Frazetta

Frank Frazetta has reigned as the undisputed king of fantasy art for well over 50 years, the value of his paintings now climbing as high as his fans' admiration. Each year his works break the previous year's auction records, with the cover for Lancer books 1967 Conan bringing $13.5 million in September 2025.Born to a Sicilian immigrant family in Brooklyn, 1928, Frazetta was a minor league athlete, petty criminal and serial seducer with movie star looks and phenomenal talent. Self-described as lazy and difficult, he often started a painting the night before it was due, completing it in mere hours, yet delivering a masterpiece--often still wet, but a masterpiece, nonetheless. He started in comics at age 16, including the infamous EC Comics, moved on to film posters, then to Tarzan and Conan pulp covers. Along the way he produced magazine covers for National Lampoon, though at odds with the editors' "hippy politics," made the animated film Fire & Ice with director Ralph Bakshi, and learned to paint left-handed at age 68 after the first of many strokes paralyzed his right hand. As he explained in the 1970s, "I'm very physical minded. In Brooklyn, I knew Conan, I knew guys just like him." Using this first-hand knowledge of muscle and macho he redefined fantasy heroes as more massive, more menacing, more testosterone-fueled than anything seen before, and their female counterparts as thick-thighed, heavy-buttocked, and pixie-faced, yet still, with their soft bellies and hints of cellulite, believably real. All in all, Frazetta's art is addictive as potato chips, and now available in a compact, attractive and affordable package.

Dan Nadel is curator-at-large for the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, and a contributor to the New York Review of Books and Artforum. Nadel's books and exhibitions include Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence 1945-1976 (2020), Chicago Comics, 1960s to Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2021), and the forthcoming biography of Robert Crumb (Scribner, 2024). He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Zak Smith is an artist whose work is included in several public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Saatchi Gallery, London; and The Whitney Museum of American Art. He is the author of several books, writes a regular column for Artillery magazine and lives and works in Los Angeles.

Dian Hanson is a senior editor and writer for TASCHEN, with over 50 books to her credit. In addition to Hal Foster's Tarzan, her recent works include ARNOLD, The Art of Pin-up, Masterpieces of Fantasy Art, and The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta.