Posted on 4/11/2025

Heartbreaking with James probably too snooty to forgive all the grammar mistakes and feeling that unrequited love is too much of a burden to bear.  You can see that Hampton has James thinking long and hard about what he just read or he might be thinking about the bankers he'll be betting on later.     

Posted on 5/25/2025

Thank you for your comment. I do think that the “idiosyncratic” use of language is what makes it so poignant, and for a long time guessed it was  because the writer is someone for whom English is not their first language, but now it occurs to me that it might be just someone who is neurodivergent but whatever it is it is not hard to see who holds the whiphand in that relationship. As far as “bankers” go – if there is one thing I have learned from my years of heavy gambling is that “bankers” are mythical creatures and don’t exist in real life, at least not at a working man’s price; they are figments of a deluded gambler’s fevered imagination. My “banker” is to stay away from gambling as you can’t beat the bookie.

Posted on 4/12/2025

Hampton, like his other painterly contemporaries like Muth and Williams, seem underrated now relative to the splash they made in the late 80s and early 90s. There's a reason Hampton was offered projects like Books of Magic and his own issue of Solo. You took a gamble on this but given Hampton's skill there was little doubt he'd deliver. This piece shows he hasn't lost any of his capabilities as an artist. Congratulations. I now need to track down that issue of Solo!

Posted on 5/25/2025

You are right the commission was not a very risky bet; perhaps 1/10 – not a working man’s price, as the saying goes. Thank you for reminding me about that prestige format mini-series which featured art from Messrs Bolton, Vess, Hampton and Johnson, which prompted me to dig out my old copies but also to change the last line of my description to what it reads now which I think is better than what it was.