Benjamin Ruth

United States

I started drawing when I was about 5. I saw Dragon Slayer on tv and became obsessed with all things fantasy. Since it was still the 80s, those old Ray Harryhausen movies were still on every Saturday afternoon, which only feuled my obsession. I started drawing wizards and dragons, usually fighting each other off. Then along came Return of the Jedi...and that was it, I was a geek. I basically taught myself to draw, despite standard elementary school art classes and my artistic father giving me pointers here and there (which I didn't listen to), but I never knew what I wanted to do with my talent. Then came the X-MEN Saturday morning cartoon, and I knew I had to get into comic books. So at 13 I started to draw my own characters, usually based on myself and people I know, I.E. teams based on people who were at a memorable party. I only collected a few comics over the years and got into the Uncanny X-men line with MAD!'s penciling and Tim Townsend's inking, mostly for the artwork. Since then I've created about 200 different characters within the dozen or two series ideas for my "REBEL Comx multiverse." I was also my highschool newspaper cartoonist. For two years I did editorial and political cartoons. My senior year the editor just gave me the lower portion of a page and said I could do anything I wanted with it. This led to my only superhero ever to be published: The Phantom Tiger - a masked teen vigilante who haunts the high school's corridors protecting misfits and fights off some experiments gone wrong.

After coming out of the closet at 17, some of my older characters were revamped (at least in my head)to include LGBT characters or story lines, And I eventually created more. In my senior year of high school, I was accepted into the Joe Kubert School—at the time, the only school in the country completely focused on comic book art—but could not attend because of financial issues. Instead, I spent a semester at my local community college, but quit after realizing that they wouldn't be able to help me get into the comic book biz. It also certainly didn't stop my learning process as I became even more interested in history, religion, and philosophy and could probably confound a few priests with their own religious history (something I take pride in as I grin evilly, hehehe). While I do have ideas for my various series, I've only ever written 12 solid issues for one of them. I'm in the process of rewriting it to make sure continuity is ensured. After writing it, i decided it would make a great prequel story to one of my other series. Things are sometimes a little backwards in my head.

Currently I work a full time job to pay the bills but do artistic work on the side, which has been made much easier with my brother teaching me to use Photoshop. Any supervisor or manager I've ever had says the same thing to me when the walk past my desk and see me doodling (which is ALWAYS)..."What are you still doing HERE?" My style has been influenced by classic, anime, and erotic comic book artists (though I'm always worried someone will think I'm just a Joe Phillips rip off), and I often lean more towards one style depending on the project. In the past I have done poster, playbill, and t-shirt designs for high school and community theater productions, have been commissioned to draw people's RPG characters, sold paintings, designed tattoos, created decor for holiday projects at home and work, done face painting and Halloween/special effects makeup, done costume and character designs for other people's movie or video game projects, sold posters for charity, and (most notably) illustrated "Bandit to the Rescue" - a children's book published in 2005. In April of 2008, two of my posters that sold at a charity auction caught the attention of the editor of GAYDAR Magazine, a local Lehigh Valley gay news publication. Shortly after the posters sold, I was contacted by GAYDAR for an interview and just after the interview, I was also asked by the editor to create an image for the COVER of the Summer 2008 Issue. Unfortunately, the editor was later convinced by several designers to use a photo of a model as they usually do. They did end up using my image, but made it too small to see an detail and placed it poorly on the Letter from the Editor page. The GAYDAR article was spotted by submissions directors for a prominant distributor of LGBT greeting cards and calendars and I am working on greeting card designs for them. I also created some logo designs for Pride of the Greater Lehigh Valley's annual Pride festival and am current working on illustrations for an upcoming book of LGBT youth short stories. The same publisher just had me spend a month designing a cover for another book along the same lines and then, after approving the pencil sketch, me finishing it and sending it it, decided it wasn't the style he was hoping for. Oh well. There...now you're all caught up. :~)Contact me if you'd like some work done!
REBELComx@aim.com

Current Residence: Kuhnsville, PA
Favourite genre of music: Rock, Dance...anything but rap and country
Operating System: a Frankenstein's monster of a PC
MP3 player of choice: Windows Media
Favourite cartoon character: Stewie Griffin
Personal Quote: Man's worst folly is to think he was created by gods and forget that it was the other way aroun