Does anyone else remember when the covers of fantasy and sci-fi novels were EXCITING? You know, filled with some of the action you might hope to find in the pages of said books? I don’t know when the trend started to move away from the flowing, vivid, energized scenes of heroes and heroines battling monsters, aliens, and villains to the somewhat lifeless, yet somehow photo-realistic posed and brooding anti-heroes in stylish (and often impractical) costumes, or just a close-up of a prop like a sword hilt or a shield began; but I do know that it has become the boring norm in the genre.

Go on. I dare you, do a random check in your local bookstore, or just search the genre on Amazon Books and tell me I’m wrong. How many of the images that you see actually grab you by the collar and scream into your face, “READ THIS BOOK!” Not many I’ll wager.





Well, fortunately for me, I grew up when there was a guy who could do that on every single cover. His name was Frank Frazetta, and he was the greatest fantasy illustrator of all time. I mean, as in drop the mike, it’s all over, kind of greatness.

When I was in high school, I was Frazetta’s champion in the ongoing debate in the D&D-geek/art-student crowd. Everybody else’s hero was Boris Vallejo. You may recall his work from the numerous ads for Mr. and Ms. Olympia contests and Joe Weider bodybuilding products from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Vallejo is a true master and a fantastic illustrator in his own right, but for my money, his stuff, as gorgeous as it is, just never had the life and action of a really good Frazetta (and, to my way of thinking, they’re all really good).

I mean, Frazetta’s characters fight, run, crawl, and leap off the page and into your mind. Just look at The Destroyer, one of his covers for Robert E. Howard’s Conan; this guy is standing in the midst of a score of enemies and literally destroying them. Man, I need to read that story! Or what about his cover for Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Return of the Mucker – the hero has dragged an enemy and his horse to the ground for some comeuppance! Show me a modern hero doing something like that on today’s covers. Please, I really want to see that.





I wonder what happened. Since Frazetta did so many fantastic covers for the pulps and the early Warren horror magazines, has his style been somehow relegated to passé or low-brow status out of some sense of literary snobbery? Or is it just laziness or tight-fistedness among art directors and publishing houses? Or, is it because of the fact that he was the absolute best ever that today’s illustrators are just plain scared to step foot into his arena?

Look up some of Frazetta’s work and then ask yourself: “What would the Game of Thrones series of novels have looked like with his covers?” Personally, I hope that his style will come back around and spark a new excitement in genre fiction and genre illustration. I know there will never be another Frank Frazetta, but I hope that there are some folks out there willing to give it a try. I don’t know about you, but I think exciting adventure stories deserve exciting adventure scenes on their covers.