Posted By Dan Greenfield on Aug 27, 2025 | 7 comments

The celebrated Mr. K’s birthday tribute to the late artist…

By PAUL KUPPERBERG

Whether you hail from comics or science fiction fandom, or both, you’ll probably have heard of Frank Kelly Freas (August 27, 1922 – January 2, 2005), either as a painter of Mad Magazine covers from the 1950s and 1960s or as the artist/illustrator of countless SF paperback and pulp magazine covers.

And if you haven’t heard of Frank Kelly Freas — aka just “Kelly Freas” — then you’re in for a treat!

He depicted Alfred E. Neuman with the same care he gave to spaceships and star systems, and as iconic as is Norman Mingo’s premiere image of the gap-toothed Mad mascot, I prefer Freas’ rendition of Alfred. Though his expression never changed from cover to cover—this simpleton had no reaction, no emotion, going through life with an unchanging grin of clueless mirth, staring the reader straight in the eye and daring them not to agree it’s funny—I always thought Freas’ Alfred had a life to it that Mingo’s lacked.

I was one of those people straddling comics and science fiction fandom. I read as many comic books as I could and as much science fiction as that left time for in between. The main delivery system of SF in print in my era, the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, were paperback books and digest magazines, and you couldn’t eeny-meeny-miny-moe a title from a spinner rack without a good chance of landing on a Freas cover… and whichever ones Freas didn’t do were probably done by Ed Emshwiller, who usually signed his name Emsh (and is also worth looking up if you’re unfamiliar).

I exaggerate, of course, but Kelly Freas was prolific as hell and worthy of all the awards he was ever awarded, which included 20 nominations and 11 Hugo wins for Best Professional Artist. Born in Hornell, New York, Freas was raised in Canada by his photographer parents, flew reconnaissance missions during World War II in the South Pacific as a cameraman in the Army Air Forces, after which he studied at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh before entering the world of advertising, but with the goal of one day becoming a science fiction illustrator.

That day came a few years later. His first cover art appeared on the fantasy pulp magazine Weird Tales (November 1950), followed by sales to Planet Stories and illustrations for publisher Grove Books. Freas delivered the types of bold, imaginative covers grounded in strong draftsmanship that the science fiction pulp and digests needed to grab readers’ eyes on the crowded newsstands and spinner racks.

I think it’s safe to say that Freas became one of the defining artists of the field through his covers for Astounding Science Fiction (later Analog), where his work helped shape readers’ visions of futures filled with rockets, aliens, and unimaginable extraterrestrial landscapes. His art also began to appear on the covers of paperbacks from publishers like Ace, Ballantine, Signet, Avon, and DAW, providing unforgettable visual introductions to the works of authors like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, A.E. van Vogt, and Arthur C. Clarke. But wait! There’s more! Freas also illustrated medical textbooks, Air Force training manuals, and created the classic album artwork for Queen’s 1977 album News of the World.

I haven’t given Kelly Freas much thought in years, but as I started looking through his vast output to research this piece, I realized how much of an impact it had in shaping my imagination and taste. And this is no exaggeration: I have a better recollection of more of those 1960s Kelly Freas covers than I do of most of the stories they adorned.

Here then, MY 13 FAVORITE KELLY FREAS COVERS:

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Witchcraft #5 (Avon, December 1952). An early contribution of a rare Kelly Freas comic-book cover.

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Astounding Science Fiction (March 1954). One of the most famous images from the Freas oeuvre, the cover for “The Gulf Between” by Tom Godwin, later revised and repurposed by the artist as the album cover for Queen’s 1977 album, News of the World.

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Astounding Science Fiction (September 1954). Another well-known Freas, illustrating Frederick Brown’s classic “Martians, Go Home.”

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Fantasy and Science Fiction (September 1956). One of those cases of my remembering the cover painting better than the story.

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Son of Mad (Signet Books, 1959). This was my introduction to Mad, a life-changing experience when I first encountered it in 1963.

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MAD Magazine #63 (June 1961). Schlepping in the rain!

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Analog (July 1964). Time to wake up, guys! Guys? Uh… guys?

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Analog (July 1973). I always loved this piece for Freas’ powerful use of color.

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Crazy Magazine #11 (June 1975). To prove to Alfred E. Neuman that he’s just as good a humor magazine mascot as him, Crazy Magazine’s Irving Nebbish commissioned a few Freas covers of his own!

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Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #1 (November 1975). And while Kelly was in Marvel’s neighborhood…!

(NOTE: Artist Joe Jusko points out that the humans were repainted by John Romita. Thanks, Joe!)

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The King of Eolim (Laser Books, 1975). Kelly Freas painted the covers for every one of the 58 titles published by Laser Books. This is one of them.

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Fantasy and Science Fiction (July 1977). Kelly Freas, inside the mind of Harlan Ellison. Better him than me.

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Our Children’s Children (DAW Books, 1983). Art for art’s sake!

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MORE

— The Lusty, MAD World of FRANK KELLY FREAS. Click here.

— PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite FRANK FRAZETTA 1960s ACE Paperback Covers. Click here.

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PAUL KUPPERBERG was a Silver Age fan who grew up to become a Bronze Age comic book creator, writer of Superman, the Doom Patrol, and Green Lantern, creator of Arion Lord of Atlantis, Checkmate, and Takion, and slayer of Aquababy, Archie, and Vigilante. He is the Harvey and Eisner Award nominated writer of Archie Comics’ Life with Archie, and his YA novel Kevin was nominated for a GLAAD media award and won a Scribe Award from the IAMTW. Check out his new memoir, Panel by Panel: My Comic Book Life. 

Website: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/

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