TS: Frank Frazetta v Roger Dean

Frazetta almost certainly the better illustrator - ie he can really draw, in that hypermasculine/hyper muscular way of his - and a few of his paintings do seem to shimmer with a kind of garish teenaged priapic hetrosex LUST. But his imagination is painfully limited to a v. few fantasy tropes/icons - themselves drawn mainly from Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard - that have long since passed into cliche, plus the actual painterly surface of his pics is often surprisingly clumsy/crude. His comic strip work is generally more exciting, I find - his surprisingly 'sensitive' linework lessens the brute testosterone of the actual images, and the black and white drawing/repro allows in some of the sweat and imperfections that are missing from the glossy surfaces of his paintings. I also much prefer the superficially similar drawings of Frazetta's friend and mentor Roy Krenkel - they're more exotic, more obsessive and generally more inspired. Search him out. Destroy: Boris Vallejo and every other Frazetta imitator.

Roger Dean is now designing portaloos for rich hippies, while Frazetta is very old and rich and has been ill for years..

Andrew is OTM all the way.

http://www.ramoniacs.hpg.ig.com.br/markysolo/m012a.jpg
http://www.artistdirect.com/Images/Sources/AMGCOVERS/music/cover200/drc000/c028/c02869591a8

to the astonishment of no one at all, i like roger dean:

http://drzeus.best.vwh.net/wotw/other/dean.jpg

And yeah - what Mark S. said... I've always preferred Roger Dean myself. Dean's got the obligatory web site up

That an illustration for an edition of War of the Worlds there?

I do too! The detail is amazing in some of his work. I kinda wish I hadn't given Sundar my copy of 'Views' now!