The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta
200Edition: Multilingual (English, French, German)Availability: In StockAlso available in a Collector's Edition
“The Godfather of fantasy art finally gets a proper monograph, as a team of artists, writers, scholars, and family members pay weighty tribute to Frazetta’s insane vision and industry-changing career.”
“…a super-deluxe retrospective of Frazetta’s career in comics, art, illustration and advertising.”
”The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta re-assesses the artist’s influence on visual culture in the wake of his ever-increasing popularity.”
The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta
200All Hail the King of Fantasy Art
Frank Frazetta finally gets the big beautiful book he deserves
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. He claimed to only make art when there was nothing better to do – he preferred playing baseball - yet began his professional career in comics at age 16. Strip work led him to the infamous EC Comics, then to oils for Tarzan and Conan pulp covers. Both characters were interpreted by many before him, but as he explained in the 1970s, “I’m very physical minded. In Brooklyn, I knew Conan, I knew guys just like him,” and he used this first-hand knowledge of muscle and macho to redefine fantasy heroes as more massive, more menacing, more testosterone-fueled than anything seen before. As counterbalance he created a new breed of women, nude as censorship allowed, with pixie faces and multiparous bodies: thick thighed, heavy buttocked, breasts cantilevered out to there, yet still, with their soft bellies and hints of cellulite, believably real. Add in the action, the creatures, the twilit worlds of haunting shadow and Frazetta’s art is addictive as potato chips.
This monograph is the most complete ever produced on the artist, done in collaboration with the Frazetta family. It won the 2023 Eisner Award for Best Archival Collection.
The authors
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.
The editor
Dian Hanson is a senior editor and writer for TASCHEN, with over 50 books to her credit. In addition to ARNOLD, her recent works include The Art of Pin-up, Masterpieces of Fantasy Art, and The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta.
Read here how it all began.
The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta
Hardcover, clothbound with jacket, 29 x 39.5 cm, 5.58 kg, 468 pagesISBN 978-3-8365-7921-6
Edition: Multilingual (English, French, German)4.7