Ramona Fradon, whose career of more than 75 years led the way for female artists in the comic book field, passed away February 24 at the age of 97. Before Fradon (and Barbara Hall, who drew the Black Cat feature for Harvey), there were no women drawing superheroes in comic books. She was especially known for her work on the DC characters Aquaman and Metamorpho, the latter of which she co-created with writer Bob Haney.
Fradon was born in Chicago, but her family moved to the outskirts of New York City when she was 5 years old. During her childhood, she lived in Rochester, N.Y., and also Larchmont, Mamaroneck and Bronxville. Fradon’s father, Peter Dom (née Dombrezian), an Armenian immigrant from Persia (now Iran), was a well-known letterer and graphic designer who created logos for such famous brands as Lord & Taylor, Camel cigarettes and fashion designer Elizabeth Arden. He was best known in the typography field for creating the widely used font Dom Casual. Lettering ran in the family, since she had an uncle and an older brother who also worked in the field.
Fradon’s mother, Irma Haefeli, died when Fradon was 26, shortly after she had begun her career as a professional artist. Her artistically inclined father is the one credited with encouraging her to attend art school. “I think that’s because of my father,” Fradon recalled in a 2016 interview with Jon B. Cooke (Comic Book Creator # 13), though she also insisted that she had had no burning desire to be a cartoonist, or an artist of any kind. “I mean, he seriously expected me to be an artist! So, it never occurred to me to go to college. I was heading for art school. I had no idea why.”
Ironically, considering the bulk of her fame in the cartooning world stems from her work in comic books, they were not part of her childhood, though she was a fan of newspaper comic strips like Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, The Phantom, Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, Alley Oop, Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner. In a 2013 Comic Book Resources interview conducted by Alex Dueben, she noted, “Later on, I saw Will Eisner’s Spirit and was enormously influenced by his drawing.” She received her early art training at the Parsons School of Design, but then, feeling that she was not learning anything, switched over to the Art Students League, and had a much happier experience. In school she met her future husband, Dana Fradon, who encouraged her to be a cartoonist. Dana Fradon would have the distinction of being the last cartoonist hired by The New Yorker’s legendary editor, Harold Ross. His first cartoon appeared in The New Yorker in the May 1, 1948 issue, and he went on to contribute 1,400 more cartoons over the next half a century, becoming one of the mainstays of the famous magazine. Before she began drawing comic books, Ramona collaborated with her husband and another New Yorker cartoonist, Robert Kraus, on several newspaper comic strip pitches that were ultimately never submitted, though she acknowledged years later to Cooke that the art was “damn good.”
It was her husband’s friend, George Ward, a comic book letterer, who solicited samples from Ramona to pitch to comic book companies such as Fox and Timely. Her first published comic book work came from DC; Fradon recalled her long tenure with the company beginning in the early '50s, though several databases credit her with an unsigned story, “Four Hours to Kill,” in DC's Gang Busters #10 (June-July 1949). It was soon followed by another Gang Busters story, a couple of pieces for Mr. District Attorney, and a pair of Shining Knight stories for Adventure Comics in 1951. However, her first regular assignment from DC was drawing the Aquaman back-up strip in Adventure Comics beginning with issue #167 (Aug. 1951). She worked on the feature for a decade, keeping the character afloat, so to speak, with her lively style, following the departure of Aquaman co-creator Paul Norris. Along with series writer Robert Bernstein, Fradon is credited with co-creating Aqualad, an orphan mentored by Aquaman, who made his debut in Adventure Comics #269 (Feb. 1960).
Fradon took a break from the business in the second half of the 1960s to raise her daughter, Amy. However, despite wanting to lessen her workload to focus on being a wife and mother, 1964 marked the debut of what is probably her best-known character: Metamorpho, the Element Man, who has long enjoyed a reputation as the strangest superhero in comics. Metamorpho originated with an idea from editor George Kashdan and was developed by writer Bob Haney and Fradon. “Metamorpho was George Kashdan's idea,” Fradon told Dueben. “He had studied science when he was in school and he thought of a character made of four elements who could change himself into different chemical compounds. He gave Bob Haney the idea, and Bob fleshed it out brilliantly. I believe George continued to supply the ‘scientific’ details for Bob to use throughout the life of the feature.”
During this period, Fradon drew two other Brave and the Bold stories, which ran in issues #55 and #59. The story in #59 is especially significant, since it teamed Batman with the Green Lantern, the first of many Batman team-ups that would run in The Brave and the Bold as the lead feature up through the title’s cancellation with issue #200.
Fradon was not unaware of her unique position in superhero comics, although work at DC kept her at a certain remove. “I believe that Marie Severin and I were the only women drawing superheroes at the time,” she related to Deuben. “It's funny that she was drawing Sub-Mariner while I was drawing Aquaman. People always used to ask me if I knew her, but I didn't meet her until years later, at a convention. I didn't work in a bullpen like Marie did so, aside from being uncomfortable with male fantasies and the violent subject matter, I never really experienced what it was like being the only woman working in a man's world.” In a 2018 interview conducted by Gwynne Watkins for Vulture, Fradon remembered “one jerk who used to come up behind me and kiss me on the neck. But that was it.”
In a 1988 profile by Andy Mangels in Amazing Heroes #141, Fradon further reflected on what it was like to be an artist in a male-dominated industry: “Something that’s always jarred my eyes is to see the kind of heaviness and ugliness about most comic art. There's not much sweetness to it. It's the tradition, and I don't think it has anything to do with the individual artists. It's just the tradition... the look. That always troubled me.”
Fradon's style was clear, uncluttered, expressionistic and unconcerned with background detail, which made her art a good fit with the animation-based The Super Friends comic, one of her best-remembered series. Super Friends was one of the titles she took on when she returned to comics in the 1970s; she contributed art to the majority of its 47-issue run, making it one of her longest stints on any series. As before, DC published the bulk of her comic book output, which also included art duties on titles like Plastic Man and Freedom Fighters.
She also worked briefly for Marvel Comics during this period, penciling a fill-in issue of Fantastic Four (#133, Apr. 1973) and the fifth and final issue of The Cat, which was never published. The Marvel Method was not to her liking, as she recounted in a 2011 interview with Dewey Cassell (Back Issue #46): “First of all, I was really rusty. And [on The Cat #5] I was totally confounded by not drawing from a script. They gave me this one paragraph and said go draw this 17-page story. I don't think I did my best work by any means. I think I had a script on Fantastic Four, but I just don't think they were satisfied with my work. Then I went back to DC and started doing mysteries with Joe Orlando. I really had a lot of fun doing that. It suited my style, I think.”
As the 1980s dawned, Fradon was happy to part company with superheroes, which she felt were evolving in a direction that did not lend itself to her own upbeat, heroic approach. “Aquaman is a good marker of what’s happening,” she told Watkins in 2018. “When I was drawing him in the '50s, he was nice and wholesome, with a nice haircut and pink cheeks. Very handsome. I had a crush on him. And then you can see what’s happened to him! It got more and more violent and then he lost his hand, then he had a beard and he looked psychotic. You know what? I don’t get it.” Fradon had returned to school by then, attending classes in psychology and ancient religions at New York University; decades later, she would author a prose book, The Gnostic Faustus: The Secret Teachings Behind the Classic Text (Inner Traditions, 2007), expanding on these studies.
But Fradon had another long comics assignment in store. In 1980, she was offered the opportunity to draw the Brenda Starr, Reporter newspaper strip upon the retirement of its creator, Dale Messick, from the art duties. Initially, Messick stayed on as writer, which created some problems, as Fradon related to Dueben: “Dale had always written and drawn Brenda, so she never had to deal with a script, per se. As a result, she never gave me one. Instead, I would get a page of her drawings to work from, which was a bit intimidating.” After Messick stopped writing the feature, Fradon worked with two other writers, first Linda Sutter, and then Mary Schmich, which presented different kinds of challenges. “When Linda and Mary wrote the script, I never got one on time. I don’t think writers like to write. I remember taking dictation on the phone from both of them, frantically scribbling down the day’s installment so I’d have something to work on. I never knew what the plots were, and since I was doing Sundays six weeks ahead of the dallies, I could never remember what Brenda was wearing from one week to the next. I think it was a tribute to Brenda’s enduring appeal that the strip survived our tenure.”
Fradon drew Brenda Starr until her own ostensible retirement in 1995. However, “retirement” was a relative concept, since Fradon continued taking on projects for a variety of publishers up through 2013. Some of her later work saw her return to television animation comics, with contributions to Bongo's Simpsons Super Spectacular (#5, 2007) and United Plankton Picture's SpongeBob Comics (#3, 2011) and SpongeBob Annual (#1, 2013); for the SpongeBob titles, she drew stories featuring Mermaid Man, a parody of Aquaman she also had drawn for Nick Mag in 2003. Among her other miscellaneous assignments were a guest spot in Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog #68 in 1999 and a contribution to issue #2 of Marvel's Girl Comics revival in 2010, along with art contributions to bookstore market fare such as the superhero parody The Adventures of Unemployed Man (Little, Brown and Company, 2010) and the children's anthology Fairy Tale Comics (First Second, 2011). In 2011, she wrote and drew a children’s book called The Dinosaur That Got Tired of Being Extinct. “I was expressing my feelings, I guess,” she told Watkins.
Fradon was a popular and welcome guest at comic book conventions well into the 21st century, and she continued to take art commissions from her fans until a month before her death. She was remembered warmly by admirers from across generations. “From all indications, anecdotal and otherwise, Ramona Fradon was a force of nature to be reckoned with from the start,” remarked the artist Howard Chaykin, who had conducted a book-length interview with her under the title The Art of Ramona Fradon (Dynamite Entertainment, 2014). “A woman in a boy man business, she held her own in that hostile territory... nothing can be more reductive than to simply regard Ramona Fradon as ‘nice.’ She was situationally kind, and never, ever suffered fools.”
