Cathy Fenner

The artwork contained in this book was absolutely stunning, but I wish that it had been a bit more organized and consistent. They organized things by loose genres, some of which absolutely made sense, but some of which I thought were kind of the same thing. And then within these categories there was no internal organization that I could decipher based on logical grouping (themes, subjects, artists, locales, colours even) which made the book seem rather disjointed. That being said, I was show more pleased to see pieces by most of my favourite fantasy artists, plenty of recognizable sources/commissioning groups, and a whole host of unexpected newcomers. show less

I have several of these volumes; they are wonderful, and they seem to keep getting bigger and bigger. I am continually impressed not only by the works themselves, but by the breadth of selection, from fine arts, to comics, to commercial art, to sculpture. There is apparently a near-infinite amount of 2-D and 3-D fantastic art being produced at any given time and much of it would largely go unseen if it were not for these annual collections.

Even in this rough work, Frazetta's genius comes through. The energy and motion and dynamics that every piece conveys ... the beautiful women begging to be ravished ... the warriors to fight by your side ... the demons to destroy ... it's amazing.

This is a wonderful book. It covers Frazetta's history from comics all the way to the late 1990's, where he was mostly doing oil paintings. There is a good sized section devoted to his illustrations, another devoted to his entanglement with Hollywood posters, actors, etc.

The largest section, of course, is the gallery which has 150+ pages of art, including oil, watercolor, drawings. These each have at least a small amount of information detailing what was going on at the time, or what the show more goal was for each art. There are also a lot of examples of where they show the original, as published piece, and then they will have next to it the re-worked version. The artist will go back a lot of times and modify a painting if he didn't like something in it.

As far as the art goes, this book is a straight up 5 stars.

I knocked off a half star because of some serious reservations I have regarding a few comments the editors decided to put in regarding Robert E. Howard. Really unnecessary. I don't want to get into it here, but if you are interested in REH, don't use this book as a source lol. Better to investigate the names Mark Finn, Rusty Burke, Del Rey REH releases etc. show less