Frank Frazetta: The Ultimate Triumph
(1999- Wandering Star Press)

[-BELOW THE LINE-] (by Robert E. Howard) This special volume, sub-titled 'The Heroic Fantasy Of Robert E. Howard', is an assembly of some lesser-seen Howard barbarian stories, poetry & scholarly appendices, matched up with 120 already existent Frazetta images that might be considered as addressing the same themes. Some of the artworks are from barbarian projects like Frazetta's FIRE AND ICE, ILLUSTRATIONS ARCANUM, KUBLA KHAN portfolio, or DEATH DEALER mythos preliminaries, but all the rest seem to be from his voluminous sketchbooks (and I'd say about 25 of those I shouldn't have really counted as they are just too non-consequential or indistinct). Some of the displays are straightforward, but most are glided into text pages that are already quite generous with negative space. Even with all that, the number of pages that don't display any art (especially those 58 straight pages of appendices) overwhelm what could be counted as art-pages, making this illustrated book fall off our 'art-book' List. For what it's worth, 61 of the worthy pieces have not gotten a featured presentation (if any at all), making the tome still quite desirable, but it currently lives in the pricier realm.