Richard Starkings (born 27th January 1962) is a Yorkshire-born comics writer, editor and letterer whose career began in the early 1980s lettering strips including Tharg's Future Shocks for 2000 AD and various strips in Warrior; he cites letterers Tom Frame and Bill Nuttall as his inspiration for entering the field. From 2000 AD and Warrior he moved on to Marvel UK where he worked on Transformers, Secret Wars (on a UK exclusive Spider-Man strip) and Spider-Man and Zoids before becoming an editor in the late 1980s. He returned to lettering in the 1990s however, and began working in the American comics industry. In 1992 he founded Comicraft, a California based studio which trains and employs letterers and designers and provides their services to numerous publishers. He is also the creator and writer of Hip Flask, an anthropomorphic hippopotamus "information agent" who has starred in several one-shot comics published by Active Images. In 2014, he began lettering Doctor Who stories for Titan Comics. He has also worked extensively for Doctor Who Magazine, sometimes writing under the name Richard Alan.