Geek Syndicate Issue 5 | Page 47

Geek Syndicate
It wasn’t until a fateful visit to Canada in late 2000 that brought Neil back into the fold. “I was living in Vancouver at the time,” he says, “the film XMen had just come out. I had this joke with a friend of mine that he was like Wolverine. The next day I walk past this shop on Granville Street. They had this little Wolverine doll in the window and I thought I would buy it as a joke present. I went in, the shop assistants heard my British accent and started talking to me as if I personally knew Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis. I had to explain to them that not only did I not know them - I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t read comics. They looked at me with big eyes, went to the back of the shop, brought back Watchmen, and told me with such passion “BUY THIS”. I bought it feeling vaguely stupid about buying something I didn’t even want…but it changed my life.” Alan Moore’s Watchmen ignited something in Neil and started him on the road to eventually becoming a comics creator himself, as he explains: “I realised it doesn’t have to be superheroes – it’s just a medium. You can tell any story you like. It can be really thought provoking and clever. That’s what Watchmen did for me. It blew away my preconceptions.” That was in 2000, but it wasn’t until ten years later that Neil finally put pen to paper and drafted his first ever story that eventually culminated in his first Twisted Dark anthology. “In 2010 I started [working on] a project in Qatar. It was actually a fairly easy project so I was home by seven in the evening - to a consultant that is very early. My friends and family were all back in the UK so I thought I should try something productive. So I tried writing stories.” really liked the stories so I got them made.” With scripts in hand the next job for Neil was to find an artist. “The very first time I tried to find an artist I didn’t know what I was doing.” He recalls trying several different comic shops in London, seeking a professional artist, during a break in his travels, all with limited to little success. “I still couldn’t find an artist. I wrote to the Royal College of Art, I looked for people on the Internet… eventually you find people you want to work with.” Admittedly it wasn’t all smooth sailing, “I had quite a bad hit rate at the start in terms of quality but you learn how to do the business as you do it. I’d never done this before but no one who is going into comics has done this before.” By April 2011 his first book of Twisted Dark came out. The formation of his own company, T Publications, sprang up out of his efforts to get his work more widely distributed. “I showed a few publishers [Twisted Dark]. One said ‘yes’ but the terms they were offering I didn’t like.” The terms he described involve the publisher taking 50% of the profits when the writers and artists do most of the work. “I happen to know just from the business side of things, they don’t take any of the risk – so why should they take so much of
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Image © GT Publications, 2011

The inspiration for his first story came from his own observations while working in Qatar. “I was looking out of this gleaming brand new skyscraper. I was in my suit and looking out the window. It’s so hot and humid there. You would walk across the room and you’d be sweating. It’s nasty. In my air-conditioned office I was looking down at these Indian labourers who were working really hard in ridiculously hot conditions. I know they are treated really badly. I thought I should write a story about that. So that’s where my first story came from. Which is in Twisted Dark volume one.” He didn’t just stop there, and he penned a few more stories – at first only showing them to friends and family. “People