Posted in: Comics | Tagged: comic con, frank brunner, san diego, sdcc

SDCC Spotlight On Frank Brunner

Published Wed, 24 Jul 2013 20:00:04 -0500

Joshua Stone writes for Bleeding Cool:

J. David Spurlock of Vanguard Publications moderated the panel, and he started off by asking Frank Brunner about his time in the infamous Marvel Bullpen. Frank said he had spent about a year there working as an inker around 1969, but he wanted to pencil and so he left went to work at Warren.

Frank said he was heavily influenced by the work that had been published by EC, and that he wanted to do visuals that were different, and often time the visuals he did were drug influenced. Frank said the older generation of writers and artists were drinkers, but he and his generations were smokers, and he wasn't referring to cigarettes. He also felt the older generation treated the work as a Madison Avenue type of workplace. He said that John Romita would leave at 5pm no matter if he was in the middle of a page or the middle of a line. Frank would stay until he was done with what he was working on.

Frank went back to Marvel because he was offered a chance to work on Doctor Strange. He not only did the art, but he was the co-writer, but Marvel wouldn't say there were two writers so instead he was called Co-Plotter. Frank said Doctor Strange was a title that he had freedom on, as Marvel didn't pay much attention to it. He said if they had asked him to come back to work on Spider-Man that he would have said no because he would have asked permission for anything that wanted to do that was different. He said they did a story in Doctor Strange that included the biblical god, and that no one noticed until after it was published.

Next Frank went to work on Howard the Duck, and it was amazing how big it got. He remembers visiting UC Berkley and he got mobbed by the students as if he were a rock star. Seeing how big it was he asked for a small rights piece on Howard, but was told to wait eight months until Christmas.

Instead of waiting Frank decided to leave Marvel, and he started his own company called Looking Glass Productions. There he made and sold t-shirts, art prints, and portfolios. He also did the art in for the first Elric story to appear in Heavy Metal Magazine.

Frank then left comics to work in the animation industry for a number of years. He worked on such titles as Johnny Quest and serving as head of character design for the Fox animated series X-Men.

In recent years Frank has been doing a lot of cover work and commissions.

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