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Connections: Frank Frazetta (1967) and Tony DeZuniga (1980)
Tag: Frank Frazetta
Connections: Frank Frazetta (1971) and Tony DeZuniga (2001)
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BONUS:
Look Here: Four slavery obsessed historical novels, two with cover art by Frazetta
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I know that I have posted a scan of Rogue Roman before, but what you see above is a new scan of a different copy of the novel (I have two). I only recently obtained a copy of Child of the Sun (for cheap at — where else? — Value Village), with cover art by Frazetta, so that scan is new, too, as are the others. Seeing those two covers together, Rogue Roman and Child of the Sun, one can appreciate, I think, the significant change — some would say, improvement — in Frazetta’s oil technique from the 1960s to the celebrated paintings of the 1970s.
I have no idea who painted the uncredited covers of The Street of the Sun or Mistress of Falconhurst, although the latter includes the initials (?) RES in the lower left-hand corner. If you know who RES is, feel free to post the artist’s name in the comments section below. [Apparently, RES is Robert E. Schulz; see comment section below.]
As for The Street of the Sun, let’s just say that although the loose illustrative style is attractive, and distinctly less “old-fashioned” than the other three, it is entirely unexceptional for the time period (the late 1960s) and could have been produced by any number of artists.
Look Here: MRS. POLLIFAX — SPY, with cover art by Frank Frazetta
I bought the following battered paperback for a buck at a church sale on the weekend:
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The image on the cover is an aggressively cropped section of Frank Frazetta’s unusually expansive poster art for the movie Mrs. Pollifax — Spy (1971), which was based on the novel by Dorothy Gilman.
Here, for ease of comparison, are what the poster and the original art look like, more or less:
Notice how, in the poster image, someone or other — the art director? — not only has intensified the colour and contrast but also has moved the hand with the gun, camouflaged in the canopy of the tree in the original, down and slightly to the left, and trimmed back the foliage a bit, in order to make the “threat from above” ridiculously blatant, and I would argue that both changes work rather nicely; that is, the brighter colours seem to me to be more sympathetic to the comedic intent/content of the image — not to mention, more eye-catching — and the change in the position of the arm, etc., integrates the hidden, would-be assassin in a more satisfying way into the overall comedic situation.
(Oddly enough, on the paperback cover, the hand with the gun appears to be positioned more or less where Frazetta has it in his painting, though its effect in that instance — if one notices it at all — seems to me to be more unsettling than it is humorous.)
Notice also the variations in colour among the three images. I don’t know if Frazetta’s original painting is truly as subdued as it looks in that JPEG. What I do know, however, is that my scan at the top of this post matches my copy of the book quite well.
Connections: Frank Frazetta and Arthur Suydam
I scanned the cover of Back to the Stone Age by Edgar Rice Burroughs, with pulse-poundin’ art by Frank Frazetta, from the copy of the paperback edition in my personal library.
Arthur Suydam’s Mammoth was published as a poster/print in both an unsigned and a signed and limited edition by Glimmer Graphics in 1990. I borrowed the image of Mammoth from the Glimmer Graphics site.
Suydam’s stories in Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated were among the best those magazines had to offer.
Frazetta, of course, is Frazetta.
BONUS IMAGES:
Perhaps those “Bonus Images” ought to have been a “Connections” post all on their own.
Connections: Frank Frazetta and Gonzalo Mayo
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Eerie Presents El Cid, with script by Budd Lewis and art by Gonzalo Mayo, is available now from a bookseller near you. The publisher is Dark Horse.
Connections: Frazetta (1973/74) vs. the unknown (1980)
I don’t often buy Western paperbacks, but when I came upon the Signet Brand Western edition of Ray Hogan’s The Hell Raiser (1980) at our local Value Village, I knew right away that there was an amusing blog post in it. So I bought it. But since I don’t own the Signet edition of Flashman at the Charge with the Frazetta cover, we’ll have to make do with a scan borrowed from Davy Crocket’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West:
Is it mere coincidence that Signet published both Flashman at the Charge and The Hell Raiser? Or was the (uncredited) artist instructed by the publisher to do a Western version of a painting, Frazetta’s painting, that had sold a lot of books for Signet in the past? The answer, my friends, is blowin’ in the wind… the answer… is blowin’… in the wind…
Flashman at the Charge is one of the many paintings that Frazetta “improved” after he got it back from the publisher:
Nice hair.
Look Here: Two paperbacks with first-rate cover art by Frazetta
Freshly scanned by yours truly:
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Look Here: A fifth obscure paperback cover by Frazetta
Yes, here it is, another “treasure” from my very own library of folded, spindled, and mutilated SF&F pulperbacks:
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Obscure for a reason, obviously…
Heads Up: THE COMICS JOURNAL LIBRARY: THE EC ARTISTS
Coming in early 2013 from Fantagraphics:
The publisher describes the book (paperback, 192 pages, 12 x 12 inches) as follows:
Archival interviews with Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Frank Frazetta, Bill Gaines, and many more, as well as contemporary interviews with MAD artists, are reprinted in the first of a beautifully packaged two-volume set.
The Comics Journal Library series is the most comprehensive series of lavishly illustrated interviews conducted with cartoonists ever published. To celebrate our republication of the legendary EC line, we proudly present the first of a two-volume set of interviews with the artists and writers (and publisher!) who made EC great. Included in the first volume: career-spanning conversations with EC legends Will Elder, John Severin, Harvey Kurtzman, and Al Feldstein, as well as short interviews with EC short-timers Frank Frazetta and Joe Kubert. Also: EC Publisher William Gaines on his infamous Senate subcommittee testimony, and probing conversations between Silver Age cartoonist Gil Kane and Harvey Kurtzman, as well as contemporary alternative cartoonist Sam Henderson and MAD great Al Jaffee. Part of what made EC the best publisher in the history of mainstream comics was some of the most beautiful drawing ever published in comic books, and every interview is profusely illustrated by pertinent examples of the work under discussion. The EC artists were renowned for their attention to detail, and the reproduction here takes full advantage of the oversized art book format.
If you’ve been buying every issue of The Comics Journal since the dawn of time like I have, you’ll have a lot of the material in this volume in your collection already. But digging through old magazines is such a chore…
Ragged Claws Network 