Frank Cho

Self-portrait, by Frank Cho

Frank Cho, born Duk Hyun Cho, is an American comic strip creator, writer and illustrator. The second of three children, Cho was born in Seoul in 1971, but moved to the United States at the age of six and grew up in Beltsville, Maryland. He attended Prince George's Community College, before transferring to the University of Maryland School of Nursing, ultimately graduating with a B.S. in Nursing in 1996.

Cho received no formal training as an artist. He got his start writing and drawing a cartoon strip called University² for The Diamondback, the student newspaper at the University of Maryland, College Park. After graduation, Cho adapted elements of this work for use in a professionally syndicated strip, Liberty Meadows. He grew tired of newspaper censorship, and ultimately converted Liberty Meadows to a monthly publication. After issue #36, the Liberty Meadows comic book went on hiatus in late 2003, although Cho has stated that issue #37 will be published in May 2006.

Cho has also drawn a wide variety of other professional material, including a new version of Shanna the She-Devil in 2005 for Marvel Comics. His Shanna series was originally meant to feature "adults only" artwork including nude drawings of the heroine, but Marvel later decided to have Cho censor his already completed pages and the 7-issue series did not feature nudity.

Cho has most recently drawn several issues of "The New Avengers" for Marvel comics. A recent issue includes a trademark Cho-ism; the character of Wolverine is depicted wearing a t-shirt that bears the logo "Beltsville". Throughout his career, Cho has frequently dressed his characters in attire that ties them to his hometown.

His artistic style is generally detailed and realistic, but he frequently makes use of absurd or anachronistic elements in his work, such as dinosaurs, pin-up girls, and Pogo-style anthropomorphic animals. He also enjoys breaking the fourth wall, frequently inserting himself into his work in the guise of a talking chimpanzee, and on several occasions he has drawn strips that feature his characters interacting with other popular syndicated features (for example, a character stuck in a pipe being ejected into a nearby panel apparently taken from Blondie). The Liberty Meadows denizens have found also themselves sharing their strip with Calvin & Hobbes, Li'l Abner, Hagar the Horrible, Dilbert, and Cathy, among others.

As of 2005, Cho lives in Columbia, Maryland with his wife Cari and children.

Awards

He has been recognized for his work with the National Cartoonist Society Book Illustration Award for 2001, and their Comic Book Award for 2001 for Liberty Meadows.

External links

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.