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BALANCING THE ADORABLE AND THE HORRIBLE

Cornell Grad Kickstarts His Own Comic Book Series

By Andrew Sullivan

The tale of Beorn: e Littlest Viking opens at the site of a tavern where the story’s main character, Beorn, throws back a couple mugs of chocolate milk while he expresses his desperate desire for any sort of adventure or journey, something that would carve out his own legacy.

Ben Bender, the author of the comic book saga, found himself in a som ewhat similar situation about 10 years ago. e Texas native and Cornell graduate (2007) had rekindled his childhood passion for illustration a er attending a Comic-Con event in Austin. As a nine- or ten-year-old he’d spent time doodling sketches of iconic comic book/strip characters such as Gar eld, Ninja Turtles and Spider Man.

“I hadn’t drawn for like 20 years, but whenever I saw that it made me remember like I really used to love drawing,” Bender said.

He began his return to illustration by drawing and selling fan art, though a er a while he developed an urge to create something of his own. He developed the character Beorn, a rambunctious, short-statured barbarian warrior, and began writing the story as a full Sunday page comic strip before realizing that he was going to need a larger medium to properly tell the plot.

In 2020, Bender launched his rst Kickstarter campaign to fund a single-issue comic book. His campaign asked for $750 to fund the project. In just the rst day the campaign was launched, he received roughly $20,000.

“I launched it on my 40th birthday and a friend of mine texted me kind of late in the morning,” Bender said. “I launched the rst thing in the morning. He texted me late in the morning, ‘Hey man. Have you gone to check out your Kickstarter,’ and I was like, ‘Nah dude I gotta wait.’ I just had knots in my stomach [from] nerves. And he goes, ‘Well, you need to go look,’ and so I went to look and it was already funded, well past where it was that I needed.”

Now, two years later, the rst issue of Beorn: e Littlest Viking is set to hit the shelves of comic book stores July 13.

As much as he enjoyed drawing as a kid, Bender does not recall writing his own comic strips growing up. He does remember reading comics o en, though, which le an impression on him at a young age and can be seen in his illustrations.

“I had people hit me up and say, ‘Oh man, I really like it. Your style reminds me of,’ and they would mention things like Asterix and Obelix and Smurfs, things from that Franco Belgian style of comics. And as I went and was looking at it…it smacked me in the face. My mom was in the Air Force and we had traveled, and when we lived in Germany, I had a diet of the Smurfs and the Smurfs comics and Asterix and Obelix. So it was these crazy seeds that were planted well before I started really doing it.”

Bender’s style exhibits strong in uences from famous cartoonist Bill Watterson, the author of Calvin and Hobbes, and Beorn is, as he describes it, a sort of “love letter” to such a comic strip.

“ ere’s just something about the…the aesthetics of it,” he said. “How vibrant [Watterson’s] inking is. All of my favorite artists, I’ve realized, I’m drawn to their inking styles and it usually has something to do with and energy to the lines, to the way that they do it. And I feel like he is just—and so many people in the comics world say the same thing—a master of using that brush in his own way.’” e concept of originality and developing one’s unique style of illustration was something that Bender grappled with early on,

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