EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 28 © 2019 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

3 Frank Kelly Freas Probably the best-known science-fiction illustrator of all time, and one of the most whimsical too. His covers for MAD magazine made him a staple in homour magazines as well. Let’s follow Diego Cordoba as he tells us about this artist’s life and work. Kelly Freas is maybe one of the best remembered science-fiction artists from the twentieth century, mainly because he lived up to this century. Like some of the early science-fiction illustrators from the twentieth-century he started working for the mythical Weird Tales pulp magazine. Freas had a way of making his illustrations both droll and captivating at the same time, and it’s not for nothing that he was one of the first cover artists for MAD when it became a magazine in 1955, Freas’ first cover being number 31. Freas’ early life was far from normal, as both his parents lived separately. Born Francis Sylvester Kelly in 1922 in Hornell, New York, Freas lived with his mother at her parent’s house (Freas’ father, unemployed and unskilled and with only a grammar school education, lived with his widowed mother). When Freas’ grandfather died, their grandmother moved to Canada with her daughter and grandson. Settling in a resort town in the Niagara region of Ontario, Canada, Freas grewup visiting the amusement parks and side-shows of the region. At Crystal Beach, where they had settled, Freas’ grandmother FACING PAGE: The Door Into Summer , acrylic on board, 1956. Cover for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science- Fiction , October, 1956, illustrating the serial by Robert Heinlein. ABOVE: The artist himself. BELOW: Pen and ink drawing for the serial ‘Double Star’ by Robert Heinlein, Astounding Science-Fiction , 1956.