Ben Bishop

Ben Bishop is the Maine kid who wrote to Marvel at age eleven asking for a job—and then grew up to draw the flashback sequences of the New York Times-bestselling Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin alongside TMNT co-creator Kevin Eastman, trusted to design the franchise’s entire next generation. Perfect for fans of Eastman’s TMNT saga, scrappy self-publishing success stories, and action comics that put a human heart inside a ninja shell.

Bishop’s road to the Ronin-verse ran through a kitchen table, not an art school. He moved to Maine in 2004 to study illustration at the Maine College of Art, but when his loans fell through during his sophomore year he asked himself a single question—“if you want to make comics, why don’t you just make comics?”—and answered it with four years of self-teaching that produced Nathan the Caveman, his 300-page self-published debut from 2008. The award-winning Lost Trail: Nine Days Alone in the Wilderness (2011), a graphic novel retelling of the legendary Donn Fendler survival story, won over Maine readers and opened the door to illustration work for Archaia and cover work for IDW Publishing.

The IDW covers became the relationship that changed everything. Bishop joined the creative team on The Last Ronin, drawing the gut-wrenching flashback sequences that carry the saga’s emotional weight, and watched the book become a phenomenon: its collected edition a New York Times bestseller, its second issue the most-printed single issue in IDW history. When Kevin Eastman and Tom Waltz greenlit The Last Ronin: Lost Years, they asked Bishop to design the next generation of Turtles from scratch—he came back with twelve designs and an entirely new future for the franchise. “I had been trying to get on the insides of these TMNT comics since… well, 11 years old,” he told io9. He has since painted the packaging art for the NECA Last Ronin toy line and helped shape the Re-Evolution sequel.

Bishop is just as at home on the creator-owned side of the table. He is the lead artist on Drawing Blood, the semi-autobiographical Image Comics series where Eastman, writer David Avallone, and Bishop turn the origin story of the Turtles into a hallucinatory action-comedy about a cartoonist haunted by his own creations—“the Fellini’s 8½ of comics”, per Publishers Weekly. His own The Aggregate claims the title of the world’s first “Split Decision Comic”: a 240-page post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure full of giant robots and spider-cats, with four beginnings, seven endings, and reader choices in between. It earned a 2018 Ringo Award nomination for Best Original Graphic Novel—the only self-published book on the ballot.

Beyond the Turtles, Bishop illustrated the acclaimed graphic biography The Far Side of the Moon: The Story of Apollo 11’s Third Man, a stark portrait of astronaut Michael Collins—the loneliest man of the moon landing—that Publishers Weekly praised for making “the vastness of space felt in nearly every panel.” He’s drawn Batman, Ghostbusters, Transformers, G.I. Joe, Power Rangers, Savage Dragon, Bloodshot, and Canto, and his beer-label artwork for Mason’s Brewing Company has become a Maine collector’s item. You can find his store, original art, and the fan-club “Bish Club” subscription at bishart.net, and follow his daily pages on Instagram, Twitter, and Bluesky.