Let’s get this out of the way: Frank Frazetta was the finest painter of butts who ever put brush to canvas. Doesn’t matter if it is a guy butt or a gal butt. His butts are perfect.

I led with this because I passed on Frazetta as a kid for two reasons. First, I think clothes are cool. Darth Vader, Warduke and Destro derive a ton of their cool from their costumes. Frazetta’s subjects rarely have clothes (Death Dealer a notable exception), so in my youthful calculus, that meant they weren’t cool. Second, Boris Vallejo. I don’t like Vallejo’s work (Hambone recently called him K-Mart Frazetta and I tend to agree) and for years, I didn’t make much distinction between the two biggest fantasy artists specializing in paintings of barely clothed people.

When my local comic shop recently closed (RIP Comic Explosion), I snagged the Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta (1975) on close-out. Holy crap, I have vastly, perhaps criminally underestimated Frazetta. Thing you probably already know: man could fucking PAINT.

Besides butts (and physique in general) there are two things Frazetta does better than anyone else. First is motion. His paintings are springing with it, like if you blink everyone will tumble out of the frame into your living room. I’m not sure how you instill a still image with this, but he does it like crazy. Its black magic.

The other thing is how his central subject often rises out of either darkness or abstraction. The fellow fighting the snake is a great example, but they all do it to some degree. In the center, clear as a photo, is the guy; then the secondary details – the brazier, the necromancer, the woman – are less detailed. Then the rest of the world dissolves into color and light. As if the whole thing is a vision springing from a narcotic haze.

Anyway, Frazetta was a monster when it came to fantasy art in the 60s and 70s. His vision dominated everything, including D&D. It was inescapable. And now, I understand why.