About F. Tiboni
This [somewhat edited] biography is courtesy of Captain Armoire and his expansive F. Tiboni fan-site.
Francisco "Frank" Tiboni exists as a curiosity of mixed media culture to most, and it is a disservice to both the individual and the cosmic meta-mind he revealed, and in which we all commune. An extremely private man, Tiboni graduated from a hedonistic academic career in North Brunswick, San Francisco, Malta and New Caledonia to become a hermetic author and martial artist at age 26 in Providence, Rhode Island. An interest in journalism followed, and a series of articles submitted to the Op/Ed section of The New York Times led to a subsequent term of employment with that newspaper and several others in the Knight-Ridder syndication, under various pseudonyms. Popular opinion rendered him in bold terms, bequeathing sterile onomastics such as "a posturing, angel-dusted G.K. Chesterton" and "[an] unmistakably puerile and truculent iconoclast." (It was later revealed to the public, through a series of now-deceased medical personnel, that Tiboni suffered from schizoaffective disorder, characterized by hallucinations and compounded by unadulterated mania. His reflective monograph on the disorder, Inner Music, seared presses and alienated faceless critics in January of 2001.) Tiboni simultaneously ran an underground radio station, KLUB, from top of his ramshackle apartment complex. Populated with the city's homeless and de-institutionalized, its programming centered on their bizarre sense of humor, accented with forays into independent music. Legal problems and scandals involving KLUB would send Tiboni spiralling into anchorage again.
His obsession with growth aberrancy, the retarded and mentally handicapped, collegiate atavism and literary topoi is most popularly drawn forth in his comic strip The Dwarf. Reportedly inspired by repeated viewings of the Sony-Trimark film Dungeons and Dragons, the daily strip depicted a incunabulous Dwarf and his colorful companions in their daily mise en scene, an environment quickly (and transparently) transported to the University of Pittsburgh, where the Dwarf enrolls. Tiboni's regressive tendencies manifest in the bowdlerizations, Poe-esque proper name truncations and simplistic commentary on the post-modern youth cult. After the strip's eventual cancellation by the University of Pittsburgh's newspaper staff, Tiboni once again went into hiding near Providence. How strange that this 32-year-old misunderstood triumph of human will should consider the other remarkably inane strips carried by the Pitt News his "peers" and the debilitated students who acquired the free publication his "public"! Now any submissions from Tiboni are accepted by his agent Kent McCall and distributed only according to his discretion, a decision that leaves many Tiboni fans wondering where or when he will truly emerge again.