Ramona Fradon, 1926-2024

Ramona Fradon, a comics illustrator for more than seventy years and co-creator of Aqualad and Metamorpho, died on 24 February at the age of 97.

Born Ramona Dom in Chicago, her family moved to New York when she was five. Her career began in 1950, and lasted until her retirement in January 2024. Her father, Peter Dom, was a commercial graphic artist, designing logos for Elizabeth Arden, Camel, and Lord & Taylor, among others. He encouraged her to go to art school. After graduating from Parsons School of Design, she met and married New Yorker cartoonist Dana Fradon, who suggested she try cartooning. A friend of her husband, comics letterer George Ward, asked for samples of her artwork to pitch to editors, and among her earliest assignments for DC Comics was a pair of Shining Knight stories. She became the regular illustrator of the adventures of Aquaman in Adventure Comics, a feature she worked on for a decade, and in 1960, together with writer Robert Bernstein, she co-created Aqualad, a relatively late entry in the kid-sidekick parade.

In 1965, she and Bob Haney co-created the bizarre hero Metamorpho. ‘He wasn’t your average superhero so capes and masks didn’t suit him. I tried a lot of those and finally decided that since he was always changing his shape, clothes would get in his way. So I drew him in tights, with a body made up of four different colors and textures that were supposed to indicate the four elements.’

Fradon art from the unpublished Claws of the Cat #5, circa 1973; inks by Jim Mooney.

After two try-out issues of The Brave and the Bold and the first four of his own series, Fradon left Metamorpho, and comics, to raise her daughter Amy. Returning in 1972, she worked briefly for Marvel, illustrating an issue of Fantastic Four and the never-published fifth issue of Claws of the Cat, but found herself uncomfortable with the ‘Marvel method’ of drawing entire issues from a half-page synopsis. So she returned to DC, illustrating Plastic Man and the TV tie-in Super Friends, of which she drew the majority of the 47 issues, as well as many one-offs for the DC mystery line.

In 1980, Dale Messick, the creator of the newspaper strip Brenda Starr, Reporter, retired, and Fradon became the regular artist on Brenda until Fradon’s own withdrawal from regular assignments in 1995; however, Fradon remained a regular and hugely popular presence at comic conventions, and drew hundreds of commission illustrations, as well as working on occasional one-off comics projects, finally announcing her retirement from commission work in January this year. Her career was commemorated in the book The Art of Ramona Fradon, released in 2014.

The Super Friends—and friends! In this convention sketch, the team is augmented by Fradon-associated characters Aqualad, Metamorpho and Plastic Man.

She passed away of heart failure at her home, and is survived by her daughter Amy Fradon.