Newsfeed
Printer-Friendly ModeStudent fulfills childhood ambition
Artist receives academic credit for creating comics
January 29, 2007 —
In the second grade, Ben Robinson's teacher encouraged him to keep drawing. Since then, he says forces have pulled him toward comic books, and he is now poised to release a full-length comic as part of an independent study course at SVSU.
"As a kid I started playing a lot of video games and watching cartoons, a whole lot of cartoons," Robinson says. "I just kept getting inspired, inspired, inspired, and then Transformers came along, and it was all over then."
Robinson's comic titled Hip Hop High is based partially off the experiences of his friends in high school and college and his times at Saginaw High School.
His main inspiration, however, came from the 1979 film The Warriors.
"I have the DVD, the soundtrack, and the videogame," he says. "My dad told me to rent it one night, and man, I just fell in love with it. It was just so richly created, with the characters, like you had over 100 or so gangs in New York."
The plot of his comic surrounds a high school talent show. The principal, who secretly wants to give the school a bad name, is directing the show. The show is a competition to see who can produce the best beats and lyrics, where the main group, No Competition, seems to dominate. Another group, Him House, wants to try to stop the principal because they realize what he is up to.
"Back when I was at Saginaw High, it was fun, but it always had this bad reputation," Robinson says. "I wanted to take the fun parts of Saginaw High and kind of just focus it into Hip Hop High. At the same time I wanted to create this 'yeah-right' attitude, like, 'yeah right, they just don't start battling on the sidewalk.'"
Hip Hop High is not Robinson's first publication. He published his first comic book, The Forbidden Aces, in 2003. It included an interactive CD filled with character biographies.
"I first decided to publish the books, but after that, I didn't think that was enough," Robinson says.
The year before Robinson published Forbidden Aces, his mother died and re-inspired him to push forward in her memory. That's when Robinson came up with the idea for his label, Dreamatic. Robinson's mother is featured in the label's logo.
Watching Saturday morning cartoons, playing video games, and reading comic books led Robinson to emulate all of them in his own work.
"I just started re-creating drawings in video games, like Castlevania, one page, one person, one word, but I put them together with string," he says.
Robinson's sister gave him possibly his biggest inspiration in the form of a Batman comic from Image comic company, famous for comics like Spawn and Savage Dragon, done by Todd McFarlane.
"When I first did my cartoon and comic style, like com-toon, a mix between comic and cartoon," he says, "I really got into a lot of Todd McFarlane."
Next, Robinson made a comic called Dusk, whose character, he says, resembled the Dark Knight.
"(Dusk) became one of my characters, a total bite-off of (Batman)," he says. "But it was all sketchy and stuff."
But as he kept drawing, his style continued to evolve.
"Even when I was trying to take my work to Coy's Comics at like 16, they thought I drew like Image, so I just kind of ran with that and slowly evolved from there, to make it my own style," Robinson says.
Once at SVSU, Robinson continued to hone his skills, receiving instruction from Professor Mike Mosher in an independent study course: "Comic Book and Story Creation." The basis for the class is creating a comic book for publication at SVSU.
Since Robinson is a secondary art education major, he is interested in circulating the comic around the Saginaw School District.
"I want to have the teachers wanting to use it for a different type of assignment, maybe to write about," Robinson says. "Just something that everyone can relate to, because this day and age, it's hip hop, there are a few scenes in there where they are rhyming against each other and cracking on one another, but it's all clean, and no profanity; clean comedy, which is the way things used to be in comics and cartoons."
