FW Presents – Ramona Fradon

8 responses to “FW Presents – Ramona Fradon”

1. Thanks for the show, everyone. It was a very nice tribute to a legend, and I enjoyed the conversation, esp. everyone’s suggestions for things they wished Fradon had done. I’m a bit surprised, though, that nobody mentioned the never published fifth issue of the Cat for which Fradon had pretty much finished all of the art (scans of individual pages can be found at multiple sites online). Personally, I’d always wished that not only that issue had been published, but that there had been at least a few more issues of the Cat with Fradon’s art. Or that had done at least one story featuring Greer Nelson’s other alter-ego, Tigra.

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   1. They really are lovely, the final colour version with Jim Mooney inks would have been amazing. I came across them at Tom Brevoort’s blog.

      https://tombrevoort.com/2023/04/29/the-claws-of-the-cat-5-the-lost-issue/

      Anyway, great show everybody, a lovely, respectful tribute to a true talent. Comics were better for Ramona Fradon.

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      1. Thanks for posting, Matt! Those are great!

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2. A wonderful tribute. I never had the opportunity to meet Ms. Fradon in person at a convention, but I’m extremely grateful that I had the chance to commission two sketches from her over the past few years: Element Girl and Thundra. I had hoped to get on her commission list yet again and request a character I’d never seen her draw: either “Woman Wonder” (the Harvey Kurtzman/Will Elder spoof of Wonder Woman from early Mad Magazine) or Don Martin’s Captain Klutz. I know she would have done an amazing job on either, but I’m thankful for what I have.
   I also appreciated the discussion of Fradon’s female characters, so appealing without any kind of salacious element. Confession: I believe my first encounter with Fradon’s art was Plastic Man #20, and I have to admit, the pizza delivery woman in that issue was one of my first “comic book crushes” as a kid, even though she was just an incidental character.

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3. Thank you for such a great tribute to the legend. I met her several times at Big Apple Con. She was in her 80’s & 90’s and still sketching! I always bought several sketches from her. I remember asking her what it was like being an artist among such a male dominant profession and she said everyone was very nice and helpful to her. She was such a humble person and yet so talented.

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4. Great episode, everybody! Really wonderful discussion and some thought-provoking questions.

   I guess I’m most sad we never got to see Ramona Fradon draw Aliens vs. Predator.

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5. Great tribute.

   One of the modern creators who most reminds me of Fradon’s clean, rounded style is Mike Allred. And he DID draw Deadman in Flashpoint, so if you screw up your eyes, you can sort of tell what that would have looked like in your parallel reality where Fradon drew everything.

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6. A somewhat belated additional comment: I recently discovered a classic Fradon story that really impressed me, and I wanted to bring it to your attention: “Child’s Play” in House of Secrets #121. Written by Jack Oleck, it tells the story of an old man who’s convinced that his neighbor’s children have made a voodoo doll of him…and the clever part is the parallel storytelling, with the left-side panels told from the old man’s viewpoint, depicting himself as a kindly, harmless soul and the kids as wicked troublemakers, and the right-side panels from the kids’ perspective, presenting them as innocents persecuted by a paranoid crank. Fradon did an outstanding job with the parallel panels, showing the same events with both subtle and not-so-subtle differences. It struck me that this would be an excellent story to cover in a “House of Franklin-stein” episode when October comes around…

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