Happy Birthday Frank Frazetta!

Frank Frazetta was born on the 9th of February in the year 1928, in Brooklyn New York. Much has been written about him and his impact on popular culture, but today I am going to write about his impact on me.

I first encountered Frazetta’s work as the cover to Back to the Stone Age by Edgar Rice Burroughs (the 5th book in the Pellucidar series) and was completely blown away by his photorealistic yet fantastic style of painting. Click on the image above to see the cover in creater detail. This jpeg does not do the painting proper justice but still note the smoothness and reflectiveness of the tusks and the fur of the mammoth! The rippling corded muscles of the arms of the hero! Those are not the muscles of a steroid-addicted weight lifter, but rather hard-earned from a lifetime of conflict! All framed by the lushly dense vegetation wherein if you but look closely it soon becomes unclear what is a serpent and what is a vine!

Needless to say, I bought the book. No doubt the publisher Ace was pleased that Frazetta’s painting did the job. But not only have I no regrets at buying the book, but am grateful for being intoduced to the Pellucidar series as well as the superb craftsmanship of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Did you know that John Eric Holmes, the editor of Basic D&D was such a fan of Pellucidar that he wrote the pastiche Mahars of Pellucidar the previous year?

Or that E. Gary Gygax himself was such a fan of Burrough’s John Carter of Mars series that he referenced it several times in the original edition of D&D (1974)?

So in closing, one of the ways I am indebted to and appreciative of Frank Frazetta is his above painting introducing me to one of my favourite phantasy cycles, Pellucidar as well as one of my favourite authors, Edgar Rice Burroughs.