The fantastic art of Frank Frazetta

This 94 page book takes an in-depth look at the amazing art of Brooklyn-born Frank Frazetta whose talent was recognized as early as three years old. He studied at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts under Italian artist Michael Falanga. He began his career in comic books and stayed with that genre for many years. Soon he branched out to doing covers for magazines and books. From the beginning, the quality of his work stood out from all the rest, to the point where readers frequently bought books not for their content but for their cover art. Franzetta has not only talent but drive, energy, power, and a will to survive. All these qualities emerge in his paintings. "He is, in toto, the perfect product of the school of comicbook art, for his work, while powerfully individual, shows the influence of its background in its heavily muscled hero figures and particularly in its intense composition which invariably directs the eye to the most important element of any painting. The Frazetta female is small of stature but lushly rounded and curved. She is a sorceress, a child, a woman; she is erotic, she is improbable and lovely and very much alive. His painting is intensely alive, vibrant, even when figures are in repose. It is perhaps this quality of life, of energy, which most signally sets Frazetta's work apart from all others in comparable fields." And from the rear cover: "In the art of fantastic illustration the work of Frazetta stands alone - unique in the effectiveness of its lushly sensuous exaggeration, powerful and dramatic, with a sure sense of composition that invariably directs the eye to the most important element in any painting."