Fradon had a looser, more cartoony style than many of her male contemporaries, which serves the funny “Through the Wringer,” written by David V. Reed and published in The Amazing World of DC Comics #10 (1976).
Friday, June 23, 2017
Number 2066: Ramona Fradon puts us through the wringer
Fradon had a looser, more cartoony style than many of her male contemporaries, which serves the funny “Through the Wringer,” written by David V. Reed and published in The Amazing World of DC Comics #10 (1976).
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9 comments:
Cute story, and I like the art, it fits the overall zany antics of the tale.
I think there's a hidden secondary meaning to this story. The editor should just take the wild stories the writer told and turn them into the scripts! Just add a purple ape and you're done!
Brian, I suspect the story was inventory, unpublished in regular comic book format. Why? I dunno. It is no better or worse than many of the stories that saw print.
So I don't skip over the pedantry, Ramona Fradon was once married to Dana Fradon, who is a famous New Yorker cartoonist. Ramona entered comic books about 1950, and Dana was accepted as a New Yorker cartoonist about the same time by the first great New Yorker editor, Harold Ross, just before Ross died. Not a whole lot of information about the couple is available, except that the Fradons had children.
I know a daughter, Amy Fradon is a recording artist, I think, in the folk vein or something similar.
I've always loved Ramona Fradon's cartoony style, and it fits this story well. I remember she did a handful of House of Mystery stories, so is that where this strip was originally meant to be published, or perhaps in Plop!, since it opens and closes with Cain, who's drawn in the beginning in Aragones style? Anyway, who are the characters meant to be? The name "Phil Binger" makes me think of Otto Binder, but that makes no sense since Binder was so prolific. And why does the editor look like C.C. Beck? These are just questions based on my own amateur observations.
This is one of the cruelest stories ever produced, ad it's no wonder it never saw print in the regular series but only turned up in AWODCC as a way to burn it of. The entire thing is a not-very-thinly disguised attack on the then-recently=deceased Bill Finger, the co-creator of Batman and author of a million stories throughout the Golden and Silver Ages.
Reads like a Plop! story.
I think this story was inventoried simply because it's a pretty unfunny and cruel parody of Bill Finger, meant to be published right after he died in poverty. Why the publication here I don't know.
Tom and Tom...okay, I see your point(s), but why? David Vern Reed was a contemporary of Finger's. Did he and the editors hate Finger that much? Finger died January 18, 1974, and the story could have been a joke written before he died, with no anticipation of his death. It would have been a lot better if they had made a less obvious reference to Finger than reversing the first letters of his name, but unless someone was there and can explain it I think speculation makes it look a lot worse than it might have been intended to be.
Ryan, okay...so it is a story about Bill Finger, not Otto Binder. And you have read Tom Brevoort and Tom Stewart's notes.
I agree with Jeff Trexler it is probably an unpublished Plop! story.
My confession is I did not notice the name and similarity to Finger. My bad.
My interest in the story is in Ramona Fradon's artwork. I have been doing research on one of my other interests, cartoonists of the New Yorker, and wanted to make a point of her marriage to a famous New Yorker cartoonist.
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