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Could you explain that to me?
she asks with a smile.
I just do not understand the grown men who are so into comics.
Its not that Fradon doesnt appreciate her fans.
But Fradon also knows, perhaps better than anyone, how quickly and dramatically the comics industry can change.
Aquaman is a good marker of whats happened, she tells me over the restaurants famous zucchini fritters.
I had a crush on him.
And you’ve got the option to see what happened to him!
I dont get it.
Fradon drew Aquaman like a 50s matinee idol seen through soft-focus saltwater.
The star of this DecembersAquamanis a new centurys model of superhuman beauty.
Born in 1926, Fradon is several generations removed fromAquamans targetaudience.
Later on, I heard it wasnt that easy to do!
I guess I was just destined to be a cartoonist.
Im sorry I didnt know her all those years, Fradon says regretfully.
We would have had a lot of fun together.
But that was it.
She also steered clear of the testosterone pileup that was the DC bullpen.
So I would creep in the back and put the drawing board up, so they wouldnt see me.
I mean, I was scared.
And I was shy.
I was expressing my feelings, I guess, she says with a satisfied smile.
Intrigued by the challenge, she worked on Metamorpho between those school pick-ups and dinner parties.
Up at DC when I was there in the 50s, it was very staid.
You had hallways and office doors, and the office was relatively small.
There would always be a file cabinet and a desk or two.
And that was it.
And the men all wore suits and ties and sat behind the desks, she says.
And then when I came back in the early 70s, it was just like a bomb had dropped.
The comics had changed too; they were less rigidly scripted, more violent, occasionally political.
Readers now preferred Stan Lees conflicted, superpowered teens to the godlike heroes of DC.
And there would be another major shift whenSupermanopened in theaters in 1978.
That changed everything, she says.
They reached a whole new audience and then started writing for that audience.
They decided to psychoanalyze the superheroes, she says.
And to me, that ruins it.
Throughout all this, Fradons work remained in demand.
Its not hard to see why.
There she shows me piles of sketches, mostly copies of recent commissions.
Every pencil line is clean and full of energy.
Perhaps owing to that art school education, her sense of composition is flawless.
Even when the characters are still, there is a sense of kinetic energy.
it’s possible for you to practically see them breathing.
Drawings of Aquaman are her most requested fan commissions.
(She actively accepts these viathe Catskill Comics website.)
In one drawing, he gazes down at his undersea kingdom like Ozymandias before the fall.
I tell her I love her undersea creatures.
I made up a lot of them, she admits.
I ask if shed like to see theAquamantrailer.
Shes skeptical; she hasnt seen a superhero movie sinceSuperman,and she doesnt think shes missing out.
But within a few seconds of my loading the video, shes smiling ear-to-ear.
This looks like fun.
But, she adds of Momoa, He should be blond.
This article originally misidentified the dates of Ramona Fradons pregnancy and Metamorpho creation.
It has since been corrected.
