Like many people, I felt a sense of great loss on reading that Frank Frazetta had died. The impulse to post something right away faded before the feeling that nothing I could say would be adequate, and the need to get my thoughts in order (and the words halfway right) before I wrote anything. But now, in the face of other significant news (that the Shieldwall is coming down) I had better get on with it while I can still say something on The Cimmerian.

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This is it. Quite possibly the iconic Conan image. It adorns the walls of bedrooms and offices as posters, decorates the cover of Conan the Adventurer and others, even used as a basis for film posters — Conan or otherwise. Everything a Conan or Sword-and-Sorcery fan could want is in this image: the muscular hero standing atop a veritable hill of ruin and carnage; the hints of sorcery and eldritch horror lurking in the background; the inimitable Frazetta female reclining next to the hero.

But is that all there is? Art historians pore over the likes of a Caravaggio or Michelangelo, eagerly pointing out little tidbits like the artist inserting a self-portrait into the painting, or a sly insult in the background–even the allusion of religious commentary via biological symbolism. Could this same method be used with Frazetta?

Someone might say this is the height of pretentiousness, pseudo-intellectual drivel designed to imbue a commercial work with deeper meaning that simply isn’t present. “It’s just an awesome painting, you don’t need to analyse it!” On the contrary, I do need to analyze it, precisely because it’s an awesome painting. There’s more to the picture than the mere fact that it’s a muscular dude on a mound of corpses with a sword in hand and a babe holding his leg. A look at the details might shed some further light on why this image has become possibly the defining visual interpretation of Robert E. Howard’s Conan.

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Robert Rodriguez

Only a short while after the sad news of Frank Frazetta passing, many have reflected on the man’s impact on the worlds of television, film, music and art. One of the most ambitious was his collaboration with Ralph Bakshi, Fire and Ice. Among the fans of that rotoscoped extravaganza are director Robert Rodriguez and Harry Knowles. The long-haired, bearded, bespectacled (no relation) master of Aint-it-Cool-News talked with Rodriguez recently, where he announces he has gained the rights to Fire and Ice.

In addition to this new news, Rodriguez talked about Machete (where he likens Danny Trejo’s character to his take on Frazetta’s Conan) and Frank Frazetta himself.  A fan of Frazetta taking control of one of Bakshi’s most celebrated films, and so infused with Frazetta’s art and style that it might as well be called Frazetta: The Movie? I’m guardedly excited. Read all about it here.

Over on his Drums of Nyumbani blog, Charles R. Saunders has posted an entry entitled, “In Memoriam: Frank Frazetta.” Mr. Saunders reminisces about his discovery of Frazetta’s work, depictions of blacks in Frank’s art and also speculates about what a Frazetta cover for an Imaro novel might have looked like. CRS does an admirable job covering the latter two topics, but I have few more factoids and opinions to add. Feel free to click the link above, read the post and click back here.

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“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.

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Yet what is more beautiful than a splendid human body in coordinated motion? The lithe finely poised figure of a dancer, the pantherish body of a boxer with the wedge-shaped torso, the long swelling muscles rippling under the smooth velvety skin, the easy glide of onset and retreat, the perfect balance and carriage, the suppleness of limb–where is a finer model for an artist or sculptor?
–Robert E. Howard, letter to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. December 1932

It’s sometimes asserted that illustration, especially fantasy or science fiction illustration, is not on the same level as “true art”: the reasoning being that art as commercial, mercenary work, as opposed to art for art’s sake, excludes it from the pantheon of real artistic endeavour. Such a view is not only painfully divorced from the history of art, where many of the greatest paintings were commissions for pampered nobles or local churches, and it’s an entirely arbitrary and worthless distinction to make. How can the motivation behind a work of art’s creation exclude it from consideration? How can a beautiful painting fail to be considered as art, whereas something like, say, a dislocated urinal is? The notion of “high art” is thus fraught with fluctuating social trends, reinterpretations, and above all, subjectivity–much like “high literature,” or most odiously of all, those who insist on a fallacious distinction between “books” and “literature.” Much as C.S. Lewis disregarded the desire to appear mature as a sign of immaturity in itself, I long ago cast away such childish ideas of what was “allowed” to be art and what wasn’t, and started to make up my own mind.

Illustration, in my opinion, can be counted as being something more than what it was commissioned to be–it can speak beyond mere depiction of characters and events that happen in another medium, and convey the deeper themes and thoughts that may not be apparent at first glance. There can be a great synergy between author and illustrator that creates a symbiotic magic unique to the medium, where the two complement each other perfectly, making something that is greater than the sum of two parts–Roald Dahl & Quentin Blake, Arthur Rackham & Lewis Carroll, Lord Dunsany & Sidney Sime, George Cruikshank & Charles Dickens, J. Allen St. John & Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sidney Paget & Arthur Conan Doyle. Nobody provided a better example of this phenomenon than the combination of the king of fantastic art of the 20th Century, Frank Frazetta, and the master of Sword-and-Sorcery, Robert E. Howard.

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Just one month until Howard Days 2010, REH fans. REHupa and the REH Foundation are working with Project Pride to prepare for the most important annual gathering of REH fans in Cross Plains, Texas. Since 1986, people have come from all around the world on the second weekend in June to render homage to the life and writings of Texan author Robert E. Howard.

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Frank Frazetta Tribute by El-Grimlock

I always knew it was going to happen. Frank Frazetta was going to die, it would happen fairly soon, and being a Scot without the funds or opportunity to take the flight to the Frazetta museum, I would probably never get a chance to meet him. I’m a latecomer to Frazetta fandom, so I can’t share some of the memories of other Frazetta fans. I never picked up one of the Lancers when they came out, to be wowed by Conan the Adventurer or Conan of Cimmeria. I never saw a Frazetta picture on the side of a van, or on somebody’s wall, or in the shops. I never saw a Molly Hatchet album cover hot off the record shelves. Nonetheless, the power of Frazetta means that his presence is felt even now: it’s just in different ways.

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With tributes, remembrances, and recaps of the life and art of Frank Frazetta lying spread across the internet like blue mantles beneath the stars, I found myself struggling to come up with anything fresh or meaningful to say on the subject that hasn’t already been said. But I love Frazetta’s artwork, and wanted to add something to the discussion, so I asked myself, What is it about Frazetta’s style that keeps me coming back to his images?

The more I thought about it, it’s his ability to depict strength. Frazetta understood raw power and human musculature like no other artist I’ve encountered. He was a master at portraying rippling, powerful heroes in scenes of sweeping action, bursting with dynamic motion and power barely contained by the canvas.

This characteristic permeates all his work, even his J.R.R. Tolkien sketches. Here’s one of my favorites, a Thor-like Witch King ready to bash a curvaceous, full-figured Eowyn with a hammer of the gods:

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Many, many things have been said about Frank Frazetta’s work over the past five decades. Some of those quotes can be accessed here. What I want to write about is how Frank’s work and his life affected me over the past thirty-plus years. The influence of both was profound.

Unlike some, I did not come upon Frazetta’s work via the covers of Robert E. Howard paperbacks (or vice versa). The Lancers were out of print and Ace had not started republishing those volumes. I discovered Frank Frazetta’s art on the side of a van. A big, groovy 1970s van sitting in a K-Mart parking lot. Frazetta’s Silver Warrior was airbrushed on the side. While not a perfect reproduction, it was plenty close enough to the original to blow my young mind.

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