Artist Frank Frazetta is known for his game-changing science fiction and fantasy paintings, but before he was a household name, he drew comics for a variety of companies, DC Comics among them. The only DC superhero Frazetta had a significant run on as an artist during this time was the Shining Knight, and it’s interesting to think what might have been had the famed artist continued along that path instead of pursuing a career as a prolific science fiction and fantasy illustrator...
Born in 1928, the young Frank Frazetta showed promise as an artist from a young age. Finding work as an art assistant at sixteen, Frazetta rose through the ranks to start drawing comics on his own by the late 1940’s. Frazetta produced steady work in the comics field for the rest of that decade and into the next, working for a variety of companies, including some memorable stories for the horror publications of EC Comics. The sixties saw Frazetta transition out of comics, where he began painting movie posters and book covers for science fiction and fantasy paperback novels. His work on the Conan and John Carter of Mars series’ is what eventually made the artist a household name, with his signature gothic, action-packed style going on to influence just about everyone working in the field of genre fiction thereafter.
Although working for a variety of publishers in his early comics career, Frazetta only had one sustained run on a superhero character: the Shining Knight stories appearing in Adventure Comics, which Frazetta began drawing in the early fifties. One of DC's oldest superheroes, the Shining Knight is actually Sir Justin, the youngest member of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. Not unlike Captain America, Sir Justin and his horse Winged Victory are frozen in suspended animation and discovered centuries later. Adjusting to modern life, Sir Justin splits his time working at a museum and donning his bullet-proof armor and magic sword to fight crime as the Shining Knight. The strip played into Frazetta’s already-growing talent, allowing the artist to draw what he excelled at: warriors on horseback, beautiful women, noble heroes and battles between warriors with medieval weaponry. In spite of this seemingly perfect fit, Frazetta only stayed on the strip long enough to complete eight stories before leaving for greener pastures.
Looking at his Shining Knight work, it’s not hard to imagine a world in which Frank Frazetta never left the comics field to create iconic pieces of fantasy art. What if Frazetta had remained a penciller and inker like his contemporaries Wally Wood or Al Williamson, churning out pages for Marvel and DC while steadily working on comic strips for newspapers and magazines? It’s interesting to consider what impact this would have on the world at large. Frazetta was that special type of artist that only comes along once in a generation, whose work is so influential it touches nearly everything that came after it - popular culture would be vastly different had Frazetta never embarked upon his career as a painter and fine illustrator. Or perhaps Frazetta’s influence would have still found its way to reach popular culture at large through the comics he drew ages ago. That’s precisely what happened with Jack Kirby, whose Marvel and DC comics are now more popular than ever before, thanks to the success of various Marvel and DC film adaptations.
While Frank Frazetta’s biggest legacy remains his work in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy, it’s interesting to imagine a world where he continued working on DC Comics characters like the Shining Knight.