Ben Caldwell's Dare Detectives

Ben Caldwell showed up on the landscape at the Drawing Board a few years back and started a deluge of amazing drawings which is for most a good reason (among many, but this about Ben, see?) to hang around that board . Drawing after drawing, it was a welcome torrent of verve and style done in pencil and glides like skates on ice. Pretty soon we all had Ben C, his call sign, folders on our hard drives full of them. Excerpt from the Dark Horse website on the Dare Detectives:

The wild and wondrous vision of cartoonist extraordinaire Ben Caldwell, The Dare Detectives throws Disney-esque illustration into the pop-culture blender to create a screwball smoothie of epic proportions. Reformed crook Maria Dare has assembled a team of misfits to crack the world's weirdest cases! They have brains ... they have guts ... but they don't have a clue!

As soon as we started asking who this dude is, we find right in our neighborhood megabookstores is a book made by none other than Ben C himself. Action! Cartooning is one of very few books that you'd see in your local B&N worth flipping pages through, better yet buying. Most of these types of books (there's a niche of them. Sounds like Kanga) that purports to teach the unwary how to draw in some style is full of hooey.

Here's a sketch of Sarah having a bad dream with a familiar toothy entity hovering over her. Awesome, eh?





Dare Detectives Da website.
Dark Horse published it.
Barnes and Noble link to buy Dare Detectives