Frank Cho - Early Life

Early Life

The second of three children, Cho was born near Seoul, Korea in 1971, but moved to the United States at the age of six, along with his brothers, Rino and Austin, and their parents, Kyu Hyuk Cho and Bok Hee Cho, who were in search of better economic opportunities. Cho was raised in Beltsville, Maryland.

His parents had college degrees, but because they did not speak English well, they took whatever jobs they could to support the family, with his mother working in a shoe factory, and his father as a carpenter during the day and a janitor at a Greyhound Bus station at night. Because money was scarce, Cho, who describes his latchkey childhood as "rough", was relegated to finding his own extracurricular entertainment. When Cho was ten, his older brother, Rino, brought some comic books home, and Cho started copying the art. When his friend, David Gill, saw that Cho was able to reproduce the artwork without tracing them, he urged Cho to illustrate comics for a living. From that point on, with the exception of some basic art classes, Cho refined his abilities by himself without any formal training, finding influence in Depression-era comics as Prince Valiant and Li'l Abner, and in the work of artists such as Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Loomis, Al Williamson and Frank Frazetta.

After graduating from High Point High School in 1990, he attended Prince George's Community College and was offered a scholarship to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, which he declined because he disliked the school's academic focus. As Cho's parents were not particularly supportive of Cho's interest in art, he placated them by transferring to the University of Maryland School of Nursing, which he says was his parents' idea. Cho would ultimately graduate with a B.S. in Nursing in 1996.