Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates, Swipe File | Tagged: Comics, ec, entertainment, frank frazetta, rick parker, Swipe File, Weird Science-Fantasy

Swipe File: Rick Parker And Frank Frazetta's Weird Fantasies

From Papercutz artist Rick Parker (also former Marvel letterer and artist on Marvel's Beavis and Butt-head), we have Weird Zombie-Fantasy…

And from Frank Frazetta, we have Weird Science-Fantasy from EC.

Rick Parker explains the genesis of this incredibly detailed parody cover: "I was a kid in the mid 50's when those EC covers and MAD Comics came out and of course they were mesmerizing. You can imagine my disappointment when I gradually came to realize that the real world was not like it was in a comic book".

"A few years ago I acquired a beat up copy of Weird Science Fantasy #29 and after the cover fell off, I put it in a frame and hung it up in my studio for inspiration. I remember that comic book as a kid. The only comic books I would actually buy as a kid were Uncle Scrooge Comics, but I used to read a wide variety of comics for free in the Soda Shop around the corner from where I grew up in Savannah, Georgia. The Soda shop had a very long wall of magazines and comics and I would go there sometimes with a nickel and buy a coke, put it on the table, and go pick out a comic or magazine from the rack and sit down and read it while I sipped my Coke. Sometimes this would last for hours. I remember the title of one of the stories that was oddly fascinating to me. "My Brother Talks to Bats." Sometimes hours would pass. The two men who ran the place never said anything to me. It was like a library with soft drinks".

"I had been doing parody covers for Papercutz Slices for the last five or six years and I suppose it got me to thinking about parodies. So, somehow or other I thought it might be fun to draw the figures on that cover as zombies, keeping the poses the same insofar as I was able. Then the next logical step was the creation of a parody of the cover, the result of which you see here. I originally had then fighting on the steps of a big mausoleum patterned after one I saw in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, but I decided to change it to the ruins of a church because it looked more like the Frazetta cover, considered by many to be th greatest cover ever to be on a comic book. And that's saying a lot. But Frazetta's work takes your mind to a magical place and this is the kind of drawing that you can look at it a thousand times and never experience it quite the same way. There is something new to see each time. In fact, I'd say you can never completely take it all in. You just eventually have to stop looking at it and go do something else. Which is probably what you feel like doing right now".

In Swipe File we present two or more images that resemble each other to some degree. They may be homages, parodies, ironic appropriations, coincidences or works of the lightbox. We trust you, the reader, to make that judgment yourself? If you are unable to do so, please return your eyes to their maker before any further damage is done. The Swipe File doesn't judge, it's interested more in the process of creation, how work influences other work, how new work comes from old, and sometimes how the same ideas emerge simultaneously, as if their time has just come. The Swipe File was named after the advertising industry habit where writers and artist collect images and lines they admire to inspire them in their work. It was swiped from the Comic Journal who originally ran this column, as well as the now defunct Swipe Of The Week website.

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