Frank Frazetta Art Gallery

The brush and ink technique he used in the pages of Creepy caught the attention of Canaveral Press. The goal of the publisher was to produce a series of Burroughs reprints in a high quality format. And the perfect artist for the job was Frank Frazetta. He was fresh from Ace still hungry for Tarzan and a ton of experience now under his belt. His illustrative style best reflected back to the original hardcover editions illustrated by J. Allen St. John (an icon of Frazetta's). What Frazetta created for those four books (one of which was never published was a series of brush and ink drawings that, to this day, challenges anyone to outdo. Frank's illustrations for Canaveral Press are considered by many to be among his finest works, fully matching the vitality of his oil paintings. Dr. David Winiewicz, a long-time Frazetta friend and owner of the original to "Lord of the Jungle," is especially enthusiastic about the artist's black and white Burroughs art from this period and has been able to obtain quite a few for his private collection. This particular drawing struck a chord with a number of ERB readers and Frazetta himself was so taken with the strong central composition that he would use it as the basis of his original cover for Conan the Buccaneer seven years later.

While the perspective of his covers for Warren remained fairly uniform, Frazetta was able to experiment with content and color: his painting for Creep #15 is a prime example of how he was able to convey a sense of horror with a limited, non-trasitional palette and an unusual subject matter.

The run-away success of Creepy perhaps made a companion magazine inevitable. In order to protect the title of Eerie from his competitors, Warren cobbled together a first issue – comic book-sized with a black and white cover– and rushed it into limited circulation. With the title identity secured, a full-sized second issue of Eerie was released to the mass-market in 1965. As with Creepy, Frazetta could paint whatever he pleased without the intrusion of an editor or art director. Always interested in dinosaurs, he took advantage of the freedom Warren afforded him to create this misty encounter with a T-Rex. Many times editor Archie Goodwin would write a story based on the magazine's cover, and this painting for Eerie #5 was no exception: "The Swamp God" was illustrated by one of Frazetta's long-time friends, Angelo Torres.

"I liked Warren, " Frazetta remembers. "He was very amiable, a lot of fun. He was a cocky little guy and he'd bullshit you a lot, but if you knew that about him you could handle him. He was funny. He had this routine, ' We're a team, Frank, blah blah blah,' That might have worked for other artists - it didn't work for me. I painted for him because I loved working for a larger format - and he stayed off my back. I guess I always had a pretty good time and I think it shows in the art."