I recently bought a couple of art books about Frank Frazetta -which I'll probably review properly in due course- but it wetted my appetite for books about fantasy illustrators and comic artists who are a bit obscure to most people but whom I like a lot.
Wally Wood was a comics artist who produced a wide-ranging amount of work, doing horror, humour, superheroes, SF, porn, satire, etc. Sadly when it came to looking for books about him there's virtually nothing and very little of his work available. I ordered MARS Patrol believing it be some of his SF work but it turned out to be invasion USA and not his best work by a long way. On its way to me is a superhero collection from the 60's, the first volume of THUNDER Agents (and the reason for capitals in both cases is that they're acronyms and I couldn't be bothered to put in the dots.
If you're easily offended, please don't look too closely at the third image below. It's rumoured that Walt Disney is still spinning in his cryogenic chamber over it.
Roy G Krenkel was somewhat of a mentor to Frazetta who held the elder artist in high esteem. Sadly, except among a coterie of affionados, Krenkel is almost forgotten. There is one book available about (see cover below) but the reviews suggest it's a somewhat inadequate job so I'm passing on it. It's even difficult to find a decent selection of his art on Google Images, not even his wonderful cover for the Lancer paperback of King Kull which I used to own.
The recently deceased Al Williamson was a prolific veteran of newspaper strips and comics for many many decades and an artist who, until recently, I'd rather taken for granted; probably because he was always around and often working on highly commercial projects like Star Wars where he always slick but didn't register with me because of my familiarity with the subject matter. There is a volume of his Flash Gordon work available which I'm in two minds about buying again because of the familiarity of it.
I'll probably be looking at this subject again sometime.
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