Background Information

I’ve been creating comics since I was old enough to hold a pencil. I come more from the UK small press comics scene than the manga scene – it seems kind of crazy that a ‘scene’ so small can have so many subdivisions, but there you go. Anyway, I self-published a few issues of my own small prses comic ‘Dumbass comics’ back when I was a broke teenager / student. They featured futuristic binmen, flying cars, ninja nuns, and lots and lots of swearing. It was all a bit 200AD-meets-Akira.

Anyway, after that I sort of drifted away from it for a while, as I was kind of busy with a lot of ‘real life’ stuff – getting degrees, finding a job, figuring out what the hell I was supposed to be doing with my life, all that boring stuff. Anyway, I eventually figured out that “what the hell I was supposed to be doing with my life” was drawing comics. Seems obvious, in retrospect.

My most recent thing that people might have seen is the 64-page comic epic ‘Bulldog: Empire’, which is included in its entirety in the Mammoth Book of Best New Manga, published by Constable & Robinson. Since then my work has been getting more and more ‘manga’ in some ways, as I get to know more about the UK Manga scene and the creators in it. There’s a lot of talented and lovely people around right now, and it’s a very exciting time to be making manga / manga-styled comics / OEL manga / whatever you want to call it...

My latest project is a brand new ongoing full-colour webcomic, Thumpculture. It is kind of a slice-of-life romantic comedy martial arts fantasy sci-fi soap opera sitcom. You can read it for free at http://www.thumpculture.com , where it is updated wit new pages every Monday and Friday.

Neill Camerion.