SPOTTED AMONG THE APES IN:
frank cho with
Conducted by telephone on October 31, 2006
“Monkey Boy” self-caricatures, “Bride of the Beastman” in Titanic Tales (Insight Studios), apes sketches and covers for Edgar Rice Burroughs, fanzines and sketchbooks
OTHER CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: Liberty Meadows, Shanna, the She-Devil, New Avengers, Mighty Avengers
Do you remember your very first ape drawing? No… actually, I don’t. I remember watching King Kong, the original [Willis] O’Brien King Kong, when I was little. It was around first grade.
Where did your nickname “Monkey Boy” come from? From Buckaroo Banzai. That’s what I thought—The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984). It was John Lithgow’s character: “Laugh all you want, monkey boy! Your overthruster’s sh*t!” [laughter]
Were you disappointed in the 2005 King Kong remake, the Peter Jackson one? I wasn’t. I’m one of the few people who liked it. I’ve talked with a lot of hardcore King Kong fans, and a lot of them were disappointed. But I wasn’t one of them. I liked it. I thought the whole Ann Darrow character being a stage actress, and performing slapsticks to gain Kong’s affections, were the missing pieces from the original O’Brien Kong. Ever see the 1976 King Kong, the one with Rick Baker in the gorilla suit? I think I saw it roughly around the same time as the original. Me being a kid, I liked both of them! But it was pretty bad. I don’t know why I enjoyed that as a kid… there was a certain charm to it, but it was basically a guy in a gorilla suit, you know? But as a kid, I thought it was a really cool movie. Whattaya know, you’re a little kid in the first grade?
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Comics Gone Ape!
How old were you when that movie came out in 1984? I was in middle school.
Dino learns it’s not smart to mouth off to King Kong. Illustration by and courtesy of Frank Cho. King Kong TM & © 2007 Universal.
So, when you were a gullible little kid, were you disappointed to discover that spider monkeys couldn’t shoot webs out of their hands? [laughs]
Did you call yourself “Monkey Boy,” or did someone else call you that? You know that age—you and your friends insult each other constantly, and “Monkey Boy” was one of them. It didn’t really catch on until I was in college. It’s the same thing in college, where you insult each other like crazy, and “Monkey Boy” made us all laugh! [laughs] So I just put it into the strip. In Liberty Meadows you draw yourself as Monkey Boy Cho, a chimp, but there aren’t any apes in the regular cast. Why not? Because I was the monkey? [laughs] So one monkey is enough… I didn’t want to be redundant.