Read Alex Grand’s Understanding Superhero Comic Books published by McFarland Books in 2023 with Foreword by Jim Steranko with editorial reviews by comic book professionals, Jim Shooter, Tom Palmer, Tom DeFalco, Danny Fingeroth, Alex Segura, Carl Potts, Guy Dorian Sr. and more.
In the meantime enjoy the show:
Alex Grand and co-host Jim Thompson interview Frank Thorne, born in 1930, he discusses his past and current works, with a career that spans from the late 1940s, utilizing and expanding on inspirations like Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and Neil O’Keefe, a late 1940s graduate of the Art Career School in Manhattan, working at Dell, Gold Key and DC Comics with an explosion of fan activity in the 1970s and 80s with his comic work centered around strong beautiful female characters like Red Sonya, his famous other femme Fatales like Ghita, Lann for Heavy Metal, Ribit for Comico, Danger Rangerette for National Lampoon, Moonshine McJuggs for Playboy, his working relationship with Hugh Hefner, his interactions with other prominent comic figures like Alex Toth, Gary Groth, Jim Steranko and Neal Adams.
Benjamin Franklin Thorne was an American comic book artist-writer, best known for the Marvel Comics character Red Sonja. Passed away (7 March 2021) at the age of 90.
Beginnings and Career Decisions
Alex Grand: Welcome to the Comic Book Historians Podcast, everyone welcome Frank Thorne, let’s get started.
Jim Thompson: Frank, let’s start with your early background. You were born in the 1930s, which means you’ve basically been around since the beginnings of comic books. Can you talk a little about where you were born, what your parents were like, and when you first became interested in comics, and art in general?
Frank Thorne: I was born in Rahway, New Jersey in 1930, early in the development of comic books. I had a small collection, I recall mostly the Atom and assorted characters – superhero characters – which never truly interested me that much. But then Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, was the one that really caught my eye, Jo-Jo Comics, and that was a turning point in a small boy’s life.
That connected somehow with discovering my father’s collection of pornography, linking the two, and I suppose that was the moment, the epiphany, that caused my interest and my development of sexy women. That didn’t come into fruition until I had graduated from The Art Career School, which was a nuts and bolts commercial arts school atop the Flatiron Building in Lower Manhattan on 23rd Street and 5th.
Jim: Did you go there straight from high school?
Frank: I had a dual career early on. I was a musician, and my lovely wife [Marilyn] is a wonderful musician. She spent her life … She’s a Julliard person, and she played the trombone then. And I played the trumpet in a band camp. That’s where we met. And so, she’s continued on the music, and I had to make the decision to go on with my trumpet playing, or go to art school. And my art teacher came to the house and said, “This boy has got to go to art school.” And of course, that was very decisive, and I landed in the art school with a couple of scholarships, and one of them was, I paid half tuition by being the janitor, cleaning up at the art school after everything closed. That went on for two years.
Jim: How old were you when you started art school?
Frank: Well, let’s see. I graduated high school at age 16, and then had been dabbling in doing some comic book work. I did some …
Jim: That was the romance books at Standard?
Frank: Yes, that was it. I did a couple of pulp magazine illustrations, which linked me to it, but that was juvenilia, it doesn’t count.
Emergence: Things begin to Count
Frank: I always liked to think that I had my little toe in the water then, but it wasn’t until 1960 that I walked into King Features, and they gave me the Perry Mason daily and Sunday to do. And I was just a young kid at the time.
Jim: Oh, yeah, we’re going to get to that in just a minute, because that’s a key part. But I am curious about the romance books, because historically, we think of the romance books as starting with Kirby and Simon, but when did you start doing them?
Frank: Well, it would have been the early ’50s.[1] I don’t know. I was never a big fan of Kirby, or Ditko, or any of those. I was a follower of [Alex] Raymond, and [Hal] Foster, and so forth. So I really can’t claim anything. My stuff on Perry Mason was mostly Raymond swipes, but they loved it at King Features, Sylvan Byck[2] was thrilled, and it went on for a year or so. And then the strip was canceled after Erle Stanley Gardner[3] died.
Gardner and William Randolph Hearst were very good friends. They didn’t have a lot of papers, and the strip didn’t have many papers, so it was canceled. And they really saved my life, because I was doing it, but boy it was tough stuff, because I did it all myself. And I’ve done all my own stuff from then until now, when I speak to you from Scotch Plains, New Jersey.
Alex: Right. So Erle Stanley Gardner wrote those scripts for the Perry Masondaily? Did you ever meet him?
Frank: No, and I don’t think Erle Stanley Gardner wrote any of it. It was written by a lady at Little, Brown. I think they owned it. And I would actually take the work there, and it would go from there to King Features.
Alex: So you used a lot of Alex Raymond swipes. Was that mostly from Flash Gordon and Rip Kirby or … ?
Frank: Rip Kirby. That was it. “Water World of Mongo” was my favorite of Raymond’s stuff. That was glorious, and he was influenced by Matt Clark[4] at that time. And he [Raymond] was just a young guy, and a prodigy if there ever was one.
Alex: Right. Yeah, there’s a lot of Aquaman precursors in that storyline, I think. So then you did the Dr. Guy Bennett soap opera strip from 1957 to 1963?
Frank: Yes, I did that. I was on it for seven years. See, we had been raising children. We had five children, and we have 11 grandchildren, and six, or seven, great-grandchildren, so … But we were in the process of producing children and raising children, and I was doing comics to support it. And the work on Dr. Guy Bennett was… well, Lafave Syndicate was the distributor, famous for Napoleon by Cliff McBride,[5] another prodigy. It was interesting working with Lafave, and … in that process, in a span of two years, I moved from Raymond photographs to freehand drawing. And by the time the ’60s arrived, I was drawing everything freehand without any scrap. So I couldn’t use photographs anymore, because it held me back. So these styles began to evolve in the appearance of Mighty Sampson and The Man with the X-Ray Eyes earlier. It was a sign of something that was happening, and I was coming into my own at that point.
And of course, I was doing illustrations for the New Jersey Bell Telephone, which is now Verizon, a wonderful big illustration included in your monthly bill. And I did a lot of them. They were top dollar in New Jersey here. They were 800 bucks a pop, which was a lot of money in those days.
Jim: I have a Bennett question for you, which is that you were doing both the dailies and the Sunday color comics?
Frank: Right.
Jim: Did you approach the drawings the same way, knowing they were black-and-white versus the ones that were in color? Was it the same method for both of those, or was it different?
Frank: In those days, this is pre-digital age, and you selected by number, the colors that you’d like. And I did all the Sunday pages for Dr. Guy Bennett using that technique and hoping that they would come close enough to match it. Often, they didn’t, but with comics in those days, you were … as Joe Kubert once said, “You were lucky if they printed it right side up.”
Later on, Joe and I became good friends, and I certainly miss him and his family. So, I’m in the ’60s, with a developing style and ready for … And I was at that time, I moved to DC and did a lot of work for DC. And that’s where …
Jim: Oh, yeah, I have a lot of questions about those, but let’s stay for a minute more on pre-DC. I want to cover your early Dell years in the 1950s, after Perry Mason, but before you moved on to the Dr. Bennett strip. You did a lot of adaptations of things like Moby Dick and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Frank: That was early on. Do you have a date for those? I can’t remember when that would be.
Jim: In the early ’50s, after you would have finished Perry Mason. And those were … A lot of that … You were doing Alex Raymond stuff then, because you were doing Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim comics as well, right?
Alex: Yeah.
Frank: But still in the area of juvenilia. I still worshiped … He was an early hero and so with Neil O’Keeffe’s[6] 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I was struck with O’Keeffe’s style, which I left behind. But I don’t think there’s a remnant of any of it left when you get to Moonshine McJugs, or Red Sonja.
Alex: So the Dell period was still in the swipe file period before you spread the wings then?
Frank: Mm-hmm [in the affirmative], but there were intimations. Howard Leroy Davis did a book, Battling Beauties, of [my art], and [in that book] he published one of the dailies from Dr. Guy Bennett, and there’s a woman in there that … I drew women, but he selected one, and looking back on it now, you could tell – people say, “Wow, that’s a good looking woman, you know?” and of course, I sat up straight and said, “Hmm. Yeah, okay.” [chuckle] And I can remember going to Marvel when Sonja struck really big, and after the second issue, he said, “You’ve got a talent for drawing women. You should keep drawing women,” which I have been doing since then. [laughter]
Alex: Now, in 1963, you won the National Cartoonists Society Award in the comic book division. Do you remember what book, or what work that was for?
Frank: That was the Inkpot Award. It was not deserved, it was just general comic book work, my DC, I think. You have to be a member of the Cartoonists Society to get any awards. The Inkpot … everybody gets that if they go to San Diego.
Jim: I think this actually predates the Inkpot Award.
Alex: Yeah, because we have two dates, which is interesting, and maybe you can shed light on it. You have 1963, it says National Cartoonists Society. Then it says 1978 an Inkpot Award in San Diego.
Frank: Mm-hmm [In the affirmative].
Alex: Those were two different awards, right?
Frank: Yes, mm-hmm [In the affirmative].
Alex: So what was the earlier one for?
Frank: Would that have been awarded in Houston?
Alex: So do you think that was probably just for general comic book work, in general at the time?
Frank: Yeah, general, I would say.
Alex: Okay. So not for any one particular run or comic?
Frank: No, just general, yes.
Alex: Okay, I gotcha. And then you were doing adaptations in the early ’60s, like Twilight Zone …
Frank: Oh, yeah.
Alex: … and a good run on Mighty Sampson for Gold Key.
Frank: Mm-hmm [in the affirmative].
Alex: So tell us a little bit about those jobs.
Frank: The Gold Key passage, that was with Matt Murphy, I believe. He was the editor, lovely man. And I did a lot of work for Golden Magazine too, and those were illustrations, painted illustrations, and they hold up pretty well even today. I did a lot of those and a lot for the Cook Company, which was a Bible producing behemoth out in the Midwest, I believe. I did a lot of kids praying and stuff like that. Not bad, but not the emerging thing that I became after that.
Jim: So, were those just illustrations for text, or were those actually in comics form?
Frank: They were in a comic booklet form. It was the size of a comic book, but it was all in a religious theme.
Jim: I’ve never seen those, that’s interesting.
Frank: Yeah, some of them were nice. You’d have to be a congregant of some church to get to … if they subscribed to it. But that was the heyday of religion. That has passed, sadly, and a lot of that is gone.
Alex: Was it different working when it was Dell versus when it was Gold Key, or was it all the same, because it was just Western Publishing anyway?
Frank: Well, it was all Western. They seldom met, but occasionally crossed … be in the same office with some of the great … [Bob] Fujitani and some of the really good guys in Dell, and then Gold Key was the same, and then gradually emerging myself. But I had one foot there and the other foot in the New Jersey illustration scene, with the stuff for New Jersey Bell-Verizon.
I did a lot of the magazine work, I did portraits and the big illustrations. It was a robust paycheck, and that saved us. We were a growing family with … the house had to be expanded to make room. But now, our house is a perfect size for just two, and we can’t believe that we raised all the kids in this house.
Alex: That’s great.
Frank: Now, we fit perfectly.
Chapter Three
Two Good Joes and a Tomahawk
Jim: Yeah, so let’s go to DC now. Is your first work there Tomahawk?
Frank: I had done any number of Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff Presents, and then came Korak.
Jim: So you moved to DC, and you’re doing the Korak strip?
Frank: Mm-hmm [in the affirmative].
Jim: And you get assigned Tomahawk, where you have a 10 issue … Basically, you close out the book during the Son of Tomahawk saga, is that right?
Frank: Well, I wasn’t doing them each at the same time. They were in sequence. I didn’t do them both at the same time. I started with Tomahawk, and then did Son of Tomahawk. Joe Kubert was the editor. That’s when I first got to know Joe, and then we came friendly after that, because the Tomahawks I did were … Many artists had done Tomahawk, many have done. But I don’t know about the Son of Tomahawk.
Jim: Those were the last 10 issues or so, that you did of the book before it got concluded. And they had changed over to Son of Tomahawk to get a younger audience, or a different audience. And you gave the original Tomahawk … restored his glory in the last few issues of that. It’s a very nice ending, and much loved amongst Tomahawk fans.
Frank: Well, a vital person who I met … I never met Kanigher, but Archie Goodwin was … I loved that guy, he was wonderful. He’s the one that gave me Sonja, so I will be eternally grateful for him. He died too young, of cancer, but …
Jim: Everyone loves Archie Goodwin it seems like, everyone we speak with.
Frank: Everybody loved him. And so, thank you, Archie, wherever you are.
Alex: Was Joe Kubert, his artwork, an influence on you? Was it also his personality? What was it about Joe that left that impression on you?
Frank: It was a mystical kind of thing. I never tried to … He was never an influence, but for some reason, my work looked like him. It was almost magical. Everybody said, “Kubert did this, didn’t he?” When I did Enemy Ace. I said, “No.” It was so easy for me to do Enemy Ace, because of my affinity for Joe’s work. So we were both from humble beginnings. His father was a butcher, and my father was an elevator operator. And we often joked about if we had been born into wealth, we would have been illustrators and use photographs for all of our work. But being born in that … we couldn’t afford models, or cameras, so we had to learn to draw by hand. And there’s the very seed and the nut of it all.
Drawing freehand gives you control over the whole page and the smallest of details, because you’re not searching for some sort of scrap. You have to find a motorcycle. “I have to find this, I … ” We just drew it, and in a sense, faked it, but it was convincing in enough to … That gives the page and the figures power and consistency that you don’t get if you’re taking a … have to find scrap on everything. “A snake, I have to find a snake, and I have to … ” Well, you have your mental file, and you just do a snake. You’ve seen enough snakes in movies and everything, you should be able to retrieve that. I can no longer do that at age 90, but I did it in my youth.
Jim: Now, you were working with Kanigher on some of the war books, and you also were working under Joe Orlando on some of the House of Mystery and horror titles?
Frank: Yeah, yes. Yeah, Joe was a good guy.
Jim: So let’s talk about genre in relation to all of this for a few minutes. What were the genres that you preferred? Obviously, fantasy was one, but for the DC period, what did you like? Did you have a preference on what you were working on, or did it just not matter?
Frank: I didn’t want to do any superheroes, that limited me. The historic stuff, which threw me to Kanigher and Archie. And I did civil war things. I can remember the Alamo, I think there was a couple of those. And so, I had a limited range. And I seemed to get sons of characters, of the famous characters, and then came Sonja, who was the daughter of none. It seemed to be perfect for me.
Bold Moves and Bald Heads
Jim: Before we do Sonja, I do want to cover the Atlas-Seaboard period too, because you went from DC to briefly working for … there was no other option but to work briefly for Atlas, because it was only around for a year or so. But you did some work for them in a number of genres too, didn’t you?
Frank: Now, what was that company?
Alex: What Jim is talking about is the one Atlas that was owned by Martin Goodman and Chip Goodman, and it only lasted a year back in 1975-ish. And you turned in some work for them.
Frank: I think I did the Sherlock Holmes interior cover and a splash page with Dr. Moriarty, I think.
Jim: You did some horror work on that too.
Frank: Yeah. Yeah, there were a lot of those, the killer clown, and things of that order.
Alex: Right. Did you ever meet Martin Goodman, or Chip Goodman, those guys?
Frank: No, but Larry Leiber, Stan Lee’s brother, he was the editor at … Am I thinking Red Circle, or Atlas? I think Red Circle was …
Alex: Yeah, Red Circle was a part of Archie, and Larry Lieber was the editor for Atlas.
Frank: Right.
Alex: How were your interactions with Larry Lieber at that time?
Frank: I enjoyed Larry Lieber very much. He drew. His brother couldn’t draw, but Larry drew quite well and also wrote quite well. Nobody ever hears of Stan Lee’s brother, but neither of them had any hair. That was the thing. Stan would prance around with a toupee, which … you’d see him one week, and he’s bald, and the next thing you see he’s got a big head of hair — Whoops, something’s going on here!
Alex: Well, maybe that’s what distinguished the two is the toupee.
Chapter Five
Making Sonja Sing!
Alex: In 1975, this was shortly around or after the Larry Lieber period, you worked on Marvel Feature #2. That was your first Red Sonya comic book. And you were saying earlier that Archie Goodwin hooked you up with that job?
Frank: Yes, yes. It was not Roy Thomas. Roy Thomas considered me, and he was very clear he felt I was a third-rate artist. It turned out that it was Archie that picked me, not Roy.
Alex: Wow, okay.
Frank: Roy is responsible for Conan and Red Sonja. Actually, the whole thing is his. I got along with Roy fine. It was all right. After the poor guy … knowing what he originally thought about me when they came out with these big artist edition books, Dynamite and Hermes Press, I think it was mostly Dynamite. Poor Roy had to write these long essays about … and break down my pages that I did for Red Sonja, and it was a payback in a way. I’m saying, “Well, Roy, here is this third-rate artist, and you’re stuck with writing all this crap about me.”
Alex: No, you’re great.
Jim: When you were doing those, conceiving it, how much did you look at Barry Windsor-Smith’s Red Sonja, and John Buscema’s, and the different ones that had preceded you? How much of that was a factor, or did you just say, “I’m going to do my own.”?
Frank: Buscema was one of the great visual artists of all time. He was a natural. Problem is, he did so many pencils, that if he didn’t get a good inker on, it would ruin it. But if you see his pencils, they’re just glorious, and they’re magical, balletic things. And we were out in San Diego in ’79, I guess it was, and we were on a panel together. And Sonja had taken off, and he was next to me, and I said, “I love drawing Red Sonja. It’s the best fun.” And he didn’t like to draw Conan. I said, “How the Hell … ?” So we met the next morning and had breakfast, just the two of us, and he said, “Yeah, well, really, what I’d like to do is start up a correspondence art school.” Which I don’t know whether he ever started it. Did that ever get off the ground?
Alex: Yeah, in the late ’70s, he did do an art class, yes, and people signed up for that. Some artists that got big in the ’90s, did start out in that school.
Frank: He has a huge following in Italy.
Alex: That’s true.
Frank: … [the Italians] claim him as their own, but he was truly one of the super giants, he and Kubert, super giants of the comic world. Andrea Bulgarelli is another super talent in Italy, and we correspond, and he is an heir, in a way, to that. And he draws everything freehand, … his Suspiria … has huge bosoms, which of course, interests me.
Alex: That’s great. Now, when you worked with Roy on Red Sonja, did you work from a full script, or was it like the Marvel style?
Frank: There was no breakdowns. I did everything, including the color, with all of the books. It’s a cottage industry. You have the breakdown artist, the letterer. I did everything myself, and that went right through to the last issue, which was … My involvement with Red Sonya ended when … Stan asked me to come in. He wanted to talk to me and a couple of other guys. And they were concerned that my Sonja was the only book in the series that didn’t look like a Marvel book, and they wanted all of the Marvel books to look like Marvel books. So they wanted possibly to put an inker on me, and that’s when I said, “Farewell, and it’s been wonderful.” And I went on to Ghita of Alizarr.
Alex: I see, so that’s why you left Red Sonja?
Frank: Yeah, that’s why I left Red Sonja. She was selling pretty well at that point, and then a series of artists came along, and then they dropped … I think Sal Quartuccio, or somebody, had it for a while, had her. And then it came to Dynamite, and they’ve thrown a lot of money into it.
There’s another movie coming along now, as you know. Did you know there’s another Sonja movie in the works?
Jim: Yes.
Alex: Yes.
Frank: Oh, you did?
Jim: It sees like there always is, and then something happens. It’s been hard to get it actually done. I’ll believe it when it actually shows in theaters.
Frank: Oh, of course. Yeah, there’s a lot of talk about it. It’s been mentioned, oh, two or three times. It was announced that Rose McGowan was going to do it.[7]
Alex: Right, that’s right.
Frank: And now … Jill Soloway[8] is going to do it, who is a gender neutral … she looks like a guy, but it might work. It’s like Playboy, which I had a wonderful relationship for all those years, is now … I think they only publish four times a year . Of course, they don’t use cartoons anymore.
Playboy After … Red Sonja
Alex: Now, after Red Sonja, you were working on Ghita, and you also did Danger Rangerette for National Lampoon also, right?
Frank: Right.
Alex: Yeah, how was working with National Lampoon, and how did Danger Rangerette come about?
Frank: Well, Ted Mann was the one who approached me. Incidentally, that was … Stepping back for a moment. I was doing Danger Rangerette, and Michelle Eury called me from Playboy, and said, “Would you like to contribute something to our magazine?” Wow, so I said, “Yeah, I’ll give it a try.” And almost overnight, Moonshine popped out full blown from my brow. I sent it in, and they published that. And from there on, it went onto many issues, and Hefner never criticized … He loved Moonshine McJugs.
And after all those years, he decided for some reason that he wanted me to do full page gags. Then all hell broke loose, because he always wanted to be a cartoonist, and he micromanaged me. Everything, he was criticizing … He was driving me crazy, so that fortunately … mag was dying, and it ended with the last few gags, which were pretty pitiful. Couple of them are okay, but-
Alex: Did you meet Hugh Hefner?
Frank: I never met him, but I brisked back and forth for memos.
I have wonderful memos, fax of memos that have his notations. I never went to the mansion, but don’t tell anybody that. I would like to have them know that I dissipated something terrible in the grotto and all that, but I never went there. Everybody always during that period, “Have you been to the mansion, have you met Hef?” No … Well, and sometime I’d say, “Oh, yes, I’ve met him. He’s a wonderful man. I’ve been to all those girls.” But no, I was just a family man.
And Michelle Eury loved our involvement, because we were a family and I was … compared to most of the people, the guys that contributed to it, I was normal.
Chapter Seven
Wizardry and Role-Playing
Frank: We went on the Playboy Channel show with Linda Carrell [Behrie] and I, and we did Ghita of Alizarr and Moonshine McJugs. And she came out here to the house, and it was a big deal. And it was broadcast, we were all thrilled. They put us on the top of the show, because we had Linda, who was at that point a pulp cartoonist, fabulous looking buxom blonde.
Alex: Linda Behrle.
Frank: Yeah, she played Ghita of Alizarr and Moonshine. And I wrote the script for the skits, and they ran it on the first part of the show. Most people said they never looked at anything else after.
Alex: Was she basically purely a model, was she also a friend, or a girlfriend, or anything too, or just a model?
Frank: Well, I always call her my muse, but I have a thing about … I have a lot of muses. No, she’s a friend. She only lives a couple miles from here. We’ve known her for years. She’s married, and now middle-aged. She had two sons, and … She lost all of that wonderful … You know what age does.
Well, and we hear from Angelique Trouvere, who is one of the Sonja models. We hear from her quite often. And Wendy Pini, we’ve reconnected after … She’s now retired, and we’ve reconnected after a fashion. And so, it was wonderful, wonderful experience, because I developed a show along with the Pini’s, and it’s given more credit than it’s due for being an early form of cosplay, with using the costumed characters.
Alex: Right, and that’s what I was going to ask is, in ’78, you got a Playboy Editorial Award, San Diego Inkpot Award, and you were also doing … you were dressed up as a wizard at San Diego Comic Con, and that was a lot of the early cosplay stuff you’re mentioning. Yeah, how did that come about, the whole wizard persona?
Frank: Well, when I was given Sonja, I was savvy enough to realize that this was a goldmine, and I had the idea that I would project myself into it, which I did, into the Sonja things, and more so into Ghita of Alizarr. So I had the wizard suit sewn by a church lady, who sewed the stars and moons on it while she was in Bible class. And that suit, which I wore many, many times in the shows … I had a one man show at the Illustration House gallery three years ago, four years ago. It sold for $40,000. So the tale of the wizard suit ends with a magnificent sum of 40 grand.
Alex: Oh, wow.
Frank: Yeah.
Jim: Wow that’s pretty cool.
Frank: Yeah, so …. And then it turned out that … We did the show several times, and Wendy Pini was so outstanding as Red Sonja that it dwindled down to just Wendy and myself. And of course, the mystic main spring behind it all was her husband. They were fans, and they had plans to develop Elfquest, I think, all along. But between Wendy, and I, and Richard, it came to a culmination in San Diego when he did this really elaborate show, which had projected animations. YouTube has one of those. It has some idea of what that looked like. It goes on for quite a while.
And then at the end of that San Diego show, the Pini’s and the Thorne’s, we decided we were each going to go a different way, because they had Elfquest on their mind, and I had Ghita of Alizarr on my mind. I had Linda Behrle-Carell on my mind. I knew she was going to be my Ghita of Alizarr. That was the culmination of that wonderful experience. Fun was being had by all. Can’t explain it. It’s great.
Alex: Yeah, mystical almost.
Frank: Yeah. Yeah, well, Stan Lee wrote a piece about me in Superhero Women, saying that Sonja and I met in some ancient time. Because of the way I had drawn her and the power of that character infused into … it had to be something mystical.
Chapter Eight
More Talk about Playboy and Jugs
Alex: So would you say that you were able to take Red Sonja beyond where Marvel would really allow it with Ghita, and then combine the comic and the almost pornographic love of the female body, and combine it all into Ghita? Is that what evolved there?
Frank: Of course, yeah, getting back to … One of the seminal moments is when I discovered my father’s pornographic photograph collection, and he had also films. That came handy later in life, because I went on to Iron Devil and some of the … I say with all lack of humility, some of the best porno drawings done in recent memory. And they, by the way, in the one man show that I had at the Illustration House gallery, they went for huge amounts of money. We pulled in about a half a million dollars worth of change on a lot of it. And so much of it was Ghita of Alizarr and the porno stuff. It’s very collectible by a small audience that won’t admit that they’re collecting it.
Alex: Secret joys.
Jim: I wanted to go back to Playboy just for a minute to ask you about, I’ve never seen any notes from Hefner to your stuff, but I have seen ones to Harvey Kurtzman. Did you ever talk to Kurtzman or Elder or anybody that was doing other comic stuff in relation to Playboy?
Frank: I never met Will Elder, but I always felt sorry for Elder — and Little Annie Fanny, because Hefner killed it. I mean, he micromanaged that thing, so it was so difficult to read. He did all these things in it and insisted that Elder and Kurtzman would do it, but he never took any credit for it and it was running at the same time with Moonshine McJugs, which was a sweet read — fast and funny and Little Annie Fannie… I don’t know if you remember, it’s beautifully rendered and all that, but it was …
Jim: Beautiful looking. Yeah.
Frank: … but it would drag on. You know, I mean you were never bored with Moonshine because it went straight pipe down funny and that was it. Barf McBuns never got a chance to get into Moonshine’s panties; everybody in McJug’s clan got into her panties but Barf never did. And that was the running gag and even to the last day… last time it was published, poor Barf never made it. And he was one of the great characters in fiction, unrequited because of his size. I had a little character called Sister Whammy who was absolutely flawless in her predictions; she carried a crystal ball, and the only time that she failed to predict was she predicted that Barf was going to get into her panties, but nope, never did.
Alex: Was Lil Abner an influence on Moonshine McJugs at all?
Frank: Well Moonbeam McSwine, It sounds… it sort of just happened. It works better, actually, than Moonbeam McSwine.[9] Moonshine McJugs… it’s got… it’s got a more of a cache to it.
Alex: It does, yeah. It goes for the jug-ular in a sense.
Frank: [laughter]
Jim: I understand that you’re primarily associated, in terms of the alternate comics, with the Pini’s, but you actually did the only cover for Cerebus, Dave Sim’s Cerebus, that was done by someone other than Sim and/or Gerhard. Do you remember that?
Frank: Yeah.
Jim: Did you do that cover?
Frank: Yeah, I did.
Jim: What was the circumstances behind you doing that? I’ve always been curious.
Frank: Dave Sim, I finally met years later. I only met him once. I don’t know much about him, but he, apparently, is Canadian, was a strange man.
Jim: Yes.
Frank: I don’t really know, but what I read about him, I wonder. Because I gave a free drawing to… because he’s written a fan letter to me and I made a drawing of Sonya holding Cerebus in her hand, and he was very appreciative of that. But that was about the only contact with him. And then he did a parody on Ghita of Alizarr, I think it went for a couple of issues. I have them around here somewhere. So, I really don’t know, but he became a religious guy or something, and he divorced his wife.
Jim: The cover you did, I think was done as they were getting married and going on their honeymoon. Because it was pretty early on in the run, and it stands out because it’s you. You know, and a lot of people don’t even know that that was your cover.
Frank: Ah. I don’t know whether I have it in my collection. I have scrapbooks …
Alex: Oh yeah?
Frank: That have all this… As much as I could gather it together and I have about 15 of them now. Huge scrapbooks.
Jim: Oh wow.
Frank: Hefner had dozens and dozens, and they were all published at one point. He collected all of that, too. Though, I don’t know whether he, you know… if all in all, if he had… maybe he would have been better off being a cartoonist, but he wasn’t very good at it.
Hy Eisman, who draws Popeye, he’s a friend of mine, an old buddy. We went to art school together and we had a reunion of the camp magazine, when they were in the service together. And they both worked on the magazine and they had a 50th reunion and Hefner came and recognized Hy, and came up to him and he said, “Hy, I’m glad you made it in comics. I wasn’t that good. I didn’t make it, but I make a lot more money than you do.”
Busting Boundaries on the World Stage
Alex: Did you ever meet Jim Warren?
Frank: Oh, yes. Yes, I did. We’re both exactly the same age. We both played the trumpet at that time. We both did gigs in the area. We got along very well. He was very friendly. Sometimes, a lot of people didn’t like him, but I enjoyed his presence, and he was very enthusiastic about serializing Ghita of Alizarr in the magazine and that, of course, thrilled me and he said it may bring some negative reviews because of the content. I said, “Great.” Weezie [Louise Jones] was working there with Bill DuBay, and I said have them fake some really devastating reviews, saying what a piece of crap it was, and how horribly explicit it was.” But they didn’t have to write them because they came in anyway, which made it even better, fueled the… and then Toutain Editor[10] picked it up and we got distribution of Ghita of Alizarr, and ultimately [it was released] in about five or six languages.
Alex: Oh, cool.
Frank: Iron Devil has got the same number of… she’s been in a lot of those, too. One just came in Portuguese so, and Hermes is reprinting all that stuff. Ribbit, and the lesser-known creations of mine.
Jim: How did you come to Warren at that time? After you left Marvel? Did anybody reach out to you or did you go to to them, and who was your editor?
Frank: At that time, I was represented by Al Zuckerman at Writer’s House and he thought that Ghita of Alizarr had great potential. And I think he’s still around, Writer’s House is still around. And anyway, at that point we were having nice parties there, Christmas parties, and that was the time when Playboy called, Michelle called, and they asked me if I could contribute something to the magazine, as I mentioned before. So I told Al about it and he wanted 15% of my Playboy. I said, “Well, but she called me. It wasn’t you,” and so we parted ways at that point. And I, on my own, approached Jim Warren with Ghita of Alizarr. So, that’s the story of that.
Jim: When you were riding high off of Red Sonja. I mean, people love that work, so that was, I’m sure… that was a perfect book it seems like, for Warren at the time.
Frank: Yeah. Yeah. It was a youthful energy, which I no longer have. I’m amazed looking back at the torrent of work that was pouring out of me, and now I have difficulty… I’m on a cane, and I have difficulty getting up the stairs without falling over.
Alex: Oh my gosh.
Frank: This awaits all of us, you know. I am your coming attraction. So enjoy and produce while you can.
Alex: Right.
Jim: You sound pretty good for a 90-year-old.
Alex: Yeah. You sound real… You sound very virile and strong.
Frank: [laughter]
Jim: I was going to ask about Heavy Metal, too.
Frank: Heavy Metal. Yes. That was Lann.
Jim: Tell us about that character and what you were doing there.
Frank: Well, that was another thing. They called me… She called me and asked me if I would contribute something to the magazine, you know, which seems like an incredible… to have Playboy call, and then Heavy Metal call, and ask you to do something. And so thank you Sonja and et al. And, so, I ended up creating Lann. It was recently, Hermes did the beautiful reprint of it and I never liked it from the beginning, but it seemed to work when I saw it in black and white. It seemed to have a solidity that I didn’t like when I originally did it, and time that enough has passed and it puts it into perspective. So, she is one of my lesser creations, but I’m still proud of her.
Alex: Yeah, I like Lann.
Frank: What I have been doing recently, and for the past five or six years, is painting huge images of my character. So, panels, without any sound effects or balloons of the characters, and they roughly average three feet by five feet. They’re on stretched linen latex with a felt pen. They come out quite beautifully. It’s amazing when you see them. I have a graphics house; it gives me a fantastic actual detailed enlargement, and I have a method of transferring it to the linen, which will remain secret. [chuckle]
Alex: All right.
Frank: And, really, I have dozens and dozens of them now and I have a problem with storage. Our daughter has a much bigger house. She lives in Pennsylvania. She has a lot of them, so I await, somehow, to connect with a gallery that’ll show one or two of these, because I would like to get a decent payment for them.
Alex: Yeah, you emailed me one sample, a couple weeks ago, and I was really amazed by that one panel, but it has movement in it, although there are no wavy lines of movement. But the expression and what you’ve captured on that page of that woman’s facial expression — I can almost feel the movement as I look at that!
Frank: That was a mermaid from book three of Ribbit.
Alex: Yeah, there you go. Ribbit. You did that for Comico, right?
Frank: Yes. Yeah. There’s also a fantastic one of Sonja that’s that size. It’s a close-up, but the eyes and the sweep of the hair, the blinds that I originally drew are enlarged and beefed in so that to get the total effect of it, as you see in that one that I sent you.
Alex: Yeah, I love it.
Jim: Did you do it on that scale because of your vision. Is it easier to work when it’s larger like that?
Frank: Well that’s true, but I can still do… I’m doing it right now. Behind me is a very large and leaping Sonja, which has no blacks. It’s all very, very light line work, but it is large. I can manage some of the small faces and fingers and fingernails. I’m working within my limitations as best I can. I have the happy aspect of my life that I can’t wait to get up in the morning and get back at it, and I still have trouble sleeping at night when I figure I have the wrong color on something. But those are a small price to pay for enjoying what I’m doing at my age.
Alex: How was working with Comico? Were they pretty easy to deal with? With those comics and with your 90s reprints, were they profitable for you?
Frank: Ribbit was a money loser for Comico. It was run by a guy whose father was a sports guy. So, he had money from owning a football team or something. He set his son up, and the son didn’t know much about comics, so it came into being in that respect. And they produced a pretty full line of comic books, but it ultimately failed. I don’t know whether it went on for, what, two or three years. It could have been four years, maybe, I don’t know.
Alex: Yeah, I have that… I think it’s a five issue run. It’s The Erotic Worlds of Frank Thorne and those are reprints from the 90’s but they have pictures of you and Linda Behrle in them, and all that stuff.
Frank: Right. That was Fantagraphics. Yeah.
Alex: Okay.
Frank: Eros saved Fantagraphics in a sense. The erotic stuff got them out of a bad spot, and Gary [Groth] produces great stuff – wonderful treasure to the comic world, and The Erotic Worlds of Frank Thorne were, I guess, part of that. But it was before — I produced all that lettering, so it’s all by hand, all of those titles … I had always done all the lettering, title lettering, by hand, and so when you look at it, you see he did just pass over Iron Devil, and so forth. But you’ve got to realize that that was not done on a computer, it was done all by hand.
Alex: It’s amazing.
Frank: You know, now it’s a computer. What Dynamite did when they reproduced all my Sonja stuff without paying me anything. Not a scintilla. They ruined all my stuff and they keep running it, running it, and they’re still doing the same thing. They have somebody color my drawings, who doesn’t know how to draw. And so they try to turn a form and they, they don’t know. And to me it ruins it… and what they’re doing to Sonja is just dreadful. I mean, making her little cartoons and crap. Yeah.
Alex: Yeah. It kind of loses some of the sensuality, right?
Frank: Yeah.
Chapter Ten
Published Histories, Private Dinners and Parting Words
Alex: Now, you also did a couple of other things. You did The Illustrated History of Union County.
Frank: Yes.
Alex: And that was reprinted by Fantagraphics in 2005, but from what I’ve been reading, it’s a serialized strip of prehistoric to modern New Jersey’s Union County. Did you start this in the late 40’s while you were in art school? Was this like an early life project? I mean, what was that?
Frank: I was an 18 year old kid when I did that. And it ran in a journal and to quite a bit of success. I was getting $25 a page for them, and ran every day, Monday to Friday. And that was quite a job, again, because I started it before we were married, and then you get married and that whole thing. And I was going into the service… special service in the army and producing that at the time. And I don’t know how the hell I did it then, and I could never do it now. So, it was compiled, and I did a cover, a special cover and it charmed Gary so much that he printed it, to my amazement.
Alex: Oh, that’s awesome. So you get along well with Gary Groth?
Frank: Yeah, yeah. Yes I did. I haven’t heard from Gary, but occasionally he’ll cut a deal for the Portuguese Iron Devil was his deal. And, and he never asked for any kind of recompense for the cutting the deal. It’s no big deal, so it doesn’t really matter.
Alex: Right, right.
Frank: Have you ever met Gary?
Alex: I have not met Gary. I’ve seen him at a convention at his booth just surrounded by, you know, a lot of buying and selling of his books, and I’ve read quite a bit of Fantagraphics. I have not spoken to him in person, though.
Frank: How about Ditko? You ever met Ditko? Who’s met Ditko? Nobody.
Alex: Yeah, I know who’s met Ditko. Well, I did meet his nephew. He and I have a started a bit of a friendship recently after Steve Ditko died, and I have met and correspond with Jim Steranko. Have you ever met Steranko?
Frank: Yes, I have. Yeah. His mark is obvious to all who know a lot about comics, which is not me. I don’t know much about comics, and I’ve met him and we had a lot of fun. We had dinner together when we were in San Diego. We all sketched on a tablecloth after they removed the food. Everybody did one of their characters and I did Red Sonja. I don’t know who got that tablecloth, but whoever did has got something that’s worth quite a bit of money now.
Alex: So a couple other questions. Two more, pretty much. You wrote and illustrated The Crystal Ballroom in 2003, tell us about that.
Frank: Well, The Crystal Ballroom came out… Perhaps my greatest written work is something called the Barrington Hall Sketchbook, which was self-published and I sent it, it had all my drawings of my youth, but it’s the perfect voice of a 12-year-old kid and never have… so spot on the voice remains to the very end. And Gary saw it and said, “Well, this deserves a wider audience.” So that birthed The Crystal Ballroom, and unfortunately the voice is not as clear in The Crystal Ballroom as it is… And there was another one I can’t remember now, but if you were to get a copy of the Barrington Hall Sketchbook, which actually, that book deserves to be printed in bound form. But I don’t know whether… If that’s possible at this point in my life, but that’s one thing that should be out there.
And I would add one of my early heroes was Harry Devlin. Have you heard of Harry Devlin?
Alex: Have you heard of Harry Devlin, Jim?
Jim: No,
Frank: He was a cartoonist for Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post.
Alex: Saturday Evening Post, I got you. A magazine illustrator guy. Okay.
Frank: And I worshipped his drawings and through connections I got the chance to go to his studio, which was nearby in Mountainside, which is a couple of miles from here. I came in with my portfolio and he looked it over and he was very cocky in his 30’s, and they had about eight kids, five or six, seven, eight kids. And he looked at it and he said I should pursue another line of work. [laughter] With moist eye, I closed my portfolio and left and produced The Illustrated History of Union County. Soon after that I’m at King Features doing Perry Mason.
Alex: So that’s that sequence of events. So that was kind of a divergence in the road there.
Frank: I think he was a bit bothered by the fact that he’d told me that. But he taught me a great lesson. The greatest lesson I ever learned was that never discourage young talent because you just never know what’s gonna come on. So then, to make amends, he invited us to come to a dinner with Noel Sickles and Milton Caniff, and that was a grand affair. And of course I had been corresponding with Toth and when Toth heard that I had actually talked to Sickles — because Toth [had] called Sickles, and Sickles hung up on him because he thought he was a nutcase — [Toth] wanted me to intercede to get, somehow, a response from Sickles. I felt maybe I shouldn’t get involved in this, and, Toth was offended by that and I didn’t hear… He sent these wonderful postcards with all of his writing on it. Toth owned the 60’s, he was fantastic — but a strange man.
Jim: Did you keep those postcards?
Frank: I have a few, yes. I wish I had kept more of them .. because they’re worth a lot of money.
Jim: That’s a subject that’s come up before in an our podcast. People who have those Toth postcards and correspondence.
Frank: Yeah, I have a couple of those. He attacked me viciously for my pornographic work. But then he would flip and say it wasn’t so bad, and then when Al Zuckerman took me on at Writers’ House, it was offense to him. He said, “What about me?” He said, action heroes or whatever, Hurray for heroism or something, and I said, “Alex… Al, I’ll mention you to him.” And he never contacted Toth, and Toth was mad at Zuckerman and me. Another strange one is Neal Adams. He’s got a strange side to him because we were in Europe to one of the salons in Barcelona, and he says strange things. A lot of talent he is, but he’s a strange fella.
Alex: What kind of strange things would he say?
Frank: For instance, we were at the salon and I was at a table next to his, and I had about five people in front of me signing. I was signing books and making sketches. He was next to me and he had about 30 people in line to get his signature and his wife, Marilyn, who has the same name as my wife, she was sitting next to him, and a little Barcelonian young man about 15 or 16 came up in back and cupped her. And, oh, he was furious. He threw a sketchpad at him and he got up and stormed off with Marilyn, and of course the line moved to me and I spent an extra hour just signing books.
Alex: Yeah, you’re the one left standing, signing stuff after that and then Noel Sickles. How was he to have dinner with?
Frank: I found him very genial. A very nice guy. He and Harry were very close. Harry’s oldest son was named for him, and his early work was unparalleled. Sickle’s stuff. Oh boy, was he ever good.
Alex: And he was there with Milton Caniff, like you guys were all hanging out together at that dinner?
Frank: Yeah, as I say, I always felt that it was kind of a payment for what [Harry Devlin] had said to me.
Alex: Right. To dissuade you from it. How was it seeing Caniff and Sickles, could you get a sense of their relationship at all, or the contrast in their personalities?
Frank: Oh, they were interacting very well. It was a wonderful gathering. Memorable in every respect, which drove Toth up the wall. He couldn’t be there and Sickles thought he was a nutcase, and Toth thought Sickles was a genius.
Alex: Now, Toth. Did you guys ever have a falling out, or did you pretty much have smooth sailing in your relationship other than-
Frank: I never met him. At San Diego he had, constantly, a crowd because he was a minimalist genius of the 60’s, and he had huge fan following. His artwork got huge. To buy a piece, it would cost a lot of money. I got a chance to see him. I never broke through because I didn’t want to interrupt those fans that were surrounded him. So I only saw him from afar but you know, we communicated over the years.
Alex: Interesting.
Jim: Did you have an interaction with Stan Lee? Besides that one …
Frank: Well, I saw Stan occasionally. My visits to Marvel offices were very few because I mailed everything in. So I think I spotted him a couple of times and then came the aforementioned meeting when they decided they were going to put an inker on me and, and make Sonja look like the rest of the line.
Jim: He was there for that meeting?
Frank: Yeah. Stan was there. Yeah. Yeah. I liked him, and everybody seemed to like him, but he took credit sort of… He didn’t draw any that stuff. It was Ditko that actually created Spiderman, I mean, in that sense. He’s getting credit now, and toward the end of his life, Stan Lee, the damage was already done. He had taken credit for those things when he really shouldn’t have gotten full credit. He should have credited the real creators.
Alex: Right. That’s interesting. And that’s cool to hear what your view is on that, because a lot of people, sometimes I want to talk about that, but it’s cool to hear what you have to say about that. Yeah. Now, you’ve done other media. So, you wrote and produced Two Lords and a Lady about Elizabeth Lee Frazee and the Battle of Short Hill, Is that right?
Frank: Yeah, yeah.
Alex: Tell us, what is that project?
Frank: Well, it was the local rotary, there was a historic house in a neighborhood that was built in the 1740s. It still stands today, but it was in a bad case of disrepair, it’s become a zoo and so forth. So, in order to raise money to restore it, I wrote and produced a film called Two Lords and a Lady, which involved the meeting of Lord Cornwallis and Lord Howe, with aunt Betty Frazee, who was a baker of bread, and was quite elaborate.
And we had a lot of help from WBGH in Boston, who allowed us to use a lot of their footage because I pushed the deal saying, you know, “This isn’t only for just to raise the money because I usually charge $20 a second for any footage that they use, that’s to be used.” So they waived that and we got to be… it was about 24, 25 minutes. Our son-in-law, John Fazio of Fazio Filmworks, he did that. It’s followed now by… He’s doing a treatment, a documentary on myself being his father-in-law. And he’s been working on that for several years. I don’t know whether I’ll ever live to see it, but somebody may see it someday, but a lot of people have seen Two Lords and a Lady, and that’s a legitimate credit. I can take credit for that.
Alex: That’s great. And it’s cool to see that. It’s good for people to see that you’ve gone beyond comics, into other media, that you have many talents. You know, and this is kind of a wrap up question in a way, you’ve made it pretty clear that superheroes would not be your preferred art genre, but you did say in a prior interview that you liked the movie Superman II in 1980. Is there a particular reason why you liked that movie and Christopher Reeve’s performance? What’s your take on that?
Frank: Well, I was cool to it, but of all of them, I prefer the second one because Reeve was so perfect as Superman. But …what’s happening today is you get wonderful actors like Mark Ruffalo, playing in these Transformer movies, or Iron Man or something. What the hell are they doing? And most of the time the stunt men are doing whatever they do. But I guess they get a good paycheck and the independents are still producing wonderful movies. You’ve just got to know where to find them.
Alex: Where to find them. And I guess final question is, you said this, I think in the early 2000’s, that despite the rise of digital access, comic books will always be around. Do you still feel that way?
Frank: Yeah, I think so. In some form. Yeah, I think so.
[1] The first issue of Simon & Kirby’s Young Romance was dated September 1947. Thorne’s first published romance story was “My Selfish Heart” in Intimate Love #7, dated June 1950.
[2] Sylvan Byke (1904-1982) was the comic strip editor for King Features Syndicate for over thirty years.
[3] Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970) was an American lawyer and author of the Perry Mason series of detective stories,
[4] Pulp illustrator Matt Clark (1903-1972) was well-known for his Western art and for his illustrations for magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post.
[5] Clifford McBride (1901-1951) was an American cartoonist best known for his popular nationally syndicated comic strip Napoleon and Uncle Elby.
[6] Neil O’Keeffe (1891-1968) was an American cartoonist and illustrator who drew for Metropolitan Movies in the 1920s, as well as for pulp magazines and mainstream magazines like Collier’s and The New Yorker. O’Keeffe began working for King Features in 1938 doing comic adaptations of novels for them, in cooperation with the Book-of-the-Month Club.
[7] McGowan was cast as Red Sonja with Robert Rodriguez set to direct the film
[8] Jill (now going by Joe) Soloway is an American television creator, showrunner, director and writer, best known for the Emmy-winning Amazon original series Transparent.
[9] Moonbeam McSwine was a character in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, known for her beauty, for her need of a bath, and for her love of pigs.
[10] Toutain-Editor was a publishing label started by Josep Toutain in 1973. It became instrumental to Spaniish comics culture in the 1970s and 1980s.
Transcript published in Comic Book Historians Presents… Frank Thorne the Blue, Wizard of the Comic Arts:
🎬 Edited & Produced by Alex Grand, ©2021 Comic Book Historians, Sound FX – Standard License. Images used in artwork ©Their Respective Copyright holders. Images used for academic purposes only.
Frank Thorne Interview 2019 by Alex Grand & Jim Thompson
📜 Video chapters
00:00:00 Welcoming The wizard of the comic arts Frank Thorne
00:00:39 Background of Frank Thorne
00:04:02 Perry Mason newspaper strip for King Features
00:05:17 Erle Stanley Gardner, Little Brown company
00:06:21 Frank Thorne’s strip Dr. Guy Bennett…soap opera strip
00:08:15 Your approach on black & white and color drawings
00:09:28 Early 1950s, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
00:10:32 Howard Leroy Davis, Battling Beauties, Red Sonja
00:11:24 1963 National Cartoonist Society award, 1978 Inkpot Award
00:12:32 The Twilight Zone, Mighty Samson for The Gold Key
00:14:02 Dell vs Gold Key, New Jersey illustration
00:15:09 DC | Korak Son of Tarzan & Tomahawk saga
00:16:38 Archie Goodwin, American comic book writer
00:17:04 Joe Kubert
00:18:52 For the DC period, what did you like?
00:19:55 Atlas Comic Period | Martin Goodman & Chip Goodman
00:21:48 Marvel Feature 2 1975
00:23:04 Barry Windsor-Smith & Andrea Bulgarelli
00:25:09 Red Sonya
00:27:54 National Lampoon comics, Danger Rangerette
00:29:20 Did you met Hugh Hefner? | Linda Burrell
00:32:04 Tale of the Wizard Suit | Wendy and Richard Pini
00:34:38 Red Sonja by Frank Thorne
00:36:09 Playboy | Harvey Kurtzman, Will elder
00:38:10 Was Li’l Abner an influence on Moonshine McJuggs?
00:38:41 Dave Sim, Canadian cartoonist Cerberus, Hi Eisen
00:41:25 Did you ever meet Jim Warren?
00:42:58 How did you come to Jim Warren at that time? | Red Sonja character
00:44:55 Frank Thorne’s Lann – Hermes Press, Heavy Metal character
00:48:49 How was working with Comic-con, Erotic Worlds of Frank Thorne
00:51:26 The Illustrated History of Union County, Book by Frank Thorne | Gary Groth
00:53:10 Gary Groth, Jim Steranko
00:54:14 The Crystal Ballroom | Barrington Hall Sketchbook
00:55:26 Harry Devlin, Cartoonist | Alex Toth
00:58:49 Neal Adams
01:00:07 Noel Sickles, American illustrator
01:01:57 Stan Lee, American comic book writer
01:03:18 Two Lords and a Lady, Elizabeth “Betty” Lee Frazee
01:05:18 I like Superman 2, 1980
01:06:31 Comic books will always be around
01:07:28 Wrapping up
#FrankThorne #RedSonja #FrankThorneRedSonja #EroticWorlds #HermesPress
#MarvelComics #ComicBookHistorians #CBHInterviews #ComicHistorianInterviews
#CBHPodcast #CBH
Join us for more discussion at our Facebook group
check out our CBH documentary videos on our CBH Youtube Channel
get some historic comic book shirts, pillows, etc at CBH Merchandise
check out our CBH Podcast available on Apple Podcasts, Google PlayerFM and Stitcher.
Photos and images ©Their Respective Copyright holders
Use of images are not intended to infringe on copyright, but merely used for academic purpose
Interview © 2021 Comic Book Historians
