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.

So many things about Frazetta’s art were astounding. The vitality, the sheer sense of violent movement when he illustrated savage combat, the sensuous strength of the women he depicted, the power of his primeval beasts, the marvellous textures of cloth, metal, leather, stone — and flesh — he coveyed in his paintings so that you could feel them — were literally a marvel.

And of course, when he painted scenes that featured Conan, he did some of his best work.

Long ago, as a bachelor in a St. Kilda (beachside suburb of Melbourne) flat, I had two Frazetta posters on my walls. One was Conan battling the frost giants beneath a craggy mountain and chill blue sky, red gore on the tip of his sword, calf-deep in snow that, looking at the painting, I could feel stinging my skin with cold. The other showed that galleon sailing through the sky past a twentieth-century artificial satellite, which also and manifestly had some years upon it, dinted and tarnished but a proud achievement. It expressed beautifully what Poul Anderson called “the oneness of time” (in his story “The Pirate,” Analog magazine, 1968.

What else? That magnificent knight, The Outlaw of Torn, on his massive, rushing horse, red cloak flying and sword held forward? That other swirling red cloak, the one that surrounds the bestial form of Thak as Conan clings to his back and stabs him again and again, even his massive and powerful frame puny beside the ape-man’s? As, even through the frenzied rage in Thak’s inhuman face, Frazetta shows the pathetic budding humanity that REH described? The embodied sensuality and lust in Castle of Sin and Las Vegas? That huge spider dying impaled under bloody water? The dinosaurs? The cowboys lugging their saddles towards the red sunset? Conan, again, chained and straddling the immense snake Satha, indomitable despite his situation? The castaway huddled among aliens on a strange planet?

Once you start it’s hard to stop. These aren’t just paintings or illustrations. They’re experiences.