About your author

So perhaps you wondering who wrote all this stuff and why?

This is your writer; his name is Richard Ian Bird and he started out his life just like many of you reading this; reading comic books his parents bought him… By day he is a mild mannered jewellery store assistant in a sleepy Kentish village, but by night he is transformed into …. Comic book writer man!!!!! (His also been known to do his own art, inking, colouring and lettering, WOW! What a guy)

“He's been a comic fan / collector for as long as he can remember, in fact he cannot actually say when he became such a fan, but he has a lot of happy memories which have a big influence on his work today.

His earliest comic related memory is of his Dad taking him up to central London to Forbidden Planet in the days when they had the two shops in Denmark Street. He went down to the basement and found himself in an ideal heaven of comics; hundreds of them all for the reading.

A few years later on another Saturday his Mum came back from the local supermarket to tell him that a comic shop had opened down the road from where they lived in Tottenham, North London. It was to be the first of a few comic shops in that area but he was excited, as it was so new back then. Dad, being a keen collector of various memorabilia himself, quickly took him down to have a look and treated him to some of those Blue Ribbon Digests, which reprinted old stories.


Of course at that time he had no idea just how important a role a Tottenham Comic shop would play in his life.

Of course we all have to grow up, this is a sad fact of life, but somehow I still kept the love of comic books that many people sadly seem to grew out of replacing them with more ‘realistic’ reading material. For me comics still had a home alongside this type of book. As a reader yourself how many times has someone said to you ‘comics are for children’ or ‘are you still reading that?’ Take heart reader for he is living proof that comics can (with a lot of hard work) help you achieve your dreams.

Several years later after enduring a torturous schooling, further education studying at the local college and a series of jobs working in different fields, He found himself working at a certain Comic Shop in Tottenham, one Krypton Komics! In the five years he worked there he met people from all sorts of backgrounds (including his future wife) with many opinions on comics in general. He got the opportunity to study first hand how the medium was perceived and the different ways in which it is presented. He become friends with a number of aspiring artists and writers and all spent many happy times talking about what sort of heroes we would create giving the chance to have our own books, this was where Home-Made Heroes was born.

During the long hours when the shop was quiet he found himself thinking more and more about his own superheroes and supervillains, it had all been done before so what could he do that would make his different? Then it came to him, life is not perfect. In the real world the media help us turn ordinary men and women into stars and then tear them down when they fall from grace, what if it was a superhuman? A man made by his government, built up by them to be a star, a hero of the people. But in playing God men can also destroy their creation, like a child with its toys; what happens to the old toys when the bigger new toy arrives?

It took ten years from that thought to what you see here and now from the early days of scribbled notes on bits of scrap paper, through to cohesive story, on to storyboarding and designing his characters (for every hero is only as good as his friends or enemies). I just hope you find his work to be of interest, I certainly have.”

Richard Ian Bird was born in 1973 he moved from his birth place, London and now lives in the town of Dover, Kent (with short stops in both Hythe and Folkestone along the way) He moved out of London five years ago with his then fiancée in search of a more peaceful and affordable life, he is now happily married. Both him and his wife are currently fixing up their first house whilst he works for a local jewellers and she works in a local office and of course there is a little matter of writing as well.