Good news for Liberty Meadows fans: Frank Cho is working on the long-awaited issue #38, after dropping plans (for now) to make it into an animated cartoon.
Liberty Meadows was originally a newspaper strip, but Cho's art and sense of humor kept bumping up against editorial standards, and he ended syndication in 2001; "I got tired of the censorship and the low pay," he told CBR in a 2006 interview, adding that his weakest strips were rush jobs done to fill in for strips that editors refused to run. Cho moved to a comic book format, first self-published, then through Image, but he put Liberty Meadows on hiatus in 2004, after issue #36. Issue #37 came out in 2009.
Cho let loose on his blog about his frustrations with Sony, which acquired the rights to create a downloadable Liberty Meadows cartoon for their Sony Digital division. Here's his account of how that went:
I wrote the original pilot episode but it was rejected for being too “risque”. So other writers were brought in to tone it down and make it more kid friendly. Once I read the rewrite, I thought it completely missed the point of Liberty Meadows. So I rewrote the rewrite, and this went back and forth couple of times until we reached a compromised script. We turned that script into an traditional 2D animated pilot episode.
Enter Sony Television division. They saw the pilot episode and liked it. Liberty Meadows get bumped up to their television division and a TV series is planned. However there is one request, Sony Television people wanted Liberty Meadows to be more “risque” with adult humor like the “Family Guy”. This is the point where I rip my hair out in frustration.
Then the recession hit and all the executives involved with the project left the company. Fortunately, Cho's contract had an inactivity clause (something the Tokyopop creators could have benefited from) so the rights have now reverted back to him.
His plan for now is to simply go back to drawing the strip, although he doesn't rule out another movie or TV deal "if the right offer comes along."