 | Thisbiography of a living personneeds additionalcitations forverification. Please help by addingreliable sources.Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced orpoorly sourcedmust be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentiallylibelous. Find sources: "Kim Raymond" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(May 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Kim Raymond (born 1957) is a British comic book artist and animator. Best known in the UK as a contributor to theJudge Dredd series of comics in the2000 AD series, newspaper comic strips appearing in the first UK newspaper to be printed in full colour, Today, andThe Daily Star. He is also one of the first UK born artists to obtain international recognition for developing commercialDisney art originating from the UK.
Kim Raymond was born in Woking, Surrey to parents Eric, an ex-navy communications engineer working in the domestic television industry and Patricia Raymond, a nurse.
His early love of comics was of home-grown UK titles such as The Beano, Tiger and Lion, and more significantly,TV(Century)21, a spin-off title accompanying the puppet TV series ofGerry Anderson.
British artist Frank Bellamy contributed regularly to TV21[1] and later drew a daily comic strip for The Mirror newspaper,Garth. This had a major influence on the ambitions of Raymond, along with the growing availability of Marvel comics in the UK such asSpiderman, TheSilver Surfer andThor.
After three years studying animation at art college in Surrey he took his interest to The Walt Disney Company in London, and began as a junior artist in the Character Merchandising Division. But after a year decided to pursue a career in comics, approaching the agent of David Wright, illustrator of the daily newspaper stripCarol Day, through his son Patrick Wright, at the time himself illustratingModesty Blaise[2] for theLondon Evening Standard.
Raymond started his comic career working for Dundee-basedDC Thomson on girls' titles such as Mandy and Tracy. Later he progressed to boys comics for IPC London, on M.A.S.K.,Robo machines, Starcom and then laterTharg's Future Shocks andJudge Dredd in black and white in the early eighties.
His ability to draw women well and with confidence eventually led him to contribute to the exploits ofJudge Anderson, Psi Division, in Judge Dredd. He confesses that he was heavily influenced byJim Holdaway,[3] the first Modesty Blaise artist;Romero,[4] a Spanish artist who took up the mantle on Modesty Blaise after Holdaway’s untimely death,Frank Bellamy, andRon Smith, who twice helped him with advice and guidance in his early and later comic career. Smith was also a regular Dredd artist and a co-contributor to theCity of the Damned epic on which Raymond also worked, illustrating three episodes. His final comic work appeared over several years in the two daily national newspaper strips, Checkout Girl[5] (The Daily Star) andRoy of the Rovers (Today Newspaper).[6]
In the late eighties it became clear to Kim Raymond that the UK comics industry was becoming more ‘licensed properties’ with little room to create new characters, so he returned to the area of work that had a huge legacy for him in terms of drawing quality, the art of Walt Disney.
He worked for several years as a freelance contributor, and then in 1992 created Character Magic Ltd.[7] in order to further develop both the quality of work that he was producing and also service the large licensee base that he was consulted to engage with by Disney. After further masterclass training in both the US and Paris, Raymond became the leading UK Disney Character artist and in 1999 he began working forThe Disney Stores Europe as a consultant.
He currently holds the position of Senior Principal Artist working for the U.S. parent company at Disney in London and is responsible for many Disney art successes.[8]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
