FRANK FRAZETTA: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Frank Frazetta is in today's Independent, you can link to it here, better a little late than never! Frazetta was hugely influential in the comics world, and already legendary by the time he'd stopped working in comics. I might have mentioned another of my favourites from those days, Jeff Jones, as being another who followed Frazetta's career path in book covers, original art, and everything except working regularly in 'the industry'.

It would also be interesting to see the way a Frazetta cover might have affected the sales of second-tier novels, say, the sword and sorcery of Gardner Fox. He certainly did spark the Conan boom with the Lancer paperbacks in the 1960s, something I know from personal experience; it probably set my literary development back half a decade when I discovered them on the wire racks at Izzy's Smoke Shop or Chapel Street Books or wherever it was I was gathering my literature in those days.

I mention the baseball games he and Al Williamson organised. Williamson just died, and it would have been nice to have done his obit as well; like Frazetta his influence went far beyond his presence in comic books. He also found a niche in daily strips which meant we probably never saw the best he could have done after the 1960s. There's also an interesting parallel to the mainstream artists around New York at the time these guys were making their mark. Frazetta and Williamson would have fit in very well with the very masculine life style of the Abstract Impressionists, the T shirt and dungarees image, though perhaps not so much with the drinking. I think in their field they had to work too much to be hungover regularly!