Rusty Burke said: "Wow! Look at this bad-ass dude!" Well, he said it in context, anyway.
I'm chuckling over that statement because I remember when I first saw, what? _Conan the Warrior_? --with Frazetta's "Barbarian" painting on the cover? I must have been 8 or 9 years old. This Conan novel was in the basement book section of Carlisle's, a typically boring local department store. Mom was probably looking for a dress or something, and I was wandering. My eyes must have been wide like eggs when I saw, amidst the cheap romance novels, a paperback with a picture of a muscley, half naked savage atop a mountain of dead bodies, gripping a bloody sword, with a beautiful naked (NAKED!) lady clutching his leg. "Wow! Look at this bad-ass dude!" ...or something like that must have popped into my mind. I briefly scanned the cover blurbs and leafed through the text. It looked as if the book really was written about what was on the cover, and it sounded just as exciting. I remember taking the book to my Mom, hiding the cover as best I could with my hand as I asked her if I could have, what? $1.95? 2.50? to buy it, thinking all the time she'd take one look at that cover painting and say, "NO WAY are you bringing this book home." But she must have been overjoyed at my interest in reading, because she just glanced down at my eager face and said, "Sure." It was a GREAT read and I was hooked on Howard AND Frazetta from then on. I would have read a book by Howard if it had Donald duck on the cover, but I loved Frazetta, too. Who didn't? Even his signature was exotic and exciting. "Wow! Look at this bad-ass dude!" Yeah. That pretty much says it. Heh-heh-heh-heh... -Shane -----Original Message----- From: Rusty Burke [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2001 10:48 AM To: REH Fans Subject: [rehfans] Frazetta's influence Paul Herman wrote: > I think the correct answer is, the author is most important to >getting the fame for his work. You can suck in lots of folks with a slick >cover, but they ain't gonna come back, nor give a rat's ass ten years down >the road, unless they actually like the product. Sales 101. Sales 102: first they have to pick up the book and take it home and read it. Many a fine author has languished unread, unsung, and finally unpublished because the book *looked* boring, or looked the same as all the other books on the shelf, etc. It's not being argued here that Frazetta *made* REH popular, or that REH's success ultimately comes down to the Frazetta covers. (At least, I don't *think* anyone is arguing that.) I am not that big a Frazetta fan, but in my judgment (as expressed in my intro to THE ULTIMATE TRIUMPH), Frazetta was a very big reason that people initially picked up those Lancer books to give them a try. *At the time*, his covers stood out vividly from everything around them, they *looked* fabulously heroic, and I think he has to be given some credit for making people, particularly teen-age boys, go "Wow! Look at this bad-ass dude!" You could tell there weren't any fairies in *these* books. Judging by the sheer numbers of people who respond to this topic whenever it comes up with their own stories of first picking up the Lancers because they were drawn to the Frazetta cover, I'd say there's pretty good reason to believe Frank gave Lancer sales, and thus REH, a boost. Certainly no one would have kept buying them just for Frazetta covers, as you say he did covers for a lot of books that didn't sell especially well. But I think he at least helped get people to give REH a try. And I say all this as not only a lukewarm Frazetta fan, but as someone who did not discover REH through the Lancer books. I didn't get them until after I had already been introduced to Conan through the comics that Charlie Williams thrust upon me when I called comic books "kid stuff." Liked the character and stories, went looking for the books. My judgment of Frazetta's influence has been formed largely by the sheer number of stories I've heard about guys picking up the books initially because of the covers. Rusty
