NEW YORK, NY.- Ramona Fradon, who in a long career as a comic book artist added to the mythology of Aquaman and helped create the eccentric superhero Metamorpho, died Saturday at her home in Ulster County, New York. She was 97.
The cause was congestive heart failure, her daughter and only immediate survivor, Amy Fradon, said.
Fradon is most closely associated with the DC Comics undersea hero Aquaman, whose adventures she drew from 1951 to 1963. Drawing a feature for more than 100 issues is a remarkable achievement in comics; even more noteworthy is that Fradon was one of the few women working steadily in comics at the time.
“She wasn’t daunted by the all-male industry” because she was doing what she loved, Amy Fradon said in an interview Monday. “She drew right up to last week,” she continued. “I gave her agent her last seven drawings, and when I took them outside, she said, ‘Those are the last, those are the last seven.’”
Ramona Fradon’s version of Aquaman, a character who first appeared in 1941, modernized him for new readers and gave him the chiseled good looks of a movie star. “When I was drawing him back in the ’50s, he was nice and wholesome, with a nice haircut and pink cheeks,” she said in an interview with Vulture in 2018. “I had a crush on him.”
She worked with many writers on Aquaman, whose stories were one of several features in the anthology series Adventure Comics. In the story “How Aquaman Got His Powers,” published in Adventure No. 260 in 1959, she and writer Robert Bernstein established the hero’s back story: his father, Tom Curry, was a lighthouse keeper and his mother, Atlanna, was from the undersea kingdom of Atlantis. They later introduced Aqualad, his sidekick.
Fradon was assigned to draw Aquaman by editor Murray Boltinoff after she had drawn two Adventure stories starring the character Shining Knight. “He said I had a simple style, which was good for children, and Aquaman was aimed at young readers,” she recalled in an interview with Howard Chaykin for the 2014 book “The Art of Ramona Fradon.”
In 1964, Fradon worked with editor George Kashdan and writer Bob Haney to create Metamorpho. An unconventional superhero, he has a chalk-white, skull-like head, and each of his limbs is composed of a different element, into which he can transform at will. Metamorpho made his debut in The Brave and the Bold No. 57, along with a supporting cast that included his love interest, Sapphire Stagg; her father, Simon Stagg; and his Neanderthal servant, Java.
“The beautiful, willful and sexy Sapphire Stagg was Moi, or didn’t I wish,” Fradon was quoted as saying in “The Art of Ramona Fradon.” She also noted that her brother, who teased her as a child, was the tongue-in-cheek model for Java.
Fradon also worked on Super Friends, a comic book based on the television cartoon series featuring many of DC’s heroes, and Plastic Man, a humorous superhero created by Jack Cole in 1941 and revived by DC in the 1980s.
She had been semiretired since 1995, although she continued to sell occasional drawings and do work for fans on commission (Aquaman and Metamorpho were frequent requests). On Jan. 3, Catskill Comics, which represented Fradon, announced her official retirement. The company was also the first to report her death.
Ramona Dom was born Oct. 2, 1926, in Chicago, but grew up in Westchester County, north of New York City. Her father, Peter Dom, was a commercial typographer and logo designer. Her mother, Erma (Haefeli) Dom, managed the home. Her brother, Jay, was also a typographer.
Because her father wanted Ramona to be a fashion artist, she attended the Parsons School of Design in New York. But she had no interest in fashion and soon switched to the Art Students League of New York to learn more of the basics of art, like figure drawing.
During her time at the League she met Dana Fradon, a fellow student who would later become a prolific cartoonist for The New Yorker; they married in 1948. They worked together on a sample cartoon strip, and a friend suggested that Ramona Fradon put together some test pages for comic books, which she took to a few publishers before landing her first assignment at DC Comics.
The Fradons divorced in 1982. Dana Fradon died in 2019.
Ramona Fradon stepped aside from comics in 1965 to raise her daughter, who was born in 1959. By that time Metamorpho had graduated to a solo series; she left after four issues, and the series was canceled with issue No. 17 in 1968, but Metamorpho himself has resurfaced many times. He is slated to make his big-screen debut, portrayed by Anthony Carrigan, next year in “Superman: Legacy,” which will reboot the DC film universe under the direction of James Gunn.
Fradon returned to the industry in 1973, joining Marvel Comics for two stories. Her first assignment featured a new character, the Cat, now known as Tigra. The story was killed, and she was relieved that it was: She found it a struggle to use the so-called Marvel method, which required artists to compose a story using only a plot summary — in this case, one paragraph. She felt more successful with Fantastic Four No. 133, which she drew from a full script written by Roy Thomas.
She then returned to DC, where she worked on House of Mystery, Plastic Man, Freedom Fighters and Super Friends. She drew Super Friends, which was designed to appeal to the younger audience that watched the animated series, from 1976 to 1980.
In 1977, she enrolled in New York University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1988. “She originally wanted to be an academic,” her daughter said, but she was persuaded by her father to pursue art. “She was into mystic religion and history and politics,” she added. “She read voraciously. Comics were not her whole life.”
But drawing would always call her back. In 1980, she quit comic books again — this time to work on “Brenda Starr,” the popular newspaper strip about an adventurous reporter.
It was grinding work — six daily installments plus a longer episode on Sunday — but she stayed on for 15 years, working with different writers, except for a one-week stint when she handled everything on her own.
“It made the drawings so much easier because I was using my own ideas,” she recalled of that week in “The Art of Ramona Fradon.” “But I’m glad that I didn’t write the strip for long, because I didn’t want to be thinking about plotting Brenda Starr 24 hours a day.”
In 1995, Fradon attended San Diego Comic-Con and dutifully mailed her strips to her editor before leaving, but they never arrived. She had rough sketches for the installments, which she had intended to sell, but she would have to recreate the strips overnight.
She was assisted in her task by Mark Evanier, a fellow comics professional, who took her pencil drawings and asked several artists at the convention if they would be willing to ink them. “Every single one of them says yes. Every single one,” he recalled on his blog.
Steve Leialoha, a comic book artist who was also there, summarized the situation on Facebook: “There was quite a crush of artists wanting to help out so Ramona could actually attend the con and not be stuck in her room. We were all longtime fans, and this was a great opportunity to repay her.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
