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Franco had been sick for over a year. He was a very private person and didn’t want this known publicly. He even withdrew from some friends as a way to spare them from seeing him fight his illness. I knew things weren’t great, but it was hard to ever know how serious his health situation was, since he talked as always about his optimism for comics, his other projects he wanted to do, a possible teaching gig in Chicago, and of course his promise to cook a meal fit for kings if I ever visited Rome. He fought a good fight, even describing some of the treatments and bad doctors and pain with good humor and optimism. And as you can see from his final piece of art for us, he was talented as could be to the very end.

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