Dez Skinn has been a familiar figure in British comics for several decades and now he's sharing his memories on his new website dezskinn.com
Smartly designed by Chrissie Harper, the site shows what an important and key figure Dez has been in UK comics, from his early days on Fantasy Advertiser International, working on Buster and editing The Buster Book of Spooky Stories, through improving the UK edition of Mad, developing Monster Mag and House of Hammer, revamping Marvel UK by bringing in British talent, creating Starburst and Warrior, to the essential comics trade paper Comics International and more recently books on comics. (And all that is just a sample of Dez's busy career.) There's also a peek at covers for dummy issues of IPC's aborted Captain Britain venture (yes, they came up with the name before Marvel) and Quality Comics' unseen Danger Man and Legend Testers comics.
I always enjoyed Dez's editorials and anecdotes when he was editing Comics International and his website has that same informative and informal flavour. Compared to U.S. comics there has been so little written about the production aspects of British comics and people such as Dez have a lot of stories to tell of the glory days of Fleetway / IPC for example. There's a particularly good IPC staff photograph from the 1970s on the site (reproduced above) which puts faces to the names of Sid Bicknell, Len Wenn, Bill Reid, and Keith Robson.
The website is still in development but there's already a lot of info there and Dez is continuing to add more. Dez has always had a commonsense approach to comics and I'm sure publishers today could benefit from his experience. dezskinn.com is well worth bookmarking for fans and pros alike.
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