Liberty Meadows is an American comic strip and comic book series created, written and illustrated by Frank Cho. It relates the comedic activities of the staff and denizens of the eponymous animal sanctuary/rehabilitation clinic. The comic strip launched on March 31, 1997, and ran until December 30, 2001.

Publication history

Liberty Meadows is the evolution of University² (University Squared), a strip Cho wrote during his college years for The Diamondback, the student newspaper at the University of Maryland, College Park. Originally, it was syndicated and appeared in many newspapers, while also being collected in comic books produced by Insight Studios. At the end of 2001, Cho ceased syndication, partly because editors kept censoring it, and announced he would publish it directly in comic book format. Cho self-published the comic book at first, with Image Comics taking over printing and distribution with issue #27. The comic book went on a hiatus in early 2004, after issue #36. June 2006 saw the publication of issue #37, and Cho commented at the time that he would be "trying to have a couple of issues of Liberty Meadows out per year". Issue #37 was the first issue that did not contain material previously published in newspapers, also being the last issue published to date. From around 2008 until May 2011, the rights to Liberty Meadows were in the hands of Sony Pictures Digital which wanted to develop it as a downloadable series, and then Sony Pictures Television which wanted to develop it as an animated television series. After a change in executives at Sony the projects went inactive, and the rights reverted to Cho, who in May 2011 announced plans to publish issue #38. On February 5, 2012, Frank Cho stated that work on Liberty Meadows had effectively stopped due to other commitments. "I thought I could do Liberty Meadows and my Marvel and outside work but I can't. I have a mortgage and child support that I have to pay each month. As much as I want to do Liberty Meadows (believe me I want to), the other jobs pay better".

Style

Cho makes references to and parodies other comic strips, such as Dilbert, Cathy and Peanuts.

Characters

The humans

The animals

The author

Collected editions

The comics collecting the daily strips have themselves been collected into a series of books:

Awards

Frank Cho has won many awards, including: the prestigious National Cartoonists Society’s Awards for Best Book Illustration (2001) and Best Comic Book (2001), the 2008 Eagle Award, the 1994 Charles M. Schulz Award for Excellence in Cartooning, College Media Association for Cartooning, and Germany’s Max & Moritz Prize for Best International Comic Strip. He was also nominated for the coveted Harvey and Eisner Awards.