Shel Dorf

• Born 1933-07-05 · Died 2009-11-03

Sheldon "Shel" Dorf was an American comics fan, promoter and artist best known as founder of San Diego Comic‑Con in 1970. Starting as a small, one-day event attended by a couple hundred people, Comic-Con grew to become one of the largest comic book and pop culture conventions in the world. A Detroit, Michigan, native, Dorf previously ran that city's Triple Fan Fair, among the first comic book conventions in the United States, for several years in the 1960s. In comics, a fan of newspaper strips since a young age, Dorf compiled and edited several volumes of collections of the Dick Tracy newspaper strip for Blackthorne in the late 1980s and lettered the Steve Canyon newspaper strip beginning around 1975 until the strip's end in 1988.