Dean Clayton

Duties: Primarily site coding, but anything that I can help with when needed
Staffer since: Time began.
E-mail address: deanclayton@gmail.com
In the brief:
Like many, I found this site back in the summer of… Wait a minute, I started this behemoth! After becoming a father for the first time, I started doing shift work in the spring of 2000 to bring in more money. I'd only just got back into comics and was looking around the net to catch up. Finding plenty of sites that were either out of date or a nightmare to navigate, I started to wonder if I could do something to solve this. With plenty of nightshifts ahead of me staring at a computer, I started working on getting a site up and running. On 14th August 2000, the site went live. For those that may remember (yeah right!) it was the day the first X-Men movie premiered in the UK. The site had been running for a while but I still wasn't sure what direction to take it in when I came across this Peter Luzifer chap. I tempted him into helping on the site with dreams of Money, Flash cars and Movie stars. Before long others were tempted by those same dreams and it kind of spun out of control. Over time the site has taken on a life of its own, and become more than I ever expected it to be, and for that I'm thankful to everyone of those guys that have stepped up to the plate.

History:
Being from the UK, I never really read many super hero comic books growing up, Instead I was brought up on a diet of Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan. As the 80's marched on I fell in love with Transformers (who didn't?) and branched from those funny books, to the those almost super hero titles. I'd got into reading pretty much anything I could find, but I do remember picking up this 1 comic in my local newsagents that was all new, all different.

Flash forward several years later and I'm playing games on my mate’s Amiga. He and his dad were both comic book fans and had an extensive collection. After reading the First few issues of Keith Giffen's infamous Justice League run, I started picking my way through his collection. He gave me some of the X-Men issues from mid 200's to read and I was hooked. I started picking up as many issues that I could find. Spending an ever-increasing amount. It wasn't until a few months later that I realized that the issue I'd picked up in my local newsagents those years ago was Uncanny X-Men #192 (of course if my mother hadn't thrown it out i may have actually known this sooner).

Then in the middle 1995 I suddenly stopped. Right in the middle of the speculator boom/bust - I wasn't interested anymore. I could say it was because the comics were bad, but thinking back now I'm sure it was a combination of beer, women, lack of money and  dare i say it, University, that pulled me away from comics.

Roll on 1999 and I'm getting all nostalgic. I wander into a local comic shop and got myself back into reading comics again, picking up the X-Men titles at the start of the revolution revamp, and never looked back since.

I like to think that I'm a funny guy, but I'm probably not and would be heckled off stage the first time I attempt a stand up routine. I've also got the attention span of a goldfish so find it difficult to not get distracted. I've always considered myself to be a problem solver and try to think outside the box. I guess that's why I work in Software development. Having said that though, I still don't know what I want to do with my life.

Music I seem to listen to a lot lately includes (in no particular order) :
Daft Punk, Pulp, Bare Naked Ladies, Maroon 5, Scissor sisters, Franz Ferdinand, The Beatles, The Monkee's, Scouting for Girls, Mika and anything vaguely Disco.

Favorite films:
Empire Strikes back, Mannequin, Back to the Future Trilogy, Dogma, Shaun of the Dead, Current Marvel Films

Favorite Series:
Peter David's run on X-Factor (old and new), X-Statix, Grant Morrison's run on X-Men, Watchmen, Strangers in paradise, powers, Keith Giffen's Justice League and Justice League Europe runs, Top Ten, Dan Slott's run on She Hulk, Fables and Bone.

If I were an X-Men Character I would most likely be: Longshot - because apparently I always lands on my feet