1969, suddenly the whole underground scene had gone to the West Coast. I then went to National Lampoon, where they’d published some pretty weird stuff, and I almost got a strip going for them. Lampoon happened to be in the same building as Marvel at the time, and I remember my experience very vividly. I was going to the offices of National Lampoon trying to sell this one-page strip for their comics section. Anyway, when I went up there, nobody was laughing, they were all dead serious. I was hearing from other offices, people shouting, “Is this funny?” Then I went downstairs to visit Marvel for a while, because I knew Marie Severin and a couple of the other artists down there, but they were on the floor, rolling around on the floor laughing! And I thought, “Maybe this is where I should be working!” I remember what they were laughing about, too. It was an issue of Amazing Spider-Man; Romita had just done the cover, and the character was holding his head down, and I guess it was the death of Aunt May, or Mary Jo, or whoever—holding his head down, before John put the spider-lines in the head, it looked like Spidey was holding a large grapefruit in front of his face, and everyone was just hysterical. CBA: Do you recall who you dealt with at National Lampoon? Frank: Yeah, Michael Gross. Strangely enough, I didn’t know his name was Michael Gross when I first visited the office. I had a strip called, “Gross Tales from the Drive-In,” and so, I showed him this strip, and then I realized, “Oh, my God, his name is Michael Gross!” He tried to act like he was not too thrilled with it because of the concept, but I knew it was the title of the strip. Then Gross told me this other weird story; he said, “You know, we had Frazetta do a recent cover. Well, I did a cover, too. And you know what? I offered to trade original covers with Frazetta, and he turned me down!” This guy was not on the same planet with the rest of us! CBA: What was the name of the other strip you tried to get in the Lampoon? Frank: Oh, yeah, it was “Smash Gordon,” obviously a satire of Flash Gordon. CBA: Whatever happened to that stuff? Frank: It wound up being published in Castle of Frankenstein and the last installment appeared in Marvel’s b-&-w Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #1. CBA: You were obviously submitting to Warren, and to… Frank: Yeah, it’s a long and winding trail. Actually, I still have a 10-page story I’d done for Warren just out of high school, that was commissioned while he was on vacation, or out of town, or something. He saw it, and he rejected it. Then, I went to work for Web of Horror, they obviously liked my work. And the funny thing is—or not so funny—the way things worked out, Web ceased publication after three issues, and we all, Bernie Wrightson and Mike Kaluta and everybody had stories that were sitting on the shelf! So, I went out there to Long Island where Cracked magazine, the parent publisher, was located. CBA: Robert Sproul? Frank: Yes. I’ll tell you a little story about that—stories within stories. Sproul only allowed Web of Horror to be published because he wanted to keep Terry Bisson as editor of Cracked. Terry was preparing to leave unless he could start a horror magazine, so they allowed him to do Web. The guy had a good idea, because Warren’s books were going down the tubes really fast at that time, and Warren had lost all his original artists from the first 10 issues or so, and was just reprinting that stuff and some awful new art! So, it was a good time to get in, and Web was kind of popular. I sold my first story to Terry Bisson that I wrote and drew, called “Santa’s Claws.” I wrote it on a Christmas Eve, and it was about a vampire pretending to be Santa Claus. Terry bought that, and I thought, “Well, I’m off and running now!” Of course, like I said, three issues and Terry, for some reason or another, decided he was going to move to California and become a flower child. Immediately, Sproul cancelled the book, regardless of sales. Anyway, I went out to Long Island, I retrieved a lot of the artwork for a lot of the guys on my own, and then I heard through the grapevine that Warren was interested in hiring the artists from Web of Horror, so I went over to the office and I sold him a story that was originally intended for Web, and did some more stories for him. CBA: Overall, how was your experience at Warren? Frank: I remember one time I brought in a story, and there was a Fall 1999
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climactic scene where the monster is confronting this girl he’d been chasing, and Jim looked at the pencils and said, “You know, I’ll bet you $5 you can do this better.” He then took out his wallet and showed me a $5 bill, and I said, “Fine, you’re on,” because $5 actually meant something in those days. I went home, redid it, brought it in, and he said, “You know, I think you won the bet,” and he takes out his wallet and there’s nothing in it! Then he calls in his editor, who was Billy Graham at the time, and borrows the $5 from him to give to me! CBA: I’ve heard he did that a lot to poor Billy. Frank: I heard Jim did a lot worse things to people; sometimes if he didn’t like their artwork, he’d take out a stamp that said “Bullsh*t,” and he’d stamp it right over the artwork. Basically Jim had a Hugh Hefner complex—except that he was no Hugh Hefner! That job was taken. At a convention, somebody overheard me calling him a bastard, and he confronted me with it. He said, “I heard you called me a ‘bastard!’” And here I am, sitting there trying to get work from him! I looked at him, and said, “I think I was misquoted!” At the same time, while I’m sitting there, he gets a phone call from Ralph Reese, and Ralph had just finished a job for him, and was bringing it downtown in a taxi; he was right outside the building, calling him to say
Above: Frank ‘s portrait of “The Doctor as I see him.” From After-Image. Below: Commission piece. Courtesy of the artist. Dr. Strange, Howard ©1999 Marvel Characters, Inc.
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