I was asked how I got into comics? Well, according to my late gran I was looking over magazines and images when too young to read and eventually my grandfather, Bill, started buying me the weekly comics that came out back then (comic strips not some photos promoting products like today).
I used to fill old receipt books with comic strips and it wasn't until my secondary school days that I got into writing and editing. QRD did an interview with me that covered much of this -
https://hoopercomicart.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-qrd-interview-terry-hooper-scharf.html
After leaving school I started writing more and more and my intention was to get into editing or publishing comics. I missed an opportunity to see Stan Lee live on BBC TVs Pebble Mill At One to go to see people at Thorpe and Porter which mainly published black and white reprint comics.
Things progressed from there and at one point Paul Neary invited me to London and the Marvel UK offices and I was offered an editor's job -but had to then withdraw the offer because of things that were going on at the time. Gil Page while managing editor at Fleetway put me forward as an editor of new comic projects but the "boys upstairs" baulked at the idea of spending money on a dead industry. I had, as already posted elsewhere, issues 1-5 of a German language version of D-Gruppe (Germany's Premiere super hero team) for Bastei Verlag in Germany but Egmont then bought the company and any ongoing or new projects were cancelled.
By that time I realised that I needed to0 publish myt own titles more and so it began.
Potted history for you right there.
My parents bought me Pippin; remember that? I had some pads and I started drawing the characters and my father said to Mum, "Look what he's doing! He's an artist." She didn't show any sign of being impressed. It was many years later that I found she had kept some of the drawings. Even when I had got into art college, she thought I had been "forced into it by my teacher". I obviously wasn't capable of self-determination then. In retrospect, I really do wonder what was going on in her mind. There are some telling instances which I won't go into on a public forum and, of course, having to be a carer for her for over thirty years didn't help. It helps now to know the limits of executive function - as they call it - and what happens when that collapses. I hope that you got the picture of Bib. There is a full length of him dressed as the character, The Phantom Doodler, which we came up with. The picture is just before his final illness took hold.
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