Frank McLaughlin (artist)
[5] After college, McLaughlin, an avid baseball player, went to work for the brake manufacturer Raybestos, where he played for its internationally ranked fast-pitch softball team.
A college friend recommended him to editor Pat Masulli at Charlton Comics in Derby, Connecticut, who hired McLaughlin as his assistant.
[5] "[I did] everything from proofreading to art corrections, lettering titles for [editor] Ernie Hart's books, traffic managing, liaison with the Comics Code, and anything else, including cleaning the storeroom".
[7] McLaughlin's first confirmed credit is full pencil and ink art on the five-page story "And the Light Shall Come" in the same publisher's Reptisaurus #8 (Dec.
[5] McLaughlin, who became Charlton's art director by 1962,[7] worked throughout the Charlton line, including on the superhero titles Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, and Son of Vulcan, the adventure comic The Fightin' 5, the supernatural/science-fiction anthologies Strange Suspense Stories and Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds, and the espionage comic Sarge Steel, where martial artist McLaughlin's backup features, "The Sport of Judo" and "What is Karate?," presaged the original character he would create with writer Joe Gill.
The series, which McLaughlin almost immediately began scripting as well, starred an American soldier in the South Pacific during World War II, who, after saving a native island girl from a Japanese sniper, was taught martial arts by her grateful grandfather.
After a smattering of work that including inking an eight-page teen humor story in DC Comics' Debbi's Dates #10 (Nov. 1970) and a seven-page story in Warren Publishing's black-and-white horror-comics magazine Eerie #34 (July 1971), McLaughlin circa 1971 began assisting comic-strip artist Stan Drake on the naturalistic soap-opera strip The Heart of Juliet Jones.
[9] McLaughlin, at Giordano's suggestion, had shown samples of his work to the Westport, Connecticut-based Drake, who hired him to succeed assistant Tex Blaisdell, who had left to draw Little Orphan Annie.
[7] In the 1980s McLaughlin was regular inker on penciler Carmine Infantino's The Flash, Gene Colan's Wonder Woman, and Dan Jurgens' Green Arrow, among other assignments.
[7] Aside from his stint on The Heart of Juliet Jones in the early 1970s, McLaughlin also worked on such comic strips as Brenda Starr, Reporter, assisting Dale Messick;[11] Nancy;[12][13] and The World's Greatest Superheroes.
[18] He married at age 30, in 1965, living then in Derby, Connecticut, and working in a studio in nearby Ansonia before moving back to his home town of Stratford.
