Our pal James H. Burns sent me this and it was too good not to share…
For me, Frank Frazetta will always be the guy who taught me how to shoot a Magnum.
I went up to Frazetta's Pennsylvania home (about seventy acres, in the Poconos). in the summer of 1983, to do an article on his animated feature film, Fire and Ice, directed by Ralph Bakshi. We hit it off and spent a couple of days talking about his career, and art, and movies, and women, and baseball…
Frank was surprised that even though we had it in common that we had both played baseball, and spent a lot of time in the city, I had never fired a gun.
We went over to the lake just outside his house, on his property, and began with a .38. Then, we moved onto the Magnum, and I immediately learned the fiction in all those action film gun-fights: You can't fire a .44, or a .357, without your ears ringing — for about a minute, in which you're terrified that your hearing will never return.
(There was an intriguing symmetry: I was learning how to fire a Magnum at the same home visited by Clint Eastwood (whom Frazetta resembled, at one point in his youth, and for whom he had painted the advertising poster for The Gauntlet.)
Perhaps the most amazing element of a sojourn to the Frazetta abode were the hundreds of paintings and sketches that it seemed to me had never before been seen: particularly a treasure trove of humorous, and other mainstream work. (I would bet that even with the innovation of that marvelous Frazetta museum, and all the art books, there still remains a wonderful world of visions that the public is not yet familiar with.)
Frazetta and I wound up hanging out for many hours beyond our interview, shooting the breeze, on a late July evening, as at least a couple of cats darted into the porchlight to say hello. It struck me that Frazetta just missed being able to talk about the fantasy business, and comics, and all the rest, the way he no doubt had, in years past, with his EC Comics, and other artist friends. (A multitude of folks like me had made the trek to meet with Frazetta, through the years.)
I mentioned to Frank that he might enjoy popping into Manhattan (about ninety minutes to two hours away), once in a while, just to reacquaint himself with some of the comics and other shops, and possibly meeting more people he might enjoy talking with. Frazetta quickly pointed out that he could grab the express bus to New York City, whenever he wished, right at the roadway at the edge of his property…
Various accounts will mention that Frank wondered what would have happened had he pursued a baseball career (as you did), or had he been a little more, as Frazetta put it, tenacious with his artwork, at least earlier in his life. But it's well known that Frank enjoyed painting what he wanted to paint, when he wanted to paint it.
And I think there's another key.
Whatever the recent controversies have been, Frazetta — at least for a long while — living amid those sylvan woods, was exactly where he wanted to be, creating and playing, surrounded by his wife and family.
That's a nice thing about Frank…and it extended to his major paintings. They're all him. Even the earlier paperback and magazine covers where he had to follow editor's dictates…once he got the originals back, he'd usually retouch to get them the way he wanted them. Otherwise, up until the end when his family had all that infighting — and excepting medical problems, of course — he seems to have lived his later life pretty much the way he wanted.
The one time I know of that Frazetta didn't get to do a painting his way in his later years was the cover he did for MAD in 1995. By then, Frank was rarely accepting assignments and when he did, he generally got about a hundred times what MAD paid for a cover…but the magazine's editor then was his old pal Nick Meglin, and because (I guess) he felt he owed Nick for past help and support, he agreed to the job. Everything was going fine until a senior exec at the company — someone above Nick and in spite of Nick's objections — demanded that Frazetta put a yellowish background on it.
Frank didn't like the idea…and I was actually in Nick's office when they discussed it on the phone and I heard Frazetta's voice through the handset yelling, "Tell him to look at every painting I've ever done and find me one where I had a yellow background!" But he gave in and did it, mostly to just get the thing over with and out of his life. It was one of the few times in his later life when Frazetta didn't have total control and I'm sure it would have been a better cover if he had. Maybe he should have put that .357 Magnum to use.