The Fantastic Worlds Of Frank Frazetta
(2024 - Taschen)

For a couple of years this collection was expressed only as one of Taschen's huge 'XXL' editions, and considering my experiences with those, it probably wouldn't have gotten much of a recommendation from us (they're just TOO big). But now, they have released it as the not-as-big '40th Edition' and I'm quite taken with it. Of course it's smaller (8.75-by-6.5-inches), slightly re-formulated, and still very-manageable with its bit-more-than-ideal 480 pages. Because of its curated comprehensiveness, I think it easily takes on the role of "the only Frazetta book you need, if you can only have one", despite THE FANTASTIC PAINTINGS OF FRAZETTA and the three Underwood retrospectives all scoring better as individual collections. Within these covers, you have 12 art pages that gather together multiple images, in addition to the 338 each featuring some reproduction. Yes, 199 of those exhibits are repeats of items found in the better-scoring volumes (four of those being even-better displays of them), and then another 122 new ones to be featured for the first time in this progression of artbooks. All areas of the artist's career are sampled, even showing a large MAD magazine panorama for which Frazetta hand-colored over 70 celebrity caricatures that Mort Drucker penciled. The captions are in English, dating the displays along with giving the medium, size (also in metric), and frequently an explanation or anecdote. There's also 44 pages of English text providing the extensive commentary (and another 46 with the German & French translations).