13 COVERS (including a couple surprises): One of the great pulp and humor painters was born 102 years ago this month…
By PETER BOSCH
If you recognize the name Frank Kelly Freas, then you probably know him as the painter of many science-fiction pulps and novels of the 1950s and 1960s. Or it’s possible you know him from his other job, one that was in a completely different genre, that of the painter of Mad magazine covers from 1958 to 1962. Whatever the case, you probably love his work. But did you know he also — no, wait, we’ll get to that…
He was born Francis Sylvester Kelly in Hornell, New York, on August 27, 1922, and when his mother later remarried he acquired the surname of Freas (pronounced “freeze”).
Freas knew early on that what he wanted to be was an artist and, following his service in World War II, he attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh on the G.I. Bill. In time, he sent in cover illustrations on spec to Weird Tales, a very popular pulp magazine of the time, and they liked his work enough to have it appear on the cover of the November 1950 issue.
Weird Tales, November 1950 (Popular Fiction). Freas’ first published cover art
Work followed for other Weird Tales covers, plus he began selling to Planet Stories, Astounding Science Fiction (later known as Analog), and others, plus numerous novel cover paintings.
Weird Tales, January 1953 (Popular Fiction)
Planet Stories, July 1953 (Fiction House)
Planet Stories, November 1953 (Fiction House)
Over his lifetime as a painter of science-fiction themes, Freas was nominated 28 times for a Hugo Award (no other illustrator since then has matched that) and he won 11 of them.
In 1957, he began doing interior drawings for Mad magazine and, starting with #40 (July 1958), he became their top cover artist. And not just the front cover, but also many back covers that spoofed advertising in other magazines. In addition, he also painted the covers for approximately a dozen Mad collection paperbacks.
MAD #40 (July 1948, EC) – Freas’ first MAD cover painting
MAD #56 (July 1960, EC)
MAD #59 (Dec. 1960, EC)
MAD #65 (Sept. 1961, EC)
MAD #66 (Oct. 1961, EC)
MAD #48 (July 1959, EC) – Possibly his most famous satirical advertising back cover, “Presenting the Bill”
After Mad #74 (Oct. 1962), Freas left because they wouldn’t give him a raise. Nevertheless, his popularity continued through the Sixties and into the Seventies, but it still did not prepare him for one of the greatest honors of his lifetime: NASA requested that he design the insignia for their Skylab I program.
Marvel also came calling during this period and he provided several covers for their new Crazy Magazine, as well as a cover for the first issue (Jan. 1975) of Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction. (The issue also contained a four-page interview with Freas.)
Marvel’s Crazy Magazine #9 (Feb. 1975) cover, which included mini-representations of previous issues, for which he did several of the covers.
In 1977, he made yet another great career adjustment by painting the album cover for Queen’s News of the World, which was a modified version of a cover he did for Astounding Science Fiction in 1953.
Frank Kelly Freas, who earned a litany of awards well beyond his Hugos, died January 2, 2005, at the age of 82 in his home in Los Angeles.
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MORE
— ALEX TOTH’s Enduringly Entertaining and Influential ZORRO. Click here.
— WALLACE WOOD AT WAR: EC COMICS and Beyond. Click here.
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13th Dimension contributor-at-large PETER BOSCH’s first book, American TV Comic Books: 1940s-1980s – From the Small Screen to the Printed Page, was published by TwoMorrows. A sequel, about movie comics, is coming soon. Peter has written articles and conducted celebrity interviews for various magazines and newspapers. He lives in Hollywood.
August 15, 2024
I remember Skylab but I didn’t he did the emblem! I do remember the cover of “Martians Go Home!”
August 16, 2024
While I’m pleased that you’ve interleaved Freas’s MAD covers – which I still regard as definitive – with his other work, you’ll agree that one page is too slight to do justice to all his work.
This is the first time I’ve read that MAD wouldn’t increase his fee, but I’m not challenging it as it’s a better reason than “MAD was making him stale” (which it wasn’t); having said that, his MAD-style post-MAD work, including his covers for Crazy, came nowhere near his work for MAD, which to me suggests that he benefited from Al Feldstein’s underrated editorship.
Dave Robinson (Compiler, ’25 Years of British MAD’, Suron International 1984)