The current issue of The Washington Post Magazine features a cover story by Annys Shin about Elkridge resident Frank Cho. Frank is a comic illustrator that is described by Alex Alonso, an editor at Marvel Comics as “a once-in-a generation artist."
"He was put on this Earth to draw beautiful women," Alonso says. Alonso places Cho in a long line of illustrators associated with "good girl art" -- im-ages of attractive women mostly in skimpy attire -- that include Frazetta and Wally Wood, whose work remains popular and coveted by collectors.
"His women have a light and intelligence behind their eyes you rarely see," Alonso says. "Others can draw a curvaceous body. What he does is different. It's the difference between a classic beauty and a Playboy centerfold."
In Gene Weingarten’s column in the same issue, Gene lists things that are now worth less than buck. Item number 12 takes aim at one of my favorite targets, the phone book.
“It still arrives at one's house, thudding onto one's driveway unordered, unwanted, unneeded -- an obsolete compendium of land lines in a cellular world, a nine-pound slab of irrelevance that the average household will need to consult less frequently in their lives than they will, say, a cat dentist. For some reason, two days after this item arrives, you get an automated phone message making sure it was delivered promptly. To my knowledge, no one has ever not hung up on this call.”