Kim Raymond

Kim Raymond (born 1957) is a British comic book artist and animator. Best known in the UK as a contributor to the Judge Dredd series of comics in the 2000 AD series, newspaper comic strips appearing in the first UK newspaper to be printed in full colour, Today, and The Daily Star. He is also one of the first UK born artists to obtain international recognition for developing commercial Disney 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 of Gerry Anderson.

British artist Frank Bellamy contributed regularly to TV21 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 as Spiderman, The Silver Surfer and Thor.

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 strip Carol Day, through his son Patrick Wright, at the time himself illustrating Modesty Blaise for the London Evening Standard.

Raymond started his comic career working for Dundee-based DC Thompson 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 later Tharg's Future Shocks and Judge Dredd in black and white in the early eighties.

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