Vanguard's Frank Frazetta books
   Fantastic Paintings Of Frazetta
   Frazetta Sketchbook II
   Frazetta Sketchbook [I]
   The Sensuous Frazetta
   Frazetta Book Cover Art
   The Definitive Frazetta Reference [BELOW THE LINE]

The Fantastic Paintings Of Frazetta (2020 - Vanguard Productions) (by J. David Spurlock) This 10-by-14-inch collection of Frazetta's work just edged out the previous top-of-the-pack. It can boast of having a solid handful of paintings & color-preliminaries that haven't been seen in other monographs much at all, if ever. 33 full-bleed painting pages are pretty glorious, though some of those are utilized in presenting 14 works that spread across the gutter (3 of those fail outright, but the rest are serviceable, mostly because of judicious use of the portfolio-centers). Anyway, another 46 pages each let a single image dominate (sometimes that's an excerpt, a preliminary or a book cover) and still another 19 pages each have a couple of images at play, frequently publications. In his foreword, even Michael Whelan gets a single 'well-presented' image (which is not hard to find at all in his own collections). With this large size tome in hand, at 'only' 112 pages, I've seen some commenters decry this volume not having more pages (and more exhibits), but I can contribute that, by our standards, much thicker and this book would start losing 'manageability'. I think some of that desire for more may come from this book not really being as much of a gallery book as it could have been. As mentioned before, a not insignificant portion of this endeavor is publication-covers and explorations into the variations of the works-at-hand (taking up more space with those exhibits). Well, the deluxe release of the book (the one with Death-Dealer on the cover) does have an additional 16-pages containing a few more paintings and some previously un-displayed horror comic art. If you've been picking up Frazetta art-books for years, do you really have to get this? I'd say no, but it is, by our lights, the current best collection of the man's original artwork, presentation-wise, and after perusing a library copy, I bought one. And, seeing the prices that some older top monographs are going for, this might not be a bad starting point for the newly-intiated...

Sketchbook II (2014 - Vanguard Productions) (by J. David Spurlock & the artist) The second volume scores higher than the first as an art presentation, and indeed has far fewer nearly indistinguishable sketches, but manages to still disappoint in its own way. Another 17 pages lost to formal figure studies and a dozen of the large full-bleed reproductions are but excerpts of paintings easily found in their entirety elsewhere. The text pages more than doubled and could by themselves account for this sequel being 16 more pages than the original. On the good side, the concluding images found here of the "Came The Dawn !" presentation are impressive. Not even counting the full-color excerpts mentioned, there are still far more welcome finished pieces than before, in a sense of "something that you probably haven't seen" (though, that doesn't really hew to the sketchbook theme at all). The captioning continues as in the first volume and interesting information is nestled within them. They're five instances of double-page-spreads and the majority of them are 'o.k.' in that presentation, if not ideal. I can't say I particularly care for the overdesigned inserted images overlapping the corners of other images, even if it's all in service of making interesting comparisons between art pieces. 101 of the book's 176 pages are given to large featured reproductions and another 36 are gatherings of multiple smaller images. Note that the Deluxe edition has 16 more pages of material, what they are calling a "collectors portfolio". If you already have the more recommended FANTASTIC PAINTINGS OF FRAZETTA, the Underwood retrospectives, FANTASTIC WORLDS and the PILLOW BOOK, then you are going to find 52 new 'well-presented' pieces here (and three that manage a better presentation than in them). All in all, this is another gathering of Frazetta's less-known pieces that any fan of his is going to want to add to their shelf.

Sketchbook [I] (2013 - Vanguard Productions) (by J. David Spurlock & the artist) I would say uncharitably that this book 'games' my own system quite a bit. I've written elsewhere here how so many of Frazetta's crowdedly presented sketches and color roughs could each carry their own pages, but this book has any number of pieces actually given their own dedicated page and some seem unworthy of them (like the more than 20 pages that are each given up to some technically impressive, but not particular emotive, nude figure studies). Rather than little spontaneous bits of Frazetta's imagination, many of what are collected here are very sketchy preliminaries for familiar paintings. With all that said, many, many pages are fun things not found elsewhere (or in a few cases, not 'well-presented' elsewhere). For example, the first half of the artist's rough illustrations for the EC's uncompleted picto-graph story 'Came The Dawn!' are shown here, each caught in whatever stage they were in when abandoned. They're impressive and the artist is quoted as saying that they might have represented his best work, if the project had been finished. Anyway, there's 160 pages here, with 90 being dedicated to large reproductions and another 25 pages having multiple drawings or otherwise less than stellar displays (as you might expect from a sketchbook . . .). That leaves, after the text and interstitial pages, about 30 more disappointing pages where the images are not much more than thumbnails, or nearly featureless colored blobs. Most things are captioned competently, giving you some idea of what brought these pieces into being. All told, FANTASTIC PAINTINGS OF FRAZETTA, the Underwood retrospectives, FANTASTIC WORLDS, the PILLOW BOOK, are recommended before these two sketchbooks, but if you already have those, you will find in this volume 50 new 'well-presented' pieces (and one Death-Dealer color rough that gets a better showing here than before). (Note that the hardback edition is said to have four more pages than the softcover and the Deluxe edition is said to have 12 more).

The Sensuous Frazetta (2016 - Vanguard Productions) (by J. David Spurlock) This is a brand-new release (as I write this), and fills a very important vacancy in Frazetta's collected oeuvre - the many pieces he executed for "men's magazines" and "spicy" paperbacks. The art has appeared here & there, in less than adequate publications, but are now pulled all together in this handsome volume. It is important to note that one of the bootleg Frazetta portfolios from the 1970s originally used this same SENSUOUS FRAZETTA title with a similarly designed cover, so make sure that you are not purchasing that product instead. This book is filled in a bit with movie-posters and some fleshy regular works, but I think a major mis-step is using 74 pages to collect all of his romance-comic stories (each page is presented in its original form and then as a photostat of the final colored comics page (those particularly being less than useless, unless you need a lesson in how Ben-Day muddies a work)). I should share that the one double-page-spread is the uncensored version of THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S movie poster, once again being barely o.k., but certainly not gaining anything from this kind of enlargement. The book is 176 pages with 77 featuring large reproductions (including large excerpts) and another ten with a couple of pieces each. The recommendation list for Frazetta's books has before this one, FANTASTIC PAINTINGS OF FRAZETTA, the Underwood retrospectives, FANTASTIC WORLDS, the PILLOW BOOK, FRAZETTA SKETCHBOOK I & II, ROUGH WORK, the Ballantine collections, and LIVING LEGEND, but if you already have all of those, you will find only nine large repeats here and 55 pieces that appear (or get a featured presentation) for the first time, and one large work that is showcased here even better than before. Joesph Michael Lensner writes the foreward and gets a good presentation of one of his own book covers.

Frazetta Book Cover Art - Definitive Reference (2022 - Vanguard Productions) (by J. David Spurlock with Patrick K. Hill) This book should not be confused with Vanguard's own 'The Definitive Frazetta Reference' (immediately below) which did not make it up onto The List due to it's primary focus being the data, not the art. This volume here rocketed to the top of the Frazetta presentation-list by spotlighting a book-cover reproduction (usually presented larger than the original object) on almost every page - 152 of them. Also, the one double-page-spread, the title-page presentation, is an acceptable exhibit of a barbarian painting excerpt. I admit that I was not totally sold on the real art-centric need for this release, since among Frazetta's many volumes, so many of these artworks have been well displayed as the original paintings, or otherwise devoid of the commercial necessities. The exhibits here do seem to be absolutely excellent reproductions of these covers. Each of them is accompanied by captioning of the book's author, publisher, release month-&-year and production-number, as well as frequently a factoid or anecdote, quoting an involved person, or Frazetta himself. However, in the final, final, analysis, I felt I had to 'discount' this volume and recommend it after all the books 'well-presenting' this artist's original art images, but acknowledging that there is a large number of fans that prefer these works in their full typographic glory.

The Definitive Frazetta Reference [-BELOW THE LINE-] (2008) - Vanguard Productions) (by James A. Bond) While intended as a comprehensive reference to the published appearances of Frazatta's art, with many visual examples, and not to be an artbook in and of itself, this 208-page book indeed does not make it up onto The List because there's not enough art pages to do so. Only 81 of pages can be said to feature the art, with 32 being one-to-a-page large reproductions. The captioning of the works presented here seems rather haphazard, but as most of them are reproductions of book & magazine covers, surrounded by sectioned reference lists, it isn't too hard to figure out what they all are. Intermixed with the data are introductions and short essays that are also fun reading and there's a number of smaller images scattered among those pages as well. As mentioned above, most of the examples come with the typography of what the art was helping to sell or advertise. I would want to insert a personal disappointment here - I found this book incredibly useful in indexing the works appearing in his own collections, but discovered that it occasionally failed in what I think an index's most basic function - definitively 'naming' an artist's pieces so they can be tracked & discussed. More than a handful of times, I found the same painting being referenced by two different 'definitive' titles in their coverage of different collections. They tried to pull together all of Frazetta's paintings into a single catalogued 'canon', but I would have really loved seeing the works in other media added to that and sorrowfully, they didn't even attempt to name & track the dozens and dozens of the more finished sketch drawings. (There have been a couple of drawing-focused books released after this volume, so maybe they can be said to solve that weakness by pulling so much of that work together.)