Meet the Exhibitors - Paul Thompson

Who are you?
Paul Thompson. I’m an artist and writer, working in digital art, photography and comics.

What do you do?
I write and draw comics, Tales of the Hollow Earth is now in its third issue: Dark goings on in a coastal city of peculiar institutions, origami, weird tales, dangerous catering and unreliable narrators. As well as comics, I've had several exhibitions of digital artworks and photography, and I occasionally write and draw comics with other people and contribute to comics anthologies with the Newcastle based Paper Jam Comics Collective and others.

What's the most exciting thing you've done recently?
I’m working on two comics projects right now – one is called Interchange-V, a sci-fi comedy collaboration hopefully in the spirit of Douglas Adams, low budget british sci-fi and claustrophobic 80’s and 90’s sit-coms. The second project will have SCIENCE in it, but is otherwise absolutely top secret.

Why do you do it?
Why comics? Comics are a massively accessible and flexible medium for telling stories and communication of all kinds. Placing pictures in sequence will build a story, whether it was intended or not. Putting words too close to an otherwise unrelated picture will set a world in motion. Most of it happens in the viewer’s head, and it’s much greater than the sum of its parts. The comics creators I admire have a supernatural control over this, and from this unstable chemistry are able to wield extremely evocative storytelling.

Further info:


http://www.hollowearth.co.uk
Twitter: @paulxthompson
Email: paulxthompson@gmail.com



Comics: Words + Pictures where Time = Space
At midday on the Sunday of the This is Where it’s Art festival, I’ll be doing a 35-40 minute talk on the subject of storytelling and design on a comics page. The talk is aimed at people of age ten and above, interested in making comics, reading comics and knowing a little more about how comics work - for example: how to use the shapes of the panels to control the pacing and drama, the different approaches taken by American, European, Japanese comics, and how the less you draw, the more people see. I’ll provide a comprehensive list of what I think are the very best comics of the last few years and the very best books about making comics.