Fran Matera, who spent a lifetime in comic books and newspaper strips, has died at the age of 87. The cause is given as prostate cancer.
Matera grew up in Stratford, Connecticut and was still in high school when he sent a fan letter and samples to cartoonist Alfred Andriola, best known for the newspaper strip, Kerry Drake. Andriola liked the young man's drawings and gave him work as an assistant and referrals to comic book publishers. Apart from a stint in the Marines, Matera made his living thereafter in comics, mainly in strips, often as a ghost or assistant. Among the many strips he worked on over the years were, in addition to Kerry Drake, Dickie Dare, Little Annie Rooney, Mr. Holiday, Nero Wolfe, Rex Morgan MD, Judge Parker, Apartment 3-G, The Legend of Bruce Lee and a long run (credited) on Steve Roper and Mike Nomad. For comic books, he maintained a steady presence in Treasure Chest from 1959 until 1971 with his feature, Chuck White, and was known to pop up occasionally at Marvel, Charlton or some other publisher when the newspaper strip work was slow. His art style was heavily Caniff at its core but from all those years of ghosting different strips, he knew how to skew it for any occasion.
My only contact with Mr. Matera was over the phone. I don't recall how we "met" but he called occasionally in the late seventies in search of a writer for some strip project he hoped to launch. As newspaper strips with continuity (as opposed to a gag-a-day) declined, the secret to continued employment for a guy like him seemed to be volume, volume, volume. He was usually doing one strip and trying to sell another…because doing just one didn't pay all the bills. When we spoke, it was because he had an opportunity to take over an established strip that from its fame, you'd think would have been successful and lucrative for its current handler but no. Getting the gig was a matter of submitting samples plus the lowest bid, and he told me the lowest bid was more important than the samples. When he told me how low we were talking, I was amazed. I wasn't interested in writing that particular strip at any price but I sure liked Fran on the phone, and I liked his determination to work as hard as he had to in order to make a living in the field he loved.
Tom Spurgeon has a good career overview on Matera at The Comics Reporter and Matera's local newspaper also offers a good obit. Everyone seems to have the same view of the man: Dedicated professional who did an awful lot of fine work.