Al Williamson's portrayal of the sword & planet genre, mostly through his work on Flash Gordon has long been my favorite. While Frazetta rightfully gets credit for his fantastic interpretations of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Williamson is the artist I would mostly liked to have seen do adaptations of the John Carter of Mars books into graphic format. Particularly his portrayal of fantastic cities on alien worlds.
Recently Flesk Publishing put together an amazing retrospective of Al Williamson's work that I highly recommend for any fan of pulp science fiction and adventure.
https://www.fleskpublications.com/al-williamson
Clocking in at 128 pages it features a lot of behind the scenes, photos, unpublished work, as well as large full resolution reproductions of completed pages some inked by Frazetta.
An added bonus is this little page done on spec of what a Pellucidar graphic story could look like with the craftsmanship of Al Williamson. In a more fair universe we could have seen many of ERB's works illustrated by Al. But he achieved fame and recognition through his Star Wars comics which sort of took the mantle of sword and planet adventures, and left Barsoom, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers in the rearview mirror.
No comments:
Post a Comment