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Metamorpho and Style

Based on an idea by DC editor George Kashdan and co-created by Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon, the character Metamorpho first appeared in The Brave and the Bold 57 and 58 in January and March 1965 and before headlining a 17-issue run of the comic Metamorpho from  August 1965 through March 1968.

Kashdan’s concept involved a character made up of four elements who could change into different chemical compounds. Haney fleshed out the idea with a “deliciously overdrawn” cast.

Kashdan, Haney, and Fradon worked together to create Metamorpho’s look:

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 enjoyed her collaboration with Haney because “his goofy stories gave me ideas about how the characters should look and act, and my goofy pictures gave him new ideas.” Metamorpho allowed Fradon to use an exaggerated drawing style which suited her better than the traditional approach to superhero illustration.

Feeling “like a fish out of water” in the male-dominated superhero field, she reflected on her style in a 1988 interview:

[Trina Robbins] made the observation that most women tend to have a more open style, use less shadow, and work in bigger open patterns. I think that’s probably true—at least I always did (work in that style). I thought that was a big failing of mine, that I couldn’t emulate that kind of photographic reproduction style. When I read that this seemed to be a characteristic of women cartoonists, it made me feel a bit better about it. […] Something that always jarred my eyes is to see the kind of heaviness and ugliness about most comic art. There’s not much sweetness to it. It’s the tradition, and I don’t think it has anything to do with the individual artists. It’s just the tradition…the look. That always troubled me.

Awards

Fradon was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2006.[13]