Disney/ Hyperion Books in 2010, it features the famous aviator and her quest to fly across the Atlantic. Oyster War, published in 2015 by Oni Press, is a nautical fantasy about dastardly pirates looting the seas and the pragmatic Commander and crew hired to stop them. Ben’s latest book, Four- Fisted Tales: Animals in Combat, published by Dead Reckoning in 2021, shares stories of animals that have fought alongside soldiers throughout the centuries. Ben currently serves as a professor of Illustration at the Columbus College of Art and Design.
1) From cats and dogs to dolphins and bears, Four-Fisted Tales tells the stories of animals’ various roles in war. What drew you to this material, and why did you decide to tell these animals’ amazing stories?
I’ve always been an animal lover, but the idea behind what would eventually become Four-Fisted Tales was pretty random. I was looking for something online (I can’t remember exactly what) and just stumbled on a Wikipedia page that was a list of animals that had played significant roles in various historical military conflicts. I did a quick read-over of the list and immediately thought, “This would make a great comics anthology!”
Initially, I’d imagined the project as exactly that: a big anthology where a bunch of cartoonists (or cartoonist/writer teams) would each select some animal war story and do a short comic about it. I had a few back-and-forths with publishers about this model, but I could never get anything worked out with a decent page rate for contributors. The version that finally came together, obviously, was all me!
2) Most artists dread drawing animals, but you’ve made an entire book about heroic animals on the front lines. How did you become interested in this subject? Is there an animal you hate to draw? Do you have a favorite?
As mentioned above, there was a fair amount of sheer chance involved, but I have an interest in history, and military history in particular, so the subject matter was a good fit! I feel like every artist probably has the same answer to the “animal you hate to draw” question: %&^$in’ horses, man! They’re weird-looking creatures with peculiar anatomy. My beat-up copy of Jack Hamm’s How to Draw Animals really came in handy. I feel Iike I’m… OK(?) at drawing horses now, though. Favorite animals? Probably birds. I don’t think I’m a ton better at drawing them than other animals, but they’re really fun to draw, especially pelicans (my favorite bird), which I drew a lot of for Oyster War, but, well, they’re not really known for their combat abilities, so not so much pelican-drawing in Four-Fisted Tales.
3) You clearly do copious amounts of research before diving into the time period of the books you’ve worked on. How has that research translated to the page? What advice would you give to someone attempting the historical fiction genre? Is there a time period you enjoy more than others?
I’m probably not as rigorous as I should be about being true-to-history with my books. Whenever it comes down to historical accuracy vs. a good story, I’m always gonna favor the latter. I think I gravitated toward history and historical fiction (and folktales before that) because I’m weaker at writing than drawing. Working in these genres allows me to start with something rather than coming up with an original narrative from whole cloth.
I don’t really have a favorite era, but I like drawing sailing ships and flying vehicles like old planes and airships, so the period after air travel was possible, but before commercial airlines became ubiquitous is kind of my sweet spot.
As far as advice goes, I’d mainly say (and this goes for other types of reality-based narrative, like memoir, for example) that just because you’re dealing with something that actually happened, you shouldn’t just throw things like character development, story structure, etc, out the window. It’s still your job to tell a good, well-structured story, and if you don’t, no one is going to want to read it. True story or not, it’s your job to put together a compelling visual narrative.
4) Many of your books are created single-handedly. What is your process like? How does it compare to partnering with a writer as you did with the Amelia Earhart book?
The Amelia Earhart book is the exception to the rule; all my other books are me solo. Honestly, my process changes with pretty much every book I do. The one thing that does remain pretty much consistent through all of my books, though, is that I avoid any part of the process that separates the words and the pictures. Those two things operating together are what comics is, so it makes no sense to me (in a work you’re doing entirely yourself ) to pry those things apart and do a movie-style “script” and then later have to smush those words back together with pictures to make the comic itself.
I have, though, enjoyed working collaboratively on things, such as with Sarah Stewart Taylor and Jason Lutes on the Amelia book, or Alex de Campi on a story we did for Creepy. You get an interesting insight into how other people visualize narrative on the page. Alex, for example, has a much more film-like conceptualization of comics than I do. Her panel descriptions almost always describe things in terms of a physical space, what’s in the foreground, middleground, and background. I have a much more diagrammatic concept of comics–probably from reading a lot of early 20th century newspaper comics.
5) All of your books are of various sizes ranging from Midnight Sun being a mere 5.5” x 6.5” to the massive 9.5” x 12.25” Oyster War. How much do you take size in to consideration when you are creating a new work? How do you think size affects the reader?
Size is pretty much the most important practical consideration for me when I start making a book. The trim size of the book in conjunction with the fact that the lettering has to be a certain size to be legible means that the size of the book dictates how many panels can be on each page and how much of each of those panels is available for drawings vs. lettering.
Midnight Sun was designed, drawn, and lettered to be bigger than it was actually published. If I ever get it reprinted, I’ll make sure it’s done bigger, at the correct size. Oyster War was deliberately made at the same trim size as European albums like the Tintin books, a deliberate reflection of its visual influences.
So, the size has a design-based effect on the reader, but it also affects its feel as an object. A book should be comfortable in the hand to read. I love those huge artists’ editions–and the whole point of them is to reproduce original art at size–but they’re not very pleasant to hold and flip through. I think something between a standard US trade paperback and a European album is the ideal size feel-wise for a longform comic.
6) Many of your books were either black and white or monochrome, as opposed to Oyster War, which is richly colored. Why did you make that departure? At what point in production do you decide on coloring?
You absolutely need to make a decision about coloring before you start drawing. The style of rendering you use for a project needs to account for whether there will eventually be color involved. If color will be there to do things like indicate light source, delineate different objects via value, etc, then you don’t need your linework to do those things. This is why comics that were intended to be black and white rarely work well when color is added later. (Notable exceptions are things like Bone and The Babysitters Club, which look great both in black and white and in color.)
With Oyster War, I went with full color because, at that time, I was getting interested in color as a storytelling tool. Most comics coloring isn’t particularly interesting to me since it’s usually not adding a whole lot of new information. Adding red to a line drawing of an apple isn’t really doing anything story-wise. But I was, at the time, reading a French comic, a Western called Gus, that was colored (mostly) by the colorist Walter, and he was emulating a lot of the flat color of an older comic, Lucky Luke (also a French Western). He was using a lot of non-literal color, color to indicate a character’s emotional state, a character’s thoughts, to differentiate between flashbacks and real-time, etc. That got me interested in coloring my work fully, as I did in Oyster War, and that’s also why there are a lot of odd color choices in the book.
7) You recently posted on your website about Steve Ditko’s influence on the work of creators such as Charles Burns, Gilbert Hernandez, and Dan Clowes. Has Ditko influenced your own style? Is there anyone else that stands out as an influence?
I’m more of an appreciator of Ditko than someone who’s really influenced by him. My biggest influences are a lot of old newspaper cartoonists, people like Roy Crane (Captain Easy), E.C. Segar (Thimble Theater/Popeye), and Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace). I also love a lot of French cartoonists. My favorites are Jacques Tardi, Christophe Blain, Hugo Pratt, and Jean-Claude Mézierès.
8) What is the most important lesson that you tell the students of your illustration class? What visual elements do you try to display when designing a character for the first time?
I teach several different illustration classes, but I guess the one underlying thing I try to get across to all of my students is that usually the difference between a really successful project and one that’s bad isn’t a matter of skill; it’s a matter of effort. Do you have to have basic drawing/drafting skills? Yes, of course. But when I see work that’s sub-par, 99% of the time, it’s just that the artist wasn’t willing to sit down, dig in, and put in the time and effort to make it as good as it needs to be.
With character design in particular, I hope the main things that my students take away is that all the decisions you make about how a character looks are design decisions, and everything that’s designed is communicating something.
9) You presented the “Principles of Page and Panel Layout” panel at 2022’s Cartoon Crossroads Columbus. What do you think is the most important takeaway from that lesson? Are you planning any other panels in the future?
Yeah, that talk seems to be strangely popular. I think it’s creeping up toward 400 views on YouTube! The main takeaway, hopefully, is just that panel layout is really, really important to putting together a comic. You can have the best drawing chops in the world, but if you can’t put drawings together into a sequence that clearly conveys a story, you won’t be a successful cartoonist.
That talk was part of the Thursday and Friday “Talk and Teach” events at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, which I do some volunteer programming work for. If there’s a hole we need to fill in the schedule, sure, I’ll jump in and do something, but the way the 2023 festival is shaping up, if anything, I think we’ll have too many good talks by guests
to fit in the available slots!
I’d given some thought to doing a series of talks like that and just putting them on YouTube, but I’ve got limited time, and I need to focus on getting my next book done.
10) If you were a soldier during wartime, pinned down in a foxhole by enemy fire, what famed cartoon animal would you most like to have by your side?
Hmmm… I guess my answer depends on whether I’m going on the offensive or whether I’m just gonna hunker down and try to stay alive. If the former, my choice is Mighty Mouse, who’s essentially an animal version of Superman, but without any sort of Kryptonite/Achilles’ heel. If the latter, I’d pick Bernice the Whiffle Hen from Thimble Theater/ Popeye. She’s a magical creature that gives anyone who rubs her head amazing good luck. Sounds like I’d need it.