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The Scott & Bo Hampton Interview
here aren’t many successful brother acts in comics. One of the first was Stan Lee and Larry Lieber; one of the best known today would be Joe Kubert’s sons, Andy and Adam. The Hampton brothers, Scott and Bo, have been making two distinct impressions on the business as artists for more than twenty-five years. Bo, the older of the two native North Carolinians, studied under Will Eisner at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. He later spent a year as Eisner’s production assistant at his home studio in White Plains, N.Y. That summer, he brought his younger brother, Scott, along to help and learn one day a week. That experience had an enduring impact on both of their careers and continues to influence them today. It also left them with some wonderful, never before published stories about Eisner. • • •
BOB ANDELMAN: What was the first that you ever heard of Will Eisner? BO HAMPTON: I saw the Harvey reprints and loved them. I was about ten years old so it was around ’64. SCOTT HAMPTON: I can recall that exactly. I was at a friend’s house, and he showed me the two Harvey reprints of The Spirit. I’d never seen his work before that. I’m not sure when Warren started to reprint the Spirit material, and so it’s conceivable that I had seen a little bit of it before I saw these Harveys, but I hadn’t really taken it in. I wasn’t really thinking about what it was. When I saw the reprints, I was just amazed and read them immediately and was just floored and became an immediate fan. I would say this was when I was fifteen. ANDELMAN: How old are you now? SCOTT: I’m forty-seven. I was born in 1959, so it was in 1974 or 1975. BO: I’m as old as the wind… fifty-two. ANDELMAN: So it must have been the Warren reprints that you saw, Scott. SCOTT: No, I may have seen some of them, but what I was seeing that knocked me out were the Harvey reprints from the ’60s….
Eisner’s original cover art and the printed comic of Harvey’s The Spirit #1. Courtesy Heritage Auctions
ANDELMAN: Oh, because they were in color. SCOTT: Right. Well, not just that. They were comic books. They were comic book size, and yes, the color was fabulous, I thought. Again, it’s been a long time since I saw them, but I just felt like this is a man who knows how to draw for that form of reproduction, using the limitations of a four-color process. There are certain artists who know the limitations and then try to make their art work within that limitation. It’s one of the great challenges of doing stuff for reproduction. I think Will was an absolute master of it. Alex Toth was a master of it. I think that the color work by Marie Severin on the ECs is a fabulous collaboration between her and the entire clan of artists that Gaines had. They knew what they were dealing with, and they worked within those parameters. So those
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