Frank Frazetta, the godfather of fantasy art, (February 9, 1928 - May 10, 2010) was born into a Sicilian family in the heart of Brooklyn, New York. His father, Alfonso Frazzetta, was a hard-working, first- generation Italian immigrant who married Mary, a New York native. In a modest Brooklyn home, they raised Frank Frazetta, the eldest, and his three sisters, Adele, Carol, and Jeanie. According to Frazetta and his immediate family, he became a paid artist as a toddler when his grandmother paid him a single penny in exchange for a crayon drawing. Once Alfonso and Mary realized their son’s undeniable talent, at a mere eight years old, Frank Frazetta was enrolled in the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts where he would study under an award-winning Italian fine artist, Michele (Michael) Falanga. “I still
remember the professor, Michele Falanga, and his face filled with skepticism as I signed myself in. He sat me down and asked me to copy a postcard featuring a group of realistically rendered ducks. When he returned to see how I progressed, he snatched up my drawing exclaiming, “Mama mia!” and ran off waving it in the air for everyone to look at,” chuckled Frazetta. From the time Frazetta first enrolled in the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts, Falanga was impressed by his ability. With three years under Frazetta’s belt, Falanga felt that it was time to make
arrangements for Frazetta to study abroad. Unfortunately, Falanga passed away that same year before Frank was able to accept the opportunity. When asked about his loss in later years, Frazetta philosophically commented, “I haven't the vaguest idea of whether it would have really affected my areas of interest. I don't know, but I doubt it. You see, we never had any great conversations. He might look over your shoulder and say. Very nice, but perhaps if you did this or that..." He spoke very broken English and he kind of left you on your own. I think I learned more from my friends there, especially Albert Pucci.
In December 1944, a character Frazetta created when he was eight
years old, “Snowman,” was published in Tally-Ho Comics #1, a
collaboration with John Guinta, an older, more experienced
cartoonist. Ambitious from an early age, Frazetta had accepted a job
at age 15, assisting John Giunta in Bernard Bailey’s studio doing
pencil clean-ups, ruling panel borders, and various odd jobs. Guinta
befriended young Frazetta and recognized his talent, so he
collaborated with him on the seven-page “Snowman” story. Frank
penciled it, Guinta polished the pencils and inked it. Because it was a
one-shot story in an obscure comic, it did not exactly set the
cartooning world on fire.
Nevertheless, Frank Frazetta was now a
published cartoonist at the tender age of 15. Two months later, he
turned 16. At the same time, he found himself working in the bullpen
at FictionHouse, doing similar chores. Because there wasn’t enough
to do to keep his restless artistic urges occupied, he’d sit in the bullpen
working in his sketchbook, developing his own characters and
stories.
He was soon fired from Fiction House and struck out on his
own as a freelancer, but in the short time he was there, he made
friends with EC horror great Graham Ingels, who recognized Frank’s
talent even early on, and would later be his editor. By 1946, Frazetta
was doing some work for Standard Comics, at first, just inking or
drawing isolated panels on other artists’ stories, but then he
graduated to illustrating two stories for Treasure Comics #7. “Know
Your America”, a four-pager about William Penn is Frank’s first
published solo work, while the one-page “Captain Kidd Jr.” a
humorous strip, is his first signed story, featuring his initials, F.F. He
contributed a five-page “Know Your America” story to the next issue
of Treasure Comics, this one profiling Ben Church.
Frazetta continued working for Standard (also known as Nedor and
Better Publications), where from 1947 through 1950, he employed his
talent for humorous cartooning illustrating text stories and short (3-7
page) comics stories for titles like Coo-Coo, Supermouse, Barnyard,
and Happy Comics. At the same time he was working on funny animal
illos and stories for Standard, he was doing similar work for a lesser-
known company called Ace Periodicals/Junior Books. Young Frank
had a real knack for drawing cute funny animals, so much so that he
was offered a job in Walt Disney’s animation department, an
assignment he turned down, preferring to stay in his Brooklyn
neighborhood and continue drawing comic books. Still, it’s said that
he treasured the letter from Walt Disney his whole life. While at
Standard, he began to branch out from the funny animal material,
inking pages and panels here and there. Graham Ingels assigned him
his first jungle strip, “Judy of the Jungle” in Exciting # 59, done in a
style very much influenced by Terry and the Pirates creator Milton
Caniff. By 1949, Frazetta was branching out from the humor material
to do westerns for Magazine Enterprises (Trail Colt #1), where he
again worked with Graham Ingels as his editor. This story, and some
of his earliest funny animal work, was signed “Fritz”, an early
nickname bestowed on Frazetta by childhood friends.
Among his other early assignments was the story, “Why They Call Them
Mavericks” for Western Fighters #11, one of many westerns Frank would
illustrate over the years, but significant because it was the first time he
collaborated with a very young Al Williamson, with whom he would do some of
his best and most fondly-remembered comic book stories, particularly for EC
Comics from 1952-1953. Frazetta and Williamson would go on to draw around
90 pages of material for John Wayne Adventure Comics and Billy the Kid for
Toby Press, a comic book company run by Elliot Caplan, the brother of Li’l
Abner creator Al Capp. Remember that last name, because Al Capp was to
figure prominently in Frank Frazetta’s future career.
While still freelancing for Standard, Frank was given the assignment to draw
stories featuring “Looie Lazybones”, a character who was practically a carbon
copy of Capp’s Li’l Abner physically, although the stories themselves were
pure hillbilly humor, lacking the sometimes savage social and political satire
Capp employed. Starting with a single text illustration of the character in
Thrilling Comics #66, Frazetta went on to do a total of seven “Looie
Lazybones” stories up through issue #73. In two of those issues, the hard-
working Frazetta also contributed a pair of teenage humor stories, including
one done in collaboration with artist Ralph Mayo, who was one his artistic
mentors and lent young Frank a George Bridgeman book on anatomy, which
Frazetta copied overnight, thereby improving his grasp of anatomy almost
immediately. It was, however, Frazetta’s dead-on pastiche of Capp’s Li’l
Abner style that led Capp to offer Frazetta work as one of his ghosts in 1954,
a job Frazetta would hold until 1962 when he broke off his relationship with
Capp after Capp tried to cut his salary, but more on this later.
The period from 1949 through 1952 is when Frazetta’s career as a cartoonist
really exploded. During this time, Frazetta was working for a number of
different comic book companies, both by himself and in collaboration with
friends Al Williamson and Roy Krenkel. He worked for Avon, ACG, Magazine
Enterprises, EC Comics (almost always with Williamson, with a couple of
exceptions), and DC Comics (Then known as National Periodical
Publications). For DC, he did one of the few continuing characters he ever
drew, “The Shining Knight”, which was probably the closest he ever came to
doing a superhero comic. He also did a single science fiction story for the first
issue of Mystery in Space, as well as stories for Tomahawk, Jimmy Wakely,
Gang Busters, All-Star Comics, All-Star Western, and Star-Spangled Comics.
Almost all of his DC stories, except for the “Shining Knight” series and “Spores
From Space” in Mystery in Space, were westerns. It’s safe to say that the bulk
of Frazetta’s comic book output was westerns, including the covers he did for
Magazine Enterprises for titles like Bobby Benson’s B-Bar-B Riders, Tim Holt,
Ghost Rider, and Straight Arrow. Frank did some of his best work in comics
for Magazine Enterprises, including 16 installments of the “Dan Brand/White
Indian” back-up strip for the first 16 issues of The Durango Kid comic, and the
cover and entire first issue of Thun’da King of the Congo, the only comic book
entirely drawn by Frazetta. The cover and four stories contained therein were
Frazetta’s attempt to get the attention of United Features syndicate, which
handled the Tarzan comic strip. Despite producing a magnificently drawn
jungle adventure, Frazetta was not picked to follow in the footsteps of his
hero, Hal Foster. However, his comic was good enough to inspire a serial
version also titled Thun’da King of the Congo, and starring Buster Crabbe, an
actor Frazetta would depict many times during his comics career. The poster
for the serial even included Frazetta’s cover for the first issue, a foretaste of
his career as a movie poster artist, but Magazine Enterprises did not see fit to
share any of the profits from the sale of the comic with Frazetta, so the first
issue was the only one he worked on.
To Frank, getting his own syndicated strip was a holy grail; if it were
successful, he could become very wealthy, as cartoonists like Hal Foster, Alex
Raymond, George McManus, and others had. During this period, after Johnny
Comet ran its course, he took another stab at creating a Tarzan-like strip,
Tiga, which featured a long-haired strongman and his beautiful, exotic
sidekick adventuring through a post-apocalyptic science fiction landscape. It
didn’t sell, but Frazetta’s sample strips were re-dialogued, retitled “Last
Chance” and ran in the third issue of Wally Wood’s Witzend prozine. Another
failed strip sample, Nina, about a female Tarzan-like air crash survivor trapped
in a world of monsters and savage beast-men, was published in the eighth
issue of Witzend with the panels broken up to illustrate an Edgar Allen Poe
poem, “The City in the Sea”. It was one of the most magnificently drawn
pieces in Frazetta’s entire career, and the title topper art showing Nina sitting
on a characteristic Frazetta mossy log while being watched by a beast-man
was later recycled as a limited-edition print.
Frazetta’s collaborations with Al Williamson for EC produced some of the
best-drawn science fiction stories ever done in comics, particularly stories like
“I, Rocket”, “The One Who Waits”, “Fired!” (the most beautiful western story
the duo produced) “Two’s Company”, “Fifty Girls Fifty”, “A New Beginning”,
and the cover to Weird Fantasy #21. Frazetta’s only solo story for EC,
“Squeeze Play” (Shock SuspenStories #13) came about only because Al
Williamson was given the assignment but didn’t want to draw the roller coaster
that figured prominently in the script, so he handed the job off to his friend
Frazetta. However, when Frazetta was facing a deadline crunch, he asked
Williamson to help out, and he wound up drawing the roller coaster anyway.
Frazetta’s only solo cover for EC (Weird Science-Fantasy #29) came about by
accident, too. Frazetta bashed out this acknowledged masterpiece overnight
while working in Al Capp’s studio. It was intended to the ninth of his Buck
Rogers covers for Famous Funnies #217. But, when he brought in the art, his
longtime editor, Steve Douglas, thought it was too violent and wouldn’t use it,
which ended his professional relationship with Frazetta forever. Disgusted,
Frazetta went over to EC Comics and offered it EC publisher Bill Gaines.
Gaines, and everyone else, loved the cover and thought it was an absolute
masterpiece. There was only one problem with selling it to EC; Gaines always
bought the original art outright. Frazetta, knowing what a gem he had created,
didn’t want to part with the art at any price, so the canny Gaines made a
counter-offer, Frazetta could keep the art, but would only get paid half the
usual rate for covers (which was $60).
Frazetta was happy to take the lower
sum just so long as he could see his work get published and hang on to his
baby. It was a wise choice, as it has since gone on to become one of the most
famous and highly praised pieces of comic art ever produced. In the ‘70s
publisher Russ Cochran used differently colored versions of the image for the
front and back covers of his EC Portfolio #2, and also issued signed,
unsigned, and hand-colored and remarqued prints of it. Years later, Frazetta
also produced a series of signed and numbered hand-colored prints of the
image. That one image made money for the Frazetta family for decades.
The year 1952 was a banner year for Frank Frazetta because he was offered
his own daily strip, long the dream of many comic book artists, and Frank was
only 24 at the time. The strip was Johnny Comet, and it chronicled the
adventures of an itinerate race-car driver. It was ostensibly written by Peter
DePaolo, the winner of the 1925 Indy 500, but was actually written by Earl
Baldwin. Although gorgeously drawn and bursting with action, the strip was
not a success. Debuting on January 28 th , 1952, the strip ran until January 31 st ,
1953, undergoing a name change to Ace McCoy midway through its run, and
a change in emphasis from straight-on action to a more humorous tone,
especially in the Sunday strips. Frazetta drew both the daily and Sunday strips
at the same time he was juggling comic book work for Heroic Comics, and
other accounts, so he sometimes enlisted friends to help him out, including Al
Williamson, Larry Woromay, Jack Hearne, and EC great Wally Wood, who did
most of the art for the last three Sunday pages, with Frazetta drawing the
characters’ heads to ensure continuity of the likenesses.
Doing a daily and a Sunday strip is a grueling grind, and sometimes the deadlines
were very, very tight. Al Williamson recalled a day when he and Frazetta
Completed Six Comet dailies in about four hours. After the syndicate pulled the plug
on Johnny Comet/Ace McCoy, on February 1 st , 1953, Frazetta was out of work.
However, Frazetta was not unemployed for very long. Flash Gordon artist Dan
Barry tapped Frank to ghost the pencils for ten days of dailies from February
18 th through February 28 th . But after that, Frank Frazetta did not have any
more paying comic strip work. However, he used that downtime to draw some
comic book pages and generate samples for a series of ultimately
unsuccessful newspaper strips, including Amby Dexter, Nina, and Sweet
Adeline, even a sample page for a proposed Buster Crabbe Sunday strip.
Amby Dexter was a baseball-themed strip in the vein of Ray Gotto’s Ozark
Ike, and concerned the adventures of an ambidextrous pitcher in the big
leagues. (It was an ironic title, considering that Frank himself was
ambidextrous, an ability that would allow him to continue drawing after a
series of strokes in his 70s left him partially paralyzed on his right side.)
Despite Frazetta’s strong draftsmanship, and an appealing cast of characters,
this project never went anywhere. Another aborted strip project was Sweet
Adeline, a humor strip written by Al Capp’s brother, Eliot Caplan. On the one
hand, it’s a shame neither one sold, for the art Frazetta created for both
projects is light and charming. Still, if Frazetta had managed to create a
successful newspaper strip, he might never have gotten into painting the
paperback book covers that are the source of his enduring fame.
In 1954, Al Capp, recalling Frazetta’s run on “Looie Lazybones” and aware of
the beautiful recent artwork on Johnny Comet, offered him a job as one of his
ghosts on Li’l Abner. Capp was at the peak of his success in the 1950s, with
Abner running in hundreds of newspaper all over the world, plus deals for
product endorsements with Cream of Wheat cereal, Wildroot Cream-Oil, and
hundreds of licensed products like hand puppets, wind-up toys, and an entire
galaxy of products featuring Capp’s Shmoos. Eventually, the strip generated
two feature films, animated cartoons, and a wildly successful Broadway
musical based on the strip. Needless to say, Capp didn’t just need help
drawing his daily and Sunday strip, he also needed assistants to generate
artwork for all the product packaging, print ads, and incidental illustrations that
were coming down the pike. When Capp first brought Frazetta in, he had him
draw and ink three weeks of daily strips. The results were gorgeous, but the
syndicate worried that readers wouldn’t like the drastic change in styles, so
Capp had Frazetta shift over to penciling the Sunday page once Capp had
roughed out the layouts and inked the characters’ heads. It took Frazetta
about a day and a half to draw the Sunday strip and Capp paid him $150 a
week, pretty good money in the mid-50s. Plus, it gave the fun-loving young
artist plenty of time to pick and choose his other cartooning assignments, play
baseball, go bowling, goof off (according to old friend Nick Meglin, Frazetta
always goofed off “with gusto”.).
It was during this period, early on in his association with Capp, that Frank did
some of his most attractive comic book stories, a series of five romance jobs,
including “Untamed Love”, which is widely acclaimed as one of the most beautiful
comic book stories ever drawn. At the same time, he was also doing his legendary
run of Buck Rogers covers for Famous Funnies (issue #s 209-216), now among the
most expensive and widely sought-out comic books from the 1950s.
Handsome, muscular, and quite charming, Frazetta was popular with women and had a string of intense romances. In 1952, at the age of 24, Frazetta met petite seventeen-year-old Eleanor Kelly and his playboy days came to an end. "I sensed that she would be forever loyal and I never ever had that feeling about any other girl. I'd been involved with, " Frazetta says. "Sure, she had most of the physical attributes I looked for in a women, she was beautiful and athletic. But beyond that she was very sharp and alert and pert and she knew a lot of things I didn't know." After four years of dating they were married on November 17th 1956. Later Ellie Kelly led Frank’s career by taking over the financial and property rights components by ensuring his art would be returned upon completion of the project and that he would be compensated accordingly. Ellie also handled all merchandising and solely curated Frank’s three galleries.
By the 1960s, Frazetta went freelance and picked up work designing covers for ‘adult’ paperbacks, men’s magazines and many notable paperbacks. His Edgar Rice Burroughs covers, including a number of Tarzan titles, cover art for Molly Hatchet’s first three albums featuring “Death Dealer,” “Dark Kingdom” and “Berserker” and of course, his definitive interpretation of Conan the Barbarian are extremely famous.
Although much of his work during this period was fantasy, he also garnered attention for a parody painting of Ringo Starr in Mad Magazine . He designed the movie poster for What’s New Pussycat? and more cinema work followed, including poster art for Roman Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers, Clint Eastwood’s The Gauntlet and a 1976 comedy The Busy Body. Frazetta was also a trailblazer in the art world. In the early 1980s, Frazetta worked with producer Ralph Bakshi on the feature Fire and Ice , released in 1983. The realis m of the animation and design replicated Frazetta's artwork. Bakshi and Frazetta were heavily involved in the production of the live-action
Appeared as "Molly Hatchet" album artwork 1978
The Destroyer (1971)
sequences used for the film's rotoscoped animation, from casting sessions to the final shoot. Following the release of the film, Frazetta returned to his roots in painting and pen-and-ink illustrations. In 2001, Frank Frazetta was awarded with the World Fantasy Award—Life Achievement for artwork such as Conan The Destroyer and Death Dealer. In 2003, Frazetta was subject to a documentary, “Painting with Fire,” All of Frazetta’s works embody a quality that make you feel as if you are stepping into an imaginative world your wildest dreams wouldn’t dare to explore. For over 50 years, Frank Frazetta dominated the art world with his images of fierce warriors, helpless princesses, and fantastical creatures set in the most lavish landscapes. His impact upon the worlds of fantasy art and film was unparalleled, and it can be seen to this day in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Amazingly, he managed to do this while nearly dying because of an undiagnosed thyroid condition. Even more astonishing was his ability to survive six strokes, which forced him to switch from drawing with his right hand to drawing with his left hand. Frazetta is the godfather of fantasy artwork.