Geek Syndicate Issue 5 | Page 46

Geek Syndicate
INTERVIEW

Neil Gibson – Businessman turned Storyteller
Image © GT Publications, 2011

He speaks rapid-fire, eager to get each of his incalculable ideas out. A one-time globetrotting management consultant, last year he decided to quit his job and throw his time, his life savings, his skills, and his creativity at the one thing that inspires him most of all: making comics. Neil Gibson comes across as a man with many masks, always changing and jumping from one to another in the space of a few minutes - from canny businessman, to creative genius, to rabid comic book fan. It’s astonishing to meet such a man working in the British Small Press comics scene; it’s quite something else to discover he started his own Small Press publishing company to bring his own works to market. Needless to say, it is a lot to take in. For a man that lives and breathes comic books, you’d think he was a lifelong fan of the medium. Not so: “I’d read comics a little bit when I was younger but I grew out of them,” Neil admits before explaining, “Marvel [Comics] aimed at fourteen year olds. It was always so formulaic for me. Some bad guy gets a new power that is stronger than the good guy, gets beaten up, but somehow at the last moment manages to just win. Then you wash, rinse, repeat. I thought this was boring.”
Neil Gibs