“Whatever Happened to Frankie King: Jay Neugeboren (Imagining Robert) and his son, Eli, buck the tortured genius trope by locating the brightness in this crackling graphic biography of wayward basketball prodigy Frankie King. It’s a winning portrait of an unforgettable personality.” —Publishers Weekly
This full-length graphic novel will be in stores and online everywhere November 26, 2024.
Story by Jay Neugeboren and art by Eli Neugeboren
A real-life mystery of books and basketball.
Frankie King was a precocious student and a promising basketball player at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School in the early 1950s. Sportswriters were comparing Frankie to the greatest college and professional players of all time, and he was recruited as a starting guard at the University of North Carolina. But Frankie dropped out before playing a single game.
This graphic novel follows King’s enigmatic life from its auspicious start in the limelight to his very reclusive existence in New York City, where he authored more than forty novels, including a popular series of cozy cat mysteries written under a woman’s pseudonym. Whatever Happened to Frankie King is the story of a unique and sometimes troubled life as well as a meditation on dreams realized, lost, and abandoned.