“For every being there is an appointed time, and even the gods must die….”

 – Robert E. Howard, “The Grey God Passes“

To his thousands of fans — to the many artists who grew up in his shadow — to me personally, Frank Frazetta was a god. In this media-driven age when pop idols are deified on an almost daily basis, it does not seem so ludicrous to make such a statement about an individual whose work, whose creations redefined how entire genres would be represented in countless minds’ eyes. At every stage of his career he stood out from his peers as something special, someone to be emulated, a man ahead of his time. As he eschewed his mortal coil last week, moving on to whatever lies beyond, it seemed at first to me that world had changed. That something great and vital was lost. But in seeing so much of his work being displayed in forums, on blogs; in reading so many wonderful tributes about what Frank and his work meant to so many individuals, I realized that in fact he left the world a much richer place than it was when he entered it.

Frank Frazetta began his career in comic books in the mid-1940s, working as an assistant to John Giunta. Even in those early days, doing humor strips, fairy tales, and westerns his work stood out from the rest. In 1950, he wrote and drew an entire comic book, Thun’da #1, essentially a Tarzan knock-off. The influence of the legendary Hal Foster was clearly present, but you could already see that “Fritz” was beginning to move past his idol and develop his own unique style. Even in a sequence of panels which were swiped from Foster’s ground-breaking 1929 Tarzan strip, Frazetta gives the figures more life, more fluidity. This sequence of Foster swipes may have been an inside homage — a wink to his friends and colleagues Roy Krenkel and Al Williamson, who like Frazetta idolized the creator of Prince Valiant — but like Hendrix with his cover of “All Along the Watchtower,” Frazetta took those figures and poses and made them his own.

In the early 1950s, Frazetta, along with Williamson, Krenkel, Wally Wood, Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, Harvey Kurtzman, and several other up-and-coming, and incredibly talented young artists began to shake up the medium at Bill Gaines’ EC comics. For the first time the notion was created that comic books could be an art form. But even among that talented group, Fritz stood out from the pack and his peers knew it.

It was during this time that he also created what are probably his best known comic book works — a series of incredible Buck Rogers covers for the venerable title Famous Funnies. The last of these covers created in 1955 created some controversy and has developed somewhat mythical status because of it. It depicted Buck fighting a group of cave-men on a ledge and this incredibly dynamic and organic composition is considered by many to be his finest work in comics. Unfortunately, the recent congressional hearings on comic books and their purported link to juvenile delinquency had led to the creation of a censorship board, the Comics Code Authority, and the issue for which this cover was intended (#217) would be the first issue of Famous Funnies that would have to be approved by the CCA. Apparently someone felt that the cover was too violent and it was rejected and replaced by an incredibly boring cover by a staff artist depicting Buck gazing out over a frozen planet. Blah.

Bill Gaines at EC, who had been butting heads with both the congressional committee and the CCA, loved Frazetta’s version and with a few minor changes, published it as the cover to Weird Science-Fantasy #29. Soon after that, however, EC was forced to give in to the censors and water down their content; within months Gaines was forced to throw in the towel and EC’s comics line was cancelled. Frazetta and his peers at EC had been pushing the envelope and breaking new ground in what could be done with the graphic narrative medium. When one compares his work to the covers of more mainstream titles (like Curt Swan’s Superman standing around chatting with mermaids) it is easy to see just how far ahead of his time Fritz really was.

With the effective neutering of the comic book medium, Frazetta and many of his peers began to look for other ways to put their talents to use. He worked for a while as a ghost artist on Al Capp’s Lil’ Abner newspaper strip (and quite frankly Daisy Mae never looked so good) and even had his own strip, Johnny Comet, for a while. But apart from some occasional work for the Warren magazines in the 1960’s, Frazetta began to shift out of comic art and into painting. Comics just were not ready for his type of genius.

Several of his EC colleagues had begun to get work doing covers for paperbacks, which was fast becoming the most popular format for prose fiction, and Frazetta soon followed suit. After several well-received covers for Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks, Frazetta was hired to paint the cover for Conan the Adventurer in 1966 and history was made. Al Harron in his recent post discussed how the pairing of Frazetta’s artwork with Robert E. Howard’s yarns was one of those special partnerships of author and illustrator that rarely comes around and in which the combined product is greater than the sum of its parts. Like his comics work, Frazetta was once again helping to revolutionizing a medium.

The success of the Conan paperbacks led to a proliferation of Frazetta paperback book covers in the 1970s, not all with content equal to Howard’s. But those amazing images of powerful warriors and beautiful women in fantastic locales leapt out at you from the racks, defying you to not judge the book by its eye-popping cover. Frazetta’s imagery was everywhere in the 1970s: books, magazines, fanzines, movie posters, t-shirts, album covers, and on the sides of Econoline vans. Growing up in the 1970’s as a fan of fantasy and science fiction from an early age, his paintings seemed to be omnipresent — they were everywhere. Unlike Deuce Richardson, I can no more pinpoint the first time I saw Frazetta’s work than I can pinpoint the first time I saw a tree or a house or a car. It was always there — part of my landscape.

Once again, Frazetta led and others followed — Boris Vallejo, Ken Kelly, Jeff Jones, and more recently Brom and Gary Gianni. Fantasy art was changed forever, and Frazetta would be the measuring stick, fairly or unfairly, by which all others would be judged. Some of his paintings, like “Death Dealer,” were so powerful and intriguing that prose fiction was written after the fact to “illustrate” the painting rather than the other way around. That may be unprecedented. With Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice Frazetta’s imagery found its way into a new medium — animation — and once again broke new ground. John Milius has said on numerous occasions that Conan the Barbarian (1982) was his attempt at creating a living Frazetta painting.

In the world of speculative fiction and fantasy art Frazetta is indeed a god. Like an Osiris or Quetzacoatl teaching the arts of civilization to ignorant savages, he strode through medium after medium showing others who had been doing it for years how much better it could be, and the world was never the same after he left his mark on it. And like an Osiris or a Campbellian hero he also descended into the Underworld and returned. In the 1990’s he seemed to disappear and no new works appeared for many years. We now know that this was due to health issues brought on by a series of strokes. They very nearly took his life and did take the full use of his right hand. But like one of the indominatible warriors from his paintings, he refused to be conquered and taught himself to write, draw, and paint with his left hand. In the last decade he began to produce great works of art again and his legion of fans and admirers could only marvel.

With the creation of the Frazetta Museum several years ago, his followers finally had a temple to which they could travel and see the objects of their veneration and, if they were lucky, meet the creative genius behind them. One of my deepest personal regrets is that I never had the opportunity to make that hajj — that pilgrimage to the temple in the Poconos. With the passing of his wife Ellie last summer and the family problems that followed, the Museum was closed and that opportunity was no longer available.

I was fortunate, however, to be able to see one of Frazetta’s original paintings, “Swords of Mars,” at an exhibit in Orlando a few months ago. Being able to see this work in real life rather than reproduced as a print or in a book was an amazing experience. I could examine it in detail, up close, admiring every delicate little brush stroke, seeing the subtle use of blues and greens in an otherwise brown palette, that help to create that sense of otherworldliness at which he so excelled. Genius deconstructed. And then I could step back to see it as a whole — the eye-popping triangular composition with John Carter leaping out at the viewer in swash-buckling 3-D. I thought I understood before, but now I truly get it. I hope that his greatest works will be available for his many fans to see in person, because it really is a different and special experience. It would be a terrible tragedy if they end up scattered to the wind and locked away in private collections. We worshipers need the relics of our deity.

So even the gods must die — but the worlds they create remain. To the world of so-called “fine art,” Frazetta is not even a blip on the radar — he is mere “illustrator,” not a true artist. He is commercial artist who paints scenes from books on commission. Of course the same can be about Michelangelo. This is rubbish of course. Frazetta’s work is art and he is an artist. The power of great illustration is that it creates a visual narrative — something a few splatters of paint on a canvas can never achieve. Maybe I’m a fool, but I’ll take “Egyptian Queen” over “No. 5, 1948” any day of the week. As illustrators go, Frazetta passed a great milestone last fall when one of his paintings sold for $1,000,000. While putting a monetary value on such a great work of art seems like a tawdry exercise, it was a breakthrough moment as the only other illustrators to have works sell for seven figures are Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth. That is the elite pantheon to which Frazetta has ascended.

The loss to his family and loved ones is great because it is a personal loss. But as a fan who knew only the god and not the man, I can not be too sorrowful because I know the gifts that he left us — the legacy of genius that touched my life and so many others, and made the world a richer and more interesting place to be. Thank you Mr. Frazetta and godspeed.