Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, dynamite, entertainment, frank thorne, Moonshine McJugs, red sonja

In The Wizard's Den With Frank Thorne

Published Sun, 01 Mar 2015 18:00:22 -0600

Dynamite has released the Frank Thorne's Red Sonja Art Edition Vol 2 hardcover earlier this month and Byron Brewer got the opportunity to visit with the legendary artist about the work and his career. This is the transcript of Byron's visit to Frank Thorne's studio.

FRANK THORNE: Welcome to my studio, Byron.

BYRON BREWER: It's an honor, Mr. Thorne.

FT: Please, call me Frank. Would you like coffee? Tea?

BB: A Sprite if you have it.

FT: (Calls down to wife Marilyn in the first floor kitchen). Two Sprites. I'm an alcoholic, but I've been off the sauce for many years. I went cold turkey. But it's wise to keep this in mind: Once an alcoholic always an alcoholic.

BB: I admire your openness on the subject.

FT: I stopped when I began my big art period, that's when I started painting on canvas, some are very large, as you see they're stacked against the walls here in the studio and the adjoining computer room and the storage room.

BB:Your work area rooms are surprisingly small.

FT: None are larger than ten by twelve feet, one's even smaller.

BB:The variety of your big art is amazing, here's a huge action painting next to a sizable drip painting.

FT: The subjects vary, most are fantasy images; eerie landscapes, some are my linear renditions of works by my favorite artists. None were spared, I've done some Picassos, Van Goghs, you name it. You can learn a lot by actually painting in the masters style. I've done upwards of 300 paintings, most of them are stacked in the cellar. I ran out of room up here.

BB:In the hall gallery, the big one next to the Sonja painting is impressive.

FT: That's N.C. Wyeth's Blind Pheu. I painted it the same size as his original; his paintings were very large. N.C. was the father of American illustration.

B/ Are you painting any warrior women these days?

FT: Having left my big art period behind, I've been painting a new series; large versions of all the covers of my Red Sonja, Ghita, and my erotic books. Most are twenty-four by thirty inches. Let's have a look.

(We move into storage room)

BB:This is quite a collection!

FT: Twenty and counting, I'm preparing for my first one-man show at the Illustration House Gallery in Manhattan, Most of my run of Sonja originals will be on view. Plus Lann, Moonshine McJugs, and the rest of my paper ladies.

BB:That's quite a cast of characters.

FT: They all have their roots firmly in the great craftsmen of yore. Let's start with Alex Raymond and Harold Foster, they ruled in my generation. I was a Raymond clone in my teens. I did several pulp magazine illustrations in the late 40s. Inexcusably bad. But, as luck would have it, I walked in to King Features with crude samples of some of the comic book work done while I was attending Art Career School atop the Flatiron Building in Manhattan.

BB: And they handed you the Perry Mason daily and Sunday strip!

FT: Bingo! Whatta way to start in this racket. I was making 250 bucks a week, which in today's money is like 2000. We bought a house and a brand-new canary-yellow Chevy convertible. Marilyn and I were just married and 21 years old.

BB:A daily and Sunday strip, that's a lot of work for one person.

FT: It nearly killed me. After two years, of a sudden, William Randolph Hearst died. Earl Stanly Gardner was a bud of Hearst, and the Mason strip had a dwindling number of papers, so the King honchos trashed series. I went over to Western Printing and did Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, even a couple of Lone Ranger books.

BB:Then came Dr. Guy Bennett.

FT: I did the good doctor for the Lafave Syndicate. Seven important years. It was in this period that I really started moving away from the Raymond Style. I'm still evolving, 60 years later.

BB:You did commercial illustration during that time period.

FT: A whole bunch. Mostly for the old Bell Telephone Company, now Verizon. I did a series of Tel-News illos, tat gig was the top-paying gig in Jersey at that time: 800 per, think of it in today's money.

BB:Mighty Samson entered your life in the 60's.

FT: Sixty-four. Smelly San was hatched at Gold Key, with the great Otto Binder scripting. It was my first opportunity to design all the characters and create a world of my own, it wasn't the last. Meanwhile, I was doing a lot of titles over at DC: Tarzan, Son of Tarzan, Hunter's Hellcats, Twilight Zone, Boris Karloff Presents assorted others then Tomahawk, Hawk, Son of Tomahawk, Korack, Son of Tarzan, and then Red Sonja, daughter of none.

BB: Kismet!

FT: The rest is writ in the stars. Our lives were changed forever, and I want to thank Roy Thomas for making Sonja a superstar. Sonja opened the doors of National Lampoon, Heavy Metal. Hustler, Vanity Fair, High Times, and Playboy.

BB:Of all those creations, which is your favorite?

FT: Moonshine McJugs, my full-page color comic for Playboy. In 1980 Michelle Urry, the cartoon editor, called me and asked if I would like to contribute to Hefner's magazine. Out popped Moon. Hef bought the sample and ran it. It was the beginning of a 20-year run.

BB:You did full-page gags as well.

FT: Yep, and I won the Playboy Oscar for the best comic in '83. Coming up with a funny gag with a continuing cast on a single page is a challenge. Writing humor is serious business. Linda Correll, my muse, sometime mistaken for my model (I don't use models, I draw what's in my head. That's the difference between illustrators and cartoonists. Cartoonists can't afford models, they draw from their imaginations), performed on the Playboy Channel, doing both Moonshine and Ghita of Alizarr.

BB:What role did you play on the show?

FT: I was Uncle Zit opposite Moon, and the Wizard opposite Ghita I scripted the show using gags from the magazine series. We, Marilyn and myself, owe a great debt to Hugh Hefner, He tand Michelle Urry treated us like family over the years.