Frank Frazetta (born Francesco Alfredo Frazzetta ; February 9, 1928 – May 10, 2010) was an American artist known for themes of fantasy and science fiction, noted for comic books, paperback book covers, paintings, posters, LP record album covers, and other media.
Frazetta was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame, the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and was awarded a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.
Born Frank Frazzetta in Sheepshead Bay, New York, located in Brooklyn, to an Italian-American family. Frazetta removed one "z" from his last name early in his career to make his name seem less "clumsy". The only boy in a family with three sisters, he spent much time with his grandmother, who began encouraging him in art when he was two years old. In 2010, a month before his death, he recalled that:
When I drew something, she would be the one to say it was wonderful and would give me a penny to keep going. Sometimes I had nothing left to draw on but toilet paper. As I got older, I started drawing some pretty wild things for my age. I remember the teachers were always mesmerized by what I was doing, so it was hard to learn anything from them. So I went to art school when I was a little kid, and even there the teachers were flipping out.
At age eight, Frazetta attended the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts, a small art school run by Italian instructor Michele Falanga. "[H]e didn't teach me anything, really," Frazetta said in 1994. "He'd come and see where I was working, and he might say, 'Very nice, very nice. But perhaps if you did this or that.' But that's about it. We never had any great conversations. He spoke very broken English. He kind of left you on your own. I learned more from my friends there."
Frazetta was a gifted baseball player, and at nineteen received the most valuable player award in his local Parade Grounds League. In 1948 the New York Giants offered him a professional contract, but he declined in favour of a career as an artist.
In 1944, at age 16, Frazetta, who had "always had this urge to be doing comic books", began working in comics artist Bernard Baily's studio doing pencil clean-ups. His first comic-book work was inking the eight-page story "Snowman", penciled by John Giunta, in the one-shot Tally-Ho Comics (Dec. 1944), published by Swappers Quarterly and Almanac/Baily Publishing Company. It was not standard practice in comic books during this period to provide complete credits, so a comprehensive listing of Frazetta's work is difficult to ascertain. His next confirmed comics works are two signed penciled-and-inked pieces in Prize Comics' Treasure Comics #7 (July 1946): the four-page "Know your America" is Frank Frazetta's first "solo" work, and the single page "Ahoy! Enemy Ship!", featuring his character Capt. Kidd Jr. In a 1991 interview in The Comics Journal, Frazetta credited Graham Ingels as the first one in the comic book industry to recognize his talent, and to give him jobs at Standard Comics in 1947.
For Dell's Famous Funnies, Frazetta did war and human interest stories for Heroic Comics, as well as one pagers extolling the virtues of prayer and the evils of drug abuse. In comics like Personal Love and Movie Love, he did romance and celebrity stories.
From 1952 to 1953 he drew the newspaper comic strip "Johnny Comet" for the McNaught Syndicate; despite a name change to "Ace McCoy" in the middle of its run the strip was canceled after a year. In 1954 Frazetta was hired as a member of Al Capp's studio; his primary job was to pencil the "L'il Abner" Sunday page, but he also drew a variety of advertising and editorial art featuring L'il Abner's characters. In interviews later in life Frazetta would say that he had worked for Capp for nine years, but his memory was faulty and he was mistaken. After Frazetta became popular painting paperback covers Capp would say that Frank had only worked for him for several months, but that was equally untrue: Frank Frazetta was part of Al Capp's studio from 1954 to 1961.
He married Massachusetts native Eleanor Kelly in New York City in November 1956. They had four children: Frank Jr., Billy, Holly, and Heidi.
In 1961, after nearly seven years with Al Capp, Frazetta quit in a dispute over money. While employed by Capp he was mostly able to work at home and was paid approximately $400 a month; on occasions when he was needed Frazetta would travel to Capp's Boston studio and be paid an additional $100 a day. In 1961 Frazetta was asked to come to Boston for a short-deadline job, but was told that he would only be paid an additional $50 a day. Frank refused and angrily resigned; he tried to return to comic books but was unsuccessful. He was given some inking work by his friend George Evans before deciding to pursue a career in illustration (though he briefly helped Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder on three stories of the bawdy parody strip Little Annie Fanny in Playboy magazine).
In 1964, Frazetta's painting of Beatle Ringo Starr for a Mad magazine ad parody caught the eye of United Artists studios. He was approached to do the film poster for What's New Pussycat?, and earned the equivalent of his yearly salary in one afternoon. He did several other film posters.
Frazetta also produced paintings for mass market paperback editions of adventure books. His interpretation of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian visually redefined the genre of sword and sorcery, and had an enormous influence on succeeding generations of artists. His cover art only coincidentally matched the storylines inside the books, as Frazetta once explained: "I didn't read any of it... I drew him my way. It was really rugged. And it caught on. I didn't care about what people thought. People who bought the books never complained about it. They probably didn't read them."
Primarily, these were in oil, but he also worked in watercolor, ink, and pencil alone. Frazetta's work in comics during this time were cover paintings and a few comic stories in black-and-white for the Warren Publishing horror and war magazines Creepy, Eerie, Blazing Combat, and Vampirella.
An advertisement for Jōvan Musk, based on his work, was animated by Richard Williams in grease pencil and paint and shown in 1978. The realism of the animation and design replicated Frazetta's artwork. Frazetta and Ralph Bakshi were heavily involved in the production of the live-action sequences used for the film Fire and Ice's rotoscoped animation, from casting sessions to the final shoot. The film was Frazetta's only work in animation, following its release he returned to his roots in painting and pen-and-ink illustrations.
Frazetta's paintings have been used by a number of recording artists as cover art for their albums. The U.S. Army III Corps adopted "The Death Dealer" as its mascot.
In 2009 Kirk Hammett, the lead guitarist for Metallica, bought Frazetta's cover artwork for the paperback reissue of Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Conqueror" for $1 million.
In the early 1980s, Frazetta created a gallery, Frazetta's Fantasy Corner, on the upper floors of a former Masonic building at the corner of South Courtland and Washington streets in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. The building also housed a Frazetta art museum that displayed both his own work and, in a separate gallery, that of other artists. From 1998 to 1999, Quantum Cat Entertainment published the magazine Frank Frazetta Fantasy Illustrated, with cover art and some illustrations by Frazetta. In his later life, Frazetta was plagued by a variety of health problems, including a thyroid condition that went untreated for many years. A series of strokes left his right arm almost completely paralyzed. He taught himself to paint and draw with his left hand. He was the subject of the 2003 feature film documentary Frank Frazetta: Painting With Fire.