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Richard Starkings
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Richard Starkings is a British font designer and comic book letterer, editor and writer. He was one of the early pioneers of computer based comic book lettering and as a result is one of the most prolific creators in that industry.
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His design style was originally inspired by British lettering legends Bill Nuttall and Tom Frame. Starkings' UK career began with lettering jobs in 2000AD's Future Shocks and various strips in Warrior. From there he moved to Marvel UK where he lettered Spider-Man Weekly and Transformers before becoming an editor for the company in the late 1980s. However by the beginning of the 1990s he had returned to full time lettering, finding work in the much larger comic book industry in the United States.
In 1992 Starkings founded Comicraft, a studio which employs a large amount of professional letterers and provides lettering services for comic books from many different publishers. In the mid-1990s Comicraft began to sell their Font designs as software applications through their Active Images publishing company.
Originally Starkings had intended that the advertisements for these fonts would feature Marvel and DC Comics' characters, however when he failed to receive the authorisation to do that, Starkings created his own character to illustrate the ads - Hip Flask an anthropomorphic hippopotamus private detective. Hip Flask has since graduated to his own series of one-shot comic books, published by Active Images. Although Joe Casey was originally the writer of the series, more recent issues have had Starkings as the writer, working with artist José Ladrönn.
In 2001 the character's similarities with an Australian comic book character called "Hairbutt" (who is also an anthropomorphic hippopotamus private detective) caused controversy [1].
[W]e have to recognise the work of Richard Starkings who has taken comic book lettering to another level - fellow letterer Annie Parkhouse, in interview with 2000AD Review.