Earlier this year, Geoff Pevere wrote a fine article on his Frazetta fetish for the Toronto Star. (Pevere is a Canadian cultural journalist. He was recruited for the Doug Wright Awards jury this year, and at the awards ceremony spoke very eloquently about Seth’s work). When I told Geoff how much I liked his Frazetta article, he informed me he had a slightly longer version. This was shortly before the sad news came of Frazetta’s death. So in honour of the great barbarian artist, here is Geoff Pevere’s full tribute:

If love makes us do things common sense says we shouldn’t, I have loved the art of Frank Frazetta. Briefly, it made me a criminal.

I can’t remember when I first laid eyes on a Frazetta, but it was probably on the cover of Creepy or Eerie in the late 1960s. These were comic magazines for people verging on growing too old for comics, black and white horror anthology collections that happened to have some of the best art and writing in the field.

Not at all coincidentally, much of this art and writing was perpetrated by the same generation that had been instrumental in the rise and censorious crash of the industry during the 1950s. On these pages, these EC Comic-vets were free to let their imaginations run to places Comics Code-approved kids comics could not.

Frank Frazetta, born in 1928 in Brooklyn, N.Y., was a veteran of not only this skirmish in comic history, but a few other deciding altercations as well. By the time his work intersected with my attention, he had done comics, movie posters, paperback fantasy covers and an uncredited four-year stint as Al Capp’s ghost illustrator on L’il Abner.

A lifelong jock and near-pro baseball player, he had fought lacerating battles over ownership, control and credit, and had become a toughly independent character as a result. He didn’t work for anybody he didn’t want to work for, and he painted whatever he wanted to paint.

No one was quite prepared for what Frazetta could do in oils. Although the content of Eerie and Creepy represented the state-of-the-art for the comic art of the day, the Frazetta covers wrapped the package with the promise of something the medium had only hinted at up to that point in its belittled and embattled history. It was the whiff of something classical, a merging of the visceral with the timeless, pure comic sensation with the compositional command of a master. It seemed, especially if one were suitably impressionable to such impressions, as though comic art had found its Michelangelo.

And so my criminal life began. From the magazine covers, I discovered Frazetta’s work on the Robert E. Howard-penned series of Conan books. More than anything, these were the images that defined the Frazetta style: darkly violent and forcefully dynamic, upwardly thrusting images of ancient-world mayhem frozen at moments of eruptive drama. The ‘Barbarian’ Conan battling savage Vikings on a snow and blood-strewn mountain passage, fiercely intervening in the ritual sacrifice of a writhing damsel, standing grimly but defiantly upon a mountain of freshly butchered enemy flesh, a wispily-clad Frazetta girl coiled devotedly around one trunk-like barbarian thigh.

Holy jumpin’ jeepers. I don’t think anything had ever looked so cool.

I began scouring second-hand bookstores for these books and other Frazetta-adorned volumes, and nothing would stop me from taking them home. Especially nothing so mundane as money. Invoking my own lank-haired barbarian spirit, I’d slip the books inside jackets and in the top of bellbottom-concealed gym socks, taking my booty home with a thumping heart. Then I’d sit and stare in awe, which seemed not just the only thing to do but the right thing. This was art to be venerated. This dude was God.

I wasn’t alone. In Painting With Fire, a 2004 documentary about the Frazetta life and legacy, one of the many illustrators the artist has inspired describes how he’d rip covers off the books – which never lived up to the apocalyptic promise of those paintings – and slip the remains in the back of the rack. Then he’d hightail it out the door, homeward to bask in the pilfered glory. A fellow traveler – bike-borne, no doubt — on the strip-mall barbarian path.

Although time drew me both to the correct side of the law and away from (some, not all) intemperate pubescent passions, it never fully divested me of my awe for Frazetta. I’m in possession of three volumes of his work and one collection of his (now duly credited) L’il Abner contributions, and I can still spark those atavistic stirrings simply by getting an eyeball-full of Frazetta’s singular visions of demonic, end-of-days eruption. Moreover, I still wonder where those women – ample, muscular, erotically irresistible yet fiercely unattainable — came from. Or, more to the point maybe, where they went.

There’s a theme here, and it rather sadly corresponds with my outlaw past. In December, news broke that Frazetta’s oldest son, Frank Jr., had been caught and charged with attempting to remove some of his father’s paintings from the family museum in Pennsylvania. The case is still pending, but the incident appears to stem from the turmoil resulting from the death last year of Frazetta’s beloved wife Ellie, long the artist’s business advisor and financial guide. Frazetta himself has suffered multiple strokes and been described as suffering from ‘dementia’. Indeed, Frank Jr. has claimed he was merely trying to ‘protect’ his father’s work from being sold.

It grows even darker when one watches Painting With Fire, especially when the artist – who turned 82 this week – jokes about the fact that not even he can get into his own museum, apparently because his wife is worried ‘I might swipe them or something.’ Finally, there is the film’s closing image, in which film director Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat, Fire and Ice) pretends to skulk off the Frazetta property with a painting tucked under his shirt.

Each of these incidents reminded me of the thieving my own Frazetta fixation had prompted, and to wonder what it was about this guy’s work that lured one so magnetically both inside the frame and outside the law. It feels like it may be something like love, an emotion that can bring out the barbarian even in the most civilized of lovers.

Labels: Frank Frazetta, Geoff Pevere