In Memoriam: Ramona Fradon, longtime force in comic books, dies at 97

•  GEORGE G GUSTINES

NEW YORK: 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 on Saturday at her home in Ulster County, N.Y. 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 on 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.’”

Fradon’s version of Aquaman, a character who first appeared in 1941, modernized him for new readers and gave him the chiselled 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 the 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 the 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 the editor George Kashdan and the 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 semi-retired 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.