Awesome Swords & Sorcery Covers I: Frank Frazetta's Conan

I just meant to put up a batch of my favorite S&S book covers for a quick post, and instead found myself hunting down Frank Frazetta's Conan covers. It's not that there aren't other covers I like and affected me growing up, but I suddenly realized how deeply these helped build my visual interpretation of the genre and decided to focus on them.

Part of me, the overly-intellectual part that channels dime store (really, shouldn't that be dollar store now?) Freudianism, assumes my adolescent self was jazzed by the pictures' blatant power fantasy imagery. There's Conan with a nubile woman curled up, subserviently, at his feet. There he is, teeth exposed in a primal grimace with his arm around Thak's neck and a giant dagger raised up high. With sword and shield held high, he rides through his enemies, trampling them under hoof.

The main part of me, though, says "pshaw!" to all that. I like these covers because they're cool. Yeah, there's a bit of a power trip inherent in Frazetta's artwork. Conan's the biggest, baddest guy around and nothing can stand in his way for long. What's not to like?

And they're darkly gorgeous. You can smell the smoke, gore, and sweat seeping off these covers. These are some of the most viscerally exciting S&S artworks ever done, and I am forever grateful to Frazetta for creating them.

Thak and Conan, Conan and Thak. The young Conan rampaging on rampaging monkey-man. I've always felt bad for Thak. Some priest's dank dungeon shouldn't be his home, he should be running free in the wild, plucking bananas and wooing some monkey-woman. 

Cool as this is, it always struck me it's too cold for Conan to go around pantsless. I don't demand verisimilitudinous perfection in S&S, far from in fact, but, dang, Conan's never struck me as too stupid to wear dress for the weather.

I think this is the most iconic Conan picture ever created. I can almost see his chest and shoulders heaving after just having killed all those creatures he's standing on. The swirling mists and skulls hovering behind over the flames are the forces still arrayed against him, but we know Conan will prevail.

I'm as indifferent to this picture as Conan is to the man he's throttling. That look on his face makes me thinks he's thinking back on his youth, or maybe remembering he's got to pick up milk after work.

Not the best, but the first one I saw. I first dug this out of one of my dad's legendary book boxes in the attic. I knew the name Conan, but nothing about him. Then I read "Red Nails," and was hooked for life. I assume this for "Beyond the Black River." 

UPDATE: I love this one. We don't see Conan's face, because he's too busy facing off against the world, despite being manacled in place. But seriously, what's with the peanut gallery on the steps? Are they waiting to see who wins, for scraps? What? And that snake. Seriously, it took the time to slither through the Cimmerian's legs instead of just eating him? Seems a little unbelievable, if you ask me. 

Looking at this picture with a critical eye it kinda stinks. What the heck is that Conan's wearing, a barbarian girdle? And why isn't his chest protected? Whatever. The horse, bucking and screaming as it smashes Conan's opponents is intense. I do really like the band of pink sunlight piercing the blue and black of the shadows.

Great cover for a poor book. The picture distills S&S to some of its essential salts: muscled barbarian, evil wizard, slimy, slithering monsters, and nubile damsel in distress. While I love the feeling of movement implied by the swinging censer, and bits of Conan's man-necklace, I also love it's the snapshot effect. Conan's in mid leap, one unseen foot balanced on the altar, his hands prepared to throttle the sorceror. The latter, arm outstretched is ready to swing downward, ripping open his helpless victims. Looking at all these together, this might be my new favorite.

There you go, some of the best and most influential S&S covers. I love that they are so unabashedly violent and masculine. There's no doubt what sorts of stories you're going to find behind those covers. Thank you, Messrs Howard and Frazetta (and De Camp, Carter, and what the heck, Nyberg, too).

The rest of the Ace Conan covers were done by Boris Vallejo. You can look them up on your own, because I don't like them and am not putting them up.

When Covers Were Cool - Brian Lumley's covers

Once upon a time, in the not too dim and distant past, fantasy books had cool covers. Whether you went for the throbbingingly lurid styles of Boris Vallejo, or the oddly antiseptic yet still colorful Darrell K. Sweet, or the thunderous and blood streaked work of Frank Frazetta, you knew you were reading something special. And there were even wilder artists, such as those whose magnificent art graced the covers of Lin Carter's Ballantine Adult Fantasy line; Gervasio Gallardo, and Bob Pepper. Fantasy books didn't look like anything else, and that was a good thing.

At some point this changed. Perhaps it was the mainstreaming of fantasy. Maybe the triumph of the marketers. I'm not sure when, but at a point in the past decade, what I derisively call the photoshop covers started appearing. They're too clean, too similar to those of romance and airport potboilers. Even if there's someone in a cowled cloak on the cover brandishing a knife, it doesn't "feel" like I'll be reading a story rooted in pulp or heroic fiction.

I don't know anything about Paul Ganley, except that in the eighties and nineties he published several volumes of Brian Lumley's Mythos-inspired fiction. His were the first American editions of the Titus Crow, Primal Land, and Dreamlands novels. 

The thing that most stands out, I imagine, to the casual viewer, is the almost amateurishness of these covers. They really aren't that much better than something a kid, albeit a talented one, might draw on the back of a notebook. That same roughness would have kept them from ever gracing a book that got front of the store placement in Barnes & Noble. 

Even those by Steve Fabian, an artist of tremendous renown among S&S readers, while much more polished than the others, would still be relegated to the back shelves if at all these days. And that's great. These covers practically ooze fannishness. There's an utter love for the material depicted in this art that I rarely get from modern covers. The new ones could just as easily have been done by anybody or even a machine, for all the intimacy with the material they evince. Yeah, I'd go for a book with a cover like this a hundred times before some of the abominations out there today.

EPIC: Some Last Notes on The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

After nearly forty years of not reading them, I've finally finished The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I tried to read Lord Foul's Bane a couple of time back in my youth, but Covenant's character and Donaldson's prose threw me off. They're still hard to handle, but the reward is rich and worth the work, something younger me couldn't be bothered with.

If I haven't been clear enough in my three Black Gate reviews, these books are great and powerful. If you haven't read them, you should. You will by turns be disgusted with, hate, and rage at Thomas Covenant. As Sarah Avery commented, when she first read, them she wanted to throw them against the wall multiple times. If you stick with them, though, you will encounter storytelling of scope and power rarely seen in genre fantasy, especially these days.

Somehow, the Castalia House blog picked up the review of The Illearth War as part of their "Pink Slime Watch." The implication is that it's the sort of weak, derivative fantasy that proliferated in the post-Shannara days and seriously lessened the overall quality of the genre. Tom 

I'm a big fan of the Castalia blog. Jeffro's Appendix N articles are stellar, and I really like the wargame articles. But to lump Donaldson in with Terry Brooks, and all the crap that flowed downward after him is just plain wrong. Putting Thomas Covenant alongside Drizzzzzzzt implies a lack of actual familiarity with these books. These books are complex, adult explorations of guilt, redemption, and heroism (among other things), using the fantasy genre to make the story operatic, MYTHICAL. And without giving anything away, Donaldson comes down pretty strongly on the side of taking action and being a hero. He just wants to point out those things can come with a steep price. 

John R. Fultz commented the other day on my Black Gate review of The Illearth War that:

In a very real way, Donaldson’s humanizing of Tolkien’s basic themes set the tone for the gritty, realism-drenched fantasies of today.

I think that's a true statement, but sadly the doors were opened for far more bad books than good ones. I'm not going to rehash the grimdark wars again, but so much of the fiction being peddled as such is just an excuse to drape easy cynicism and ultra-violence in a mantle of worldy insight into the miserable reality of life, the universe, and everything. 

Creating a world of gray and gray morality filled with characters hued in wondrous shades of gray is no deep insight. Personally, I think it's a childish one that should only sound insightful to a college freshman. There's nothing gray in Thomas Covenant's world. His world, in fact, it's a pretty black and white one, it's just that even good actions can have terrible consequences. It's a much more nuanced and realistic vision, something missing in most of today's supposedly more "realistic" fantasy. 

Finally, for anyone who has read these books I can't stress enough about checking out Fantasy Bedtime Hour. For nearly five years, two women, in bed, read, puzzled over, and created wonderfully low-rent recreations of Lord Foul's Bane. Each episode also feature conversations with experts. The last two episodes' expert is none other than Donaldson himself. I haven't watched them all yet, but the ones I have are priceless.

God Stalk by P. C. Hodgell and other ramblings

Just reread P. C. Hodgell's God Stalk for the, I dunno, seventh or eight time.  I enjoyed it so much that I think I'm going to make the effort to finish reading the rest of the series. I've read half of it leaving me one long book and two short ones to go.  If you haven't, go read the review at Black Gate, then go read the book.

Reading the book got me to thinking about what makes a book one that draws me back to it again and again over the years. The books I reread every few years include God Stalk (duh), The Master and Margarita, LotR, the Disc World Series (several at a time).  Maybe I'm exposing myself as a shallow reader with poor taste, but I don't care.  I've read them at various stages in my life, as a teenager and an adult and never been disappointed.
Do these books possess something in common that makes me love them? Well, yes, all are fantastic. Not a mundane plot in the bunch.  The imagination invested in all these books is staggering. Whether it's Tolkien's reworking the themes of Northern European myths, Pratchett and Hodgell playing with the tropes of modern fantasy fiction, or Bulgakov's meshing together ancient history with grim Soviet reality into a blackly comical tapestry, I'm astounded each time I read these books.
I think that's not it, though.  It's the characters that grab me an hold me. Jame's curiosity and determination to make a place for herself, Margarita's struggle to save the Master and Pilate's to do the right thing and save Yeshua and the travails of all the Ring Party.  These characters resonate with me in ways that I'm not sure I fully understand.  I love Life: A User's Manual and Dune but I don't pull them off the shelf every few years for a reread. Maybe if I was a closer critic of the texts I could figure out exactly how each author captures my attention, but I'm not sure I want to.

Right now I'm reading Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away and the two earlier linked short stories, "Not Long Before the End" and "What Good Is a Glass Dagger?".  More interesting than really good, they're still fun enough to not make me feel like I'm wasting my time.  Also, totally cool Esteban Maroto pictures in TMGA.

No music was consumed during the reading or writing of the God Stalk post.  Sometimes it just goes down that way.  Now, I'm digging out my Ocean Colour Scene stuff and going all British trad-revival rock.  Next comes Paul Weller probably.