It’s a sad day here at the secret headquarters of LIAS, as we just found out about the passing of Frank Frazetta, unarguably the greatest fantasy illustrator of all time. He inspired legions of fans and imitators alike, but his style could never be duplicated —there certainly were more precise artists, guys who could almost create photo-realistic images of swords and sorcery, but no one had the subtlety and vague despair that Frazetta could summon from his brushes. As a Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed teen I used to dwell on his paintings for hours, and my childhood bedroom was plastered with his paintings (the Ice Giants, Serpent, The Apparition, Berzerker, Sacrifice, Conan the Destroyer and of course the Death Dealer, above). Besides tapping into all the more obvious teen boy tropes —barbarians, boobs, blood, gore, violence, heroics, carnage — there was always an overwhelming sense of storm cloud adventure that permeated all of his illustrations; there was a perverted part of you that wanted to be in that heap of bodies, swinging a bloody battle axe while iliciting a primal scream until victory flowed from your vanquished enemy’s veins. Quite simply, if a book or movie had a Frazetta painting on it I was taking it to the cash register, no matter how poor the content inside might be. He inspired entire weeks of lost day dreaming, and that is no small feat. In my world, Frank Frazetta was a genius. Rest In Piece my man, you made our lives better…