Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1124104
2 8 P E R S P E C T I V E | J U L Y / A U G U S T 2 0 1 9 Benton Jew As a child growing up in Sacramento, CA, I drew my own comics and made little animated Super 8 films with my twin brother. I went to The Academy of Art/USF in San Francisco. Started working at George Lucas' visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic around 1988, right out of art school. Stayed there for thirteen years, doing art for feature films and commercials, including Ghostbusters 2, The Mask, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Men in Black, The Mummy. I left the Bay Area for greener pastures and headed for Los Angeles on 9/11. I worked on Terminator 3, The Day After Tomorrow, The Chronicles of Riddick, Bolden, The Incredible Hulk, G.I. Joe 1 & 2, Pirates of the Caribbean 4. More recent projects include Wonder Woman, Logan, Venom and Mulan. In my spare time I do comics. Some of the projects include backup stories in Marvel's Agents of Atlas #1 and Hulk Family #1. I appeared in the small press anthologies Zowie Deux, Komikswerks: Thrills and Chills, Secret Identities, The Adventures of Unemployed Man, Bela Lugosi's Tales From the Grave. I've also put together several self-published comics, including the Babes in Space anthology (featuring several ILM and Pixar artists); a sketchbook called Striking Works and a mini-crime comic Art of Crime. I did a self-published comic about witchcraft in colonial New England called The Gulegodt. I recently did a self- published, full-color trade paperback of my art called Old's Kool. The Last Fight is a truncated version of a graphic novel I wanted to do over ten years ago. It's basically the ending of the story squeezed into three pages. Maybe I'll actually go back and finish the whole thing some day. I was inspired visually by the Martin Scorcese film, Raging Bull. The story is kind of a Twilight Zone-type story as we follow the last few moments of a boxer's life as he contemplates his less than honest career. The story is kind of a pre- death hallucination after the boxer gets knocked out. I wanted a '50s black- and-white movie style, except for the last panel, which is less stylized and in color. I drew the story with an older version of Manga Studio and did the color in Photoshop.