Frank Frazetta, he of the sword and the damsel and the sci-fi paperback and the poster on your uncle’s dorm room wall. Where do I start? Everyone knows Frazetta’s story, right? Molly Hatchet? No? Never mind.
Ahem. Frank Frazetta. To quote the introduction of Telling Stories: The Comic Art of Frank Frazetta edited by Edward Mason (Black Bart/Underwood Books, Sept.), “Frazetta’s comic output wasn’t great but it was unforgettable.” Here’s another comment: “Frazetta is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s most famous creators of fantasy art.” Which is a nice way of saying he was the best tits-and-ass, sword-and-sorcery paperback-cover artist of all time.
But before he earned that distinction, he was a comic book artist, and a really good one.
Born in 1928 in Brooklyn, N.Y., Frazetta began his comics career at 18 and quickly developed a reputation as a “serious” artist. He found plenty of work in the booming comics industry and in the studio of Al Capp as an assistant on the newspaper strip L’il Abner. But Capp was a pain; Frazetta basically outgrew the medium; and when the famous anticomics Senate hearings of the mid ’50s hit, he had plenty of reason to move on to greener pastures in the more professional world of magazines and paperbacks. His career in comics was short indeed, but it was remarkable.
Romance comics, war comics, jungle comics (think Tarzan and really sexy Jane), science fiction comics: Frazetta could do it all and in stellar fashion. His ability to marry a painterly naturalism to cartooning was his real strength. And he could make a comic book story “read” like a movie better than his peers and his forebears. He must have been a breath of fresh air in the 1950s, when the gold standard for that sort of thing was the baroque, stodgy serialized adventure newspaper strip Steve Canyon by Milton Caniff.
Frazetta showed that he could out-Caniff Caniff in the story “Judy of the Jungle.” This was Frazetta’s first full-length story, and he drew it when he was 19. It concerns a beautiful woman who carries a knife and wears a torn evening dress with no straps and who swings around the jungle saving wild animals from big-game hunters and who of course falls in love with the hunter with a good heart. Bad B-movie genre crap, but in Frazetta’s hands it’s a marvel of composition, lighting, movement and skill. Here one can begin to see Frazetta developing his chops for a future in fantasy art and the Hall of Fame for, uh, painters of girls’ butts.
As the 1950s wore on, Frazetta refined his style and quickly established himself as an artist who brought a “slick magazine” illustration style to the low ghetto of comics. His stories from ’51-’52 began to look like tryouts for the major leagues, each panel and page overflowing with lush detail and care that was unheard of at the time in comics.
In “Too Late for Love,” from 1953, the artist defined the look of the romance comics genre. Sultry, summery young uber-babes vie for the attentions of a hunk (who looks like Frazetta, of course). What makes the story great is Frazetta’s apparent ease at rendering people that feel real, who aren’t cardboard cutouts or generic. They’re emotive, beautiful drawings and wonderful to simply stare at, like it was all really unfolding in front of you, the reader.
Telling Stories, edited by Mason and reprinting Frazetta’s comics work, was supposed set the record straight. Put his name up in lights for all the new kids who have never heard of him. Roll out the red carpet. Unfortunately, this comprehensive reprint edition completely misses the mark in presenting the work as Art.
Why is it so hard to get the color right in these reprint editions? You’d think with today’s technology they could figure out a way to reproduce the wonderful old colors that these Frank Frazetta comic books had in the mid-20th century. But publishers always try and update or improve the coloring by recoloring, and print the new colors on bright white, glossy paper. Ecch. And then in the text sections, they reproduce an original cover with its original color scheme or a yellowed page of “original art” (that’s what they call the “inked” line art of the book itself) and it makes the “colorized” comics look terrible! Why? (Homer Simpson voice: "WWWHHHhhyyyy?")
It’s Frazetta! You couldn’t try and color it nicely, properly? Oh, you think the new colors look good? Am I the only one who wonders why publishers do this? With books like the recent editions of Little Nemo and Gasoline Alley, we’re seeing these reprint volumes that preserve the color and richness of the original presentationof the art as object, as commodity, as a comic book or a comic strip, as history.
So Underwood Books serves up one of the masters of American comics (okay, that’s another issue) and just throws something together in Photoshop? Some of the colors are from the reprints that I remember from the ’80s, but the never-before-reprinted work is just demolished, thinned out somehow by the bad coloring and worse bright white paper. Don’t you guys understand that bright white paper thins out the line weight? What art book in the art world does this? Answer: They don’t!
Through sheer artistry, Frazetta’s drawings managed to transcend the formulaic genre trappings within which he labored and elevate a 10-cent funny book to a work of art.
Yet this art is difficult to view in this reprint volume, so poor are the reproductions; one feels as though one is reading them on a computer screen from 10 feet away. No wonder Frazetta is often discounted as a master of comics. There’s been no sourcebook to easily pull off the shelf as proof of his ability. Now, there is one, yet it’s not going to win Frazetta many votes. The language of comics also includes production, and this is another missed opportunity, one that does a disservice to any real contribution Frazetta made to the medium.
Frank Santoro was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pa. Moved to San Francisco on an art school scholarship. Quit to create and self-publish SIRK zines & comics—some in conjunction with Katie Glicksberg—culminating in publication of Storeyville. Moved to New York City, returned to painting, worked five years as Francesco Clemente’s assistant. Met Dan Nadel and began project to integrate painterly and poetic values into comics, starting with Chimera and Incanto and currently in collaboration with Ben Jones on Cold Heat. Cofounded the Comics Comics blog with Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler and writes there about comics ephemera. The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Publishers Weekly.
