The following is an interview with Jay and Eli Neugeboren regarding the release of their graphic novel, Whatever Happened to Frankie King, through publisher Graphic Mundi. In this interview, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief Barbra Dillon chats with the Neugeborens about their shared creative approach to bringing Frankie King’s story to life on the page, how they hope that this Graphic Medicine story may help to further destigmatize mental health, and more!
Barbra Dillon, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief: You recently released the graphic novel, Whatever Happened to Frankie King. Jay, what can you share with us about the genesis behind this biographical account of the promising basketball star and author?
Jay Neugeboren: I saw Frankie King play when I was in high school when his school, Madison, played mine, Erasmus. He was the most exciting high school player I ever saw. He was the youngest player, at 15, to make first team all-city in NYC. But he never played college or pro ball and disappeared to all his childhood friends. When he died, at 79, we discovered that he’d never left New York and had published 43 novels, most under the pseudonym of a woman. I began reading his books, and searching out and talking with his childhood friends and family. There was a story here!
BD: What can you tell us about your shared creative and research processes in bringing this enlightening narrative to life on the page?
JN: Eli came to me and said he had a sabbatical year coming up and wanted to collaborate with me on a graphic novel—and use one of my books. We talked and talked, and then Eli said, what about Frankie King—I’d published an article about King in The American Scholar—and I said, “Yes,” and we went to work.
Eli Neugeboren: My father had already been working on a manuscript for a book about Frankie – weaving the story of Frank’s complicated life in with that of my uncle, Robert Neugeboren – when I talked to him about adapting Frank’s life story into a graphic novel. Because of his exhaustive and rigorous approach, there was already a wealth of information for him to use to write the script for the graphic novel.
Once he had the script ready, I read it and took some notes, asked some questions, and was off to the proverbial races – the thumbnail/page breakdown races, that is! The fun part of my research in adapting this was finding all the actual real-life places that are mentioned, and then tracking them down and finding out what they may have looked like at the time of the telling. The story runs from the 1940s all the way to the present day (late 2010s), so there I had to look up things like, “What did NYC Parks backboards, rims, and supports look like?” from the ’50s up til now.
BD: Eli, when tackling a new project, is there anything that guides or propels your approach to the style and tone of the artwork?
EN: I wanted to approach this with a looser and more energetic line, to reflect the energy and chaos of Frank’s life. The passages where he is younger, I consciously rendered in a more cartoon-y style and as the story takes him through his life, the lines get looser/rougher and seemingly have less control. Since these are real people depicted, many of whom are still alive, I also wanted to make sure the likenesses were good.
For the color I purposely picked a very limited palette that similarly begins brighter and gets darker throughout the story. I wanted the color to cast a mood on the story as one is reading it, whether that would ever be picked up on or not.
BD: What makes Graphic Mundi the perfect home for this story?
EN: Working with Kendra Boileau as an editor was a great experience for me, creatively. She has a light hand for the most part, but her notes were always as sharp as a scalpel, and it was really wonderful to work out some of the more difficult parts of the story, specifically the CODA, where she was instrumental in tying the whole thing together and helping me realize some rather ambitious spreads containing dense textual material.
It was also great working with Graphic Mundi because they are an academic press and we were given a lot of latitude in terms of the story we wanted to tell – they asked us to frame the book in terms of where it fits in the world of comics, rather than having a larger publisher’s marketing or sales team sitting over our shoulders telling us to make it sexier.
BD: Graphic Medicine is an emerging genre that combines the field of medicine with the medium of comics. How do you feel that Graphic Medicine stories like this one can not only help to shed light on historical figures, but also aid in destigmatizing mental health disorders?
JN: The more we see and tell the stories of people like Frankie, the more we come to understand that they are not defined by their “mental illness”—that they are fully complex, complicated, original, unique and human in the ways any of us are.
EN: My father’s memoir about his brother, Imagining Robert, and the follow-up, Transforming Madness, both did a lot to open my eyes to the power of books to help destigmatize and a big part of that is using a book like those, or Whatever Happened to Frankie King, to start difficult conversations about family members and people we know – maybe even ourselves – relating to these topics.
It has been interesting, and maybe a little ironic, to have people who have read the book come to me after they’ve finished and say things like, “I never heard of him before!” And that is the opener to discuss the “why” behind the story – why are there so many others who have been lost? Lost to their families, loved ones, maybe even to society as a whole?
The more open we are and the more conversations like these that we have, the better off we all are.
BD: Are there any other projects – past or current – that you would like to highlight for our readers?
JN: Readers might find my book, Imagining Robert, of interest. It’s about me and my brother Robert, who spent most of his life in and out of mental hospitals, psych wards, and halfway houses.
EN: My ongoing project, Drawing the News, is regularly updated with new imagery. It is a series of drawings I started as a warmup exercise so I wouldn’t have to think about what to draw. It has become a lasting and impactful series of reportage-style drawings that capture the world from day to day. I like to think of it as being in the vein of Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings in that photographs propose objectivity, and I am merely translating those to improve my skills, but a narrative (or multiple narratives) arise when you look at the series as a whole.
BD: Lastly, what is the best way for our readers to find more information about Whatever Happened to Frankie King?
EN: Visit this site or email us with questions.
