COMIC STRIP ALERT! Our paper runs a hilarious strip weekly in our Sunday Comics section, as well as in our sister publication MidWeek. Frank Cho does one of the best-drawn and funniest strips in the country, called "Liberty Meadows." Comic strip wins with
well-rounded charactersDRAWN & QUARTERED
By Gary C.W. Chun
gchun@starbulletin.comA broad description of "Liberty Meadows" could be "Li'l Abner's" Daisy Mae meets "Bloom County." It's about an animal sanctuary populated by a cast of some of the more riotous anthropomorphic critters around.
Leslie and Ralph are best friends, a hypochondriac bullfrog and a warped midget circus bear/"genius" inventor. There's a mad cow called THE COW! There's also Dean, who personifies the description "male chauvinist pig," and an ex-college fraternity mascot, a holdover character from Cho's University of Maryland's campus newspaper days, while he was attending nursing school (more about that later).
Balancing off this wacky cast is a childlike, innocent duckling named Truman. He's the cute one, along with the frisky, nonspeaking and all-barking Oscar the wiener dog.
There are also humans. Julius runs the sanctuary, whose other main mission in life is to capture Khan -- or, more appropriately, KHAN! -- the giant catfish in the sanctuary's lake. Al is the level-headed owner of the nearby Treetop Tavern who, for some strange reason, thinks Francis Bacon wrote all of Shakespeare's plays.
While Cho occasionally draws himself as a crotchety chimp whenever he wants to address his readers in the strip, I think his true alter ego is the character aptly named Frank. He's the resident veterinarian, an insecure single guy who has an unrequited love for the sanctuary's caretaker and animal behaviorist, Brandy.
As an admirer of what's called in comics "good girl art" (with "good" meaning idealized renderings of the female form, within reason, of course!), Cho's figure drawing is his strength, and he hit the jackpot with Brandy. In fact, Cho ran into earlier problems with his syndicate, which distributes the strip to fine, upstanding family papers like ours, because Brandy was a bit too, um, zaftig. But over the strip's 4 1/2-year run, Brandy has been allowed to bloom to her proper proportions.
Cho said the character "is a composite of several women whom I have lusted after since second grade. She's based on Lynda Carter, Bettie Page, Candy Loving and two girls from my high school. ... One of them particularly looked like Brandy."
You can tell Cho loves to draw Brandy, and making her intelligent and idealistic makes her that much sexier. Cho has also added Brandy's blond counterpart into the mix, her roommate Jen, a NASA engineer (!) who, unlike Brandy, knows she's hot. All of this must stem from Cho's nursing school days; he's admitted that a prime reason for enrolling was his belief that his chances of "scoring" would greatly improve in an academic setting of an eight women-to-one man ratio. The Seoul-born Cho has since settled down with his own lovely version of Brandy in Columbia, Md.
One reason for doing this write-up on "Liberty Meadows" is that, since the strip's startup in our Sunday Comics section, we haven't seen much of the full-figure splendor of Brandy. Sure, the animals are hilarious, but WE WANT MORE BRANDY!! AND THROW IN SOME JEN, TOO!!
Sorry, my adolescent fanboy got the best of me there. My appetite has been satiated somewhat with the hardcover publication of "Liberty Meadows Big Book of Love" (Insight Studios Group). It's a bit pricey at $29.95, but it's a fine reprint collection of the earlier daily and Sunday strips. The strips themselves have been compiled in a regular series of comic books since 1999 and are worth searching for in your favorite comic store, particularly as some include the censored strips in their original form.
It's also been reported on Cho's Web site that come the end of the year, the comic strip will end on Dec. 30 with a cliffhanger ending surrounding Brandy's wedding. The report says that all through December the story will lead up to Brandy accepting a marriage proposal from someone other than Frank (gasp!). The story's conclusion will continue in a new story, "Liberty Meadows Wedding Album," which will be published in January 2002 and found only in comic stores. "Liberty Meadows" will then continue on in comic book form.
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