The comic strip work of Frank Brunner is quite easy to summarise. He started looking for work in 1969, but not in the mainstream comics field. He initially wanted to work on underground comics and newspapers.

Unfortunately, for his ambitions, the underground scene was on the West Coast and he was on the East. Instead of doing a Robert Crumb and heading west he looked for work at National Lampoon. Eventually he did work for Warren and a bit of inking on the Silver Surfer for Marvel.

Brunner was possibly more suited to undergrounds. Like a lot of artists he thought that the Marvel system was more creative than DC's but felt that by '69 it was getting a bit stagnant. The appointment of Roy Thomas as editor changed that. Brunner was assigned to Doctor Strange, which appealed to him because Strange was a magician rather than a muscle bound superhero (three cheers for Ditko there).

Initially he wasn't too impressed with the storylines on Strange but he got talking (and smoking) with Steve Engleheart and the two of them put together a suitably cosmic storyline that turned the good Doctor into Sorcerer Supreme.

After that, as far as Brunner was concerned there was nowhere else he could take the character. He was ill suited to churning out a continuous series. So he looked around for another project and happened on Howard the Duck, who had guested in Giant Size Man Thing (written by Steve Gerber and drawn by Val Mayerik).

Brunner got the chance to draw Howard's next two appearances in Man Thing and then did Howard the Duck issue one. His feeling about this comic was that it was just about perfect, considering the subject matter. It's certainly true that Brunner's work on it is stunning. Brunner managed half of issue two before quitting work on Howard.

Brunner began to move away from drawing comics. He continued to be in demand to produce comic covers but also started doing art portfolios. He produced drawings of Conan, Elric, numerous magicians, fairies etc as well as more mature version of Alice in Wonderland.

Brunner has also done a lot of animation work (model sheets, layouts etc). Today he believes that most comics are crap (he's always believed that 90% of them are crap - a conservative estimate (I would say the figure is closer to 99%). He thinks the storylines are vacuous, the storytelling unreadable, the techno style drawing lifeless and pinup orientated, the cover price vastly over inflated.

It's hard growing old.

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