Jenny Frison is a cover star. The Chicago-adjacent illustrator ranks among the premier comic book cover artists of her generation, producing sensuous and painterly depictions of four-color icons from Wonder Woman to Red Sonja.
Comic shops are not the only place where you can view Frison’s work, however. From Monday, Sept. 14 through Sunday, Oct. 18, she’s one of close to four dozen artists featured in Vertical Gallery’s kaleidoscopic group exhibition ‘ASCENDING,’ presented in partnership with Frame Chicago (1627 N. Clybourn Ave.). Frison (@jennyfrisonart) tells all in the latest installment of our web-exclusive Artist Spotlight series.
Vertical Gallery: Tell us about the two pieces you’re contributing to “ASCENDING.’
Jenny Frison: I don't do a lot of gallery work, so when I do, I treat it as a bit of an experiment from how I do comic book work — like “There's nobody telling you what to draw, so draw whatever you want.”
When I get to do whatever I like, it’s usually something that’s character-driven. I focus on the character’s strength and vulnerability, and I want things to be sort of ethereally beautiful. For ‘ASCENDING,’ I just decided to draw my favorite things, which are women's faces, hands and flowers.
Your contributions to previous Vertical group shows featured mythological characters like Medusa and Persephone — archetypal symbols of feminine power. You’re also synonymous with Wonder Woman, another symbol of power rooted in Greek mythology. What draws you to these figures?
I loved mythology growing up. I hyper-focused on books about mythology when I was little, when nothing else could hold my interest. I still find it really interesting now.
I also loved images of Wonder Woman. When I was very little I had a Wonder Woman children's book called Cheetah on the Prowl, but I didn't read a lot of Wonder Woman comics when I was a kid — I was reading Barbie comics and Archie comics instead. But when I was about 13, my older sister worked at a bookstore that carried a Wonder Woman art book. I remember looking at it and thinking “This is the coolest image I've ever seen.” I finally started reading the comics in high school, when I saw Adam Hughes’ first and second Wonder Woman covers on a spinner rack at the airport, and it blew my mind.
From there I went back and read [writer/artist] George Pérez’s Wonder Woman reboot, which focused on the Greek mythology aspects of the character. I was already interested in Greek mythology, and I was already interested in Wonder Woman, so they simultaneously fed into each other.
You detail your process on your website. Are there technical differences between how you approach gallery work compared to your comics work?
I still sketch out each piece on the computer, and move everything around so that I get the composition that I want, with everything in proportion. Once I have the full drawing, I'll print it out on paper, and then finish drawing or finish painting or whatever. With comics, I just do a black and white drawing with the intention of finishing it with bright colors in Photoshop. I'm thinking about rendering — I'm not thinking about a finished art piece.
The thing about commercial art is that there’s not really a ton of room to fuck it up. I always have the ability to fix something. With gallery work, whatever I get on paper is what gets turned in. I can't fix it on the computer later. So I approach it by trying to figure out what I can experiment with and still be successful at.
What goes into being a cover artist, anyway? How do you distill the essence of someone else's story into a single image?
It's so much more technical than you might think, because it really just depends on what I get to work with. I might get everything, or I might get nothing.
Covers are one of the first things done on a comic, sometimes before they’re even written. Covers promote the books in the solicitation catalogs sent to comics retailers, and the catalog comes out months before the comic is published. So sometimes I'll have a full script, sometimes I'll have entire issues, and sometimes it’s “Draw Catwoman. We don't know what's going on in the book, just draw her being Catwoman.”
I work mostly on variant covers, which means it’s the exact same comic inside, but with a different cover. There's always the A cover — the main cover — then there’s the B, the C, sometimes all the way to Z12 or something. The variant usually has less to do with what's going on inside than the A cover. I recently did a whole run of covers for Marvel where the editors only told me who the character was. I don’t think they even knew which book the cover was for. They just add my work to their backstock, and pull it out whenever they want to put it on a cover.
If I get nothing, then I focus on what the character means to me. I'm just trying to draw something that I would pick up off a shelf — something with a limited color palette, and not too much detail. Something focusing on the character and some emotion, or a total lack of emotion, or somewhere in between.
You recently produced a variant cover for DC’s Absolute Batman, the best-selling comic in the U.S. market. What’s next?
I did a Wonder Woman cover for the 30th anniversary of DC’s Kingdom Come. That comes out next month. I also have a NSFW cover for a queer erotic body horror book from Boom! Studios called Gastronomique, and I’m doing ongoing covers for Hello Darkness, a horror anthology also from Boom! Studios.
Something Is Killing the Children is another hot book. The creator and writer, James Tynion IV, also worked on DC’s Swamp Thing for a really long time. I don't know how he did it, but he somehow got Boom! and DC to do a crossover, Swamp Thing Is Killing the Children, and I did a cover for that that was really fun. There’s a strong character who has vulnerabilities, and there's also blood and scary monsters, so it's the perfect cross-section of things I love to draw.
Email us at sales@verticalgallery.com to inquire about available work from Jenny.
