Transcript: Scott Hampton - Comic Book Artist

For Arts sake
Episode “Scott Hampton, comic book artist”

Scott: I think that what I'm drawing and painting I am not conscious of anything, except the fact that I'm absorbed into what I'm doing. When it is working, hours will go by and I'm not aware of them. It is the best diet I know for me, I go for eight hours and I don't eat I don't want to eat and it’s weird. It is a strange situation.
Horror is what we try to avoid in our lives, and yet… Jeff, hey how's it going guys that's great please do. Death is a very scary possibility; I mean it is more than that, a scary thing. And as a young person I saw certain things happen that made me really scared of it. And I didn't have much to work with in terms of coping with that. So I was very attracted to catharsis in film and in reading, which allowed me a certain vent for that fear.
So yeah, I am more interested in real horror. And to me that comes from having empathy. What I want is someone to, is basically accept the idea that these people are like people that I know I have been through some of the things that they have been through. I take it for granted that we have this connection, I'm not going to concern myself too much with things other than what is happening to these people as the unusual starts to happen. And then they are up against something that I have feared. And to me that is really the key.
I think that if I make my characters too sympathetic, too cartoony or too likable, then when the scary stuff starts to happen I worry that they will be too concerned about the people and whether or not they will live, then taking in the plot points and the dynamism of the action and the actual arc of the story. To cause empathy without overly, you know without too much sympathy.
The thing that I'm working on right now is a new book, it is a monthly comic book which I've never done. I have been in comics for 25 years; I've never actually done a monthly comic. And it is called Simon Dark. It is written by Steve Niles and I'm doing the art on it. Steve and I are co creators.
It is actually a story about a 17-year-old boy who is composed of different body parts, all youngsters like himself. He is sort of a Frankenstein character, tapestry. It was Steve's I think very good notion to play with the Frankenstein idea but to set up a character at a time when that character is at his most vulnerable and least defined and most at sea. Which are the teenage years, the idea of identity, how we construct ourselves is the core of the storyline.
On the technical side I'm creating it almost as animation. I'm doing all the drawings of the people on separate sheets of paper; all the backgrounds are done on separate sheets of paper. And I'm putting them together in Photoshop, and by that means I am able to create all kinds of convincing environments without having to draw it again and again and again, which is the most laborious part of drawing comics. The beauty of drawing comics with this technique is that I repeat very little. And so I'm going what a wonderful time for me to finally be doing a monthly comic book.
The beauty of the comic to me is in the gutter. The fact that you have this space between the images, it is in that space it is in this space that the reader is able to invest himself and to create that hinge of action or what ever between the two panels. It can be something as dramatic as someone lifting their like to kick someone, and then the next panel that person is flying through the air, while it is in that gutter that the cake happened. But you see it and you know it and you fill that in. And of course as the reader you're going to fill that in, in the most interesting way possible. I feel that there is no other reading and looking experience like it. The fact that you are obliged to be a participant is I think particular to comics.