The 4 de Camp/Carter stories(too short to be actual novellas) comprising CONAN OF AQUILONIA deal with Conan in his King phase when he is roughly in his mid 60s and grooming his young adult son Conn(aka Conan II) to assume the throne so Conan himself can later go back to being an essentially irresponsible world wanderer(in other words back to his roots). This book also features a final showdown between King Conan and his longtime nemesis Thoth-Amon(guess who wins?). 

  

Frank's depiction of old man Conan in the 1973 original COA painting gives him the muscular physique of a young man coupled with long silver hair and a substantial silver mustache(interestingly no full beard though). The axe-wielding old man Conan is chopping through a trio of closely spaced foes with a few small scale reptilian monsters lurking in the background for good measure.

  

Very much like Jack Kirby, Frazetta has always been an action guy rather than a violence guy. However, considering this painting features a decapitated head AND a decapitated hand it easily qualifies as Frank's most explicitly violent painting. In fact there aren't even any close runners up in the rest of his painting catalog in this regard. FF was never a gorehound, nor was he a fan of blood and guts.

Frazetta submitted the COA painting to Lancer in 1973 and they did make some reproductions of it and even a cover mock up. Before the book had a chance to be actually published Lancer declared bankruptcy and during this time period the COA painting was stolen from the Lancer office.

  

  

The thief contacted Frank and Ellie and expressed an interest in trading the COA painting for some of Frazetta's other paintings. Ellie very understandably got angry, refused to negotiate with the thief, and told him to burn the painting. In retrospect years later she wished she had played it cool and strung the guy along so that Frank, Ellie, and the FBI could have mounted some sort of sting operation that might have led to the perpetrator's arrest and the recovery of the COA painting. As things turned out the super creep and the COA painting both vanished without a trace and the whereabouts of the painting is still unknown. It is weird to think that it might still be OUT THERE somewhere. Of course it is just as possible that the criminal destroyed the painting in order to get rid of the incriminating evidence against himself.   

  

At this point it is probably worth mentioning that Lancer was a company that always treated Frazetta decently and fairly. After Frank's rough and conflicted time with Ace Books during the 1st wave of ERB covers, Lancer not only offered FF more money but even more importantly they agreed to return his original art. Getting the original art back literally opened the floodgates for Frazetta to do the very best art he was capable of doing and Lancer set the precedent and example that other book publishers(and Warren) followed concerning FF. Lancer always conscientiously gave Frank's paintings the very best cover repro possible. It was a crying shame that the very proactive relationship of Lancer and Frazetta ended so bitterly with Lancer going out of business and with him having a major painting stolen. They both deserved so much better than this super sad mutual ending.  

  

In 1986 Frank decided to do a repainting of COA for his private collection. This is a repainting only in the very loosest sense of the word since the only thing that was retained from the COA original was the POSE of the axe-wielding Conan. In the repainting Conan has been de-aged by about 40 years to his youthful mid 20s. The composition has been radically simplified. Instead of fighting 3 foes Conan is now attacking a singular demonic entity. The background monsters have been totally eliminated.

  

The younger Conan in the repainting suggests that Frazetta might not have been comfortable depicting old man Conan in 1973 and only did so because of the storytelling era depicted by de Camp/Carter. Left to his own devices FF could leave the old man in the dust.

  

Repainting a stolen painting might have been an unpleasant task for Frank and maybe he simplified the composition just as a practical way of spending less time actually painting it. There is a fun story about Frank Zappa and his hit song DINAH-MOE HUMM(1973). Reportedly FZ got sick and tired of playing this song in concert but his fans demanded it. So Zappa instructed his live band to play it at the fastest tempo they could just to get it over with as quickly as possible. The song was a full 6 minutes on record but the live band zipped through it in less than half that time. Perhaps FF had a similar mindset with getting the COA repainting done very quickly by making the composition so simple.

  

Frank did the 1986 repainting in 2 sessions and photographed it at the end of each session. In the 1st session he socked in about 85% of the painting. The 2nd session consisted of intensifying the background colors, adding more precise highlighting to Conan and his demon victim, and painting detailed rock textures in the space surrounding the 2 main figures(particularly in the triangular quadrant on the viewer's lower left side of the painting).

  

  

It seems unlikely that Frank or Ellie gave the repainting a title and I don't have a clue who called it BARBARIAN but this title is just asking for trouble. Heritage Auctions also gave Frazetta's untitled 2nd repainting of DAYS OF WRATH(1983) the title BARBARIAN and to further confuse matters they gave it the incorrect creation date of 1986(the year the FIRST repainting of DOW was done). Of course Frank and Ellie used the title THE BARBARIAN for FF's classic CONAN THE ADVENTURER(1966).

If a good man is hard to find, then a good title is apparently even harder to find.

  

It is almost mind boggling the potential financial loss that Frank experienced with COA(1973). First the original painting was stolen and Lancer didn't pay Frazetta his monetary fee for the painting using their pending bankruptcy as a justification for non-payment. When the painting was 1st published as the cover for THE FRAZETTA TREASURY(1975) he received no payment because this was an unofficial publication(although it is anyone's guess where the anonymous publisher got a repro of a stolen FF painting...perhaps from Frank and Ellie themselves back when they used to be friends with this guy?). When the little known publisher Sphere 1st published the COA novel they reportedly stiffed FF for payment as well. Frank's last and only hope of making any dough at all for this painting came when Ace published COA, but they made the decision to reject the stolen cover image and instead commission a new cover painting by Boris Vallejo. Frazetta might have very well felt that the COA painting was cursed(and probably felt the same way about QUEEN KONG(1970 or 1971) in the early 1980s). Although Frank and Ellie in the big picture and the long run were certainly financially successful, there is no doubt in my mind that Frazetta was the most ripped off artist since George Romero.

 

I'm sure that Sherlock Holmes would agree with me that a disgruntled Lancer employee was the most obvious candidate for the COA thief. He was probably very angry about losing his job due to their bankruptcy and decided to treat himself to a "parting gift"  consisting of a free Frazetta original. This invites further speculation: if the COA original still survives, has it changed illicit ownership over the years? In other words did 1 dishonest jerk sell it to ANOTHER dishonest jerk and so on and so on? Here's another question: did the friends, family, and loved ones of these possible various illicit owners know this was a stolen painting? I'm guessing the perpetrators had enough common sense to not hang it proudly on their walls, but did these peripheral people in their lives even know who Frazetta was or his central importance to pop culture?

Speaking of Boris and Conan, BV did some mighty nice Conan covers for Marvel's THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN during the mid-1970s(more specifically TSSOC 1,4,5,7,9,10,12,15). Boris was the foremost 2nd generation Frazetta emulator at this time. I prefer the term emulator over imitator because to the best of my knowledge BV never swiped or copied anything from Frank's paintings. He must have studied FF's published paintings very closely and somehow taught himself to do all new paintings in the Frazetta style. For me that is an admirable talent. Back when I was a full time artist in my younger years I never emulated or imitated Frank's paintings...not because I did not want to, I just could never figure out how FF did his oil paintings. I still haven't figured it out! 

  

I see the relationship between Boris and Frank in the art world comparable to Brian De Palma and Alfred Hitchcock in the film world. 1 dopey film critic once said that De Palma's OBSESSION(1976) was an actual remake of Hitch's VERTIGO(1958) which was a statement of supreme stupidity. You only have to view these 2 films in a double feature to realize how very different they are from each other.

I bought the 1st dozen or so issues of TSSOC back when they were originally published(as a matter of fact I got TSSOC 5-10 directly in the mail from Marvel as a 6 issue subscription). In this initial phase TSSOC was published bi-monthly and did not go monthly until issue 18. I distinctly remember in 1 of the earliest TSSOC letter columns writer/editor Roy Thomas made the announcement that Frank would be doing all new cover art for the magazine. Needless to say I was very thrilled by this news at the time, followed by 1 or 2 years of sheer disappointment when it became painfully obvious that FF was NOT doing any new Conan covers for Marvel. As it turned out Roy got a bit ahead of himself with that premature announcement. We found out years later that if Frank had agreed to do these covers Marvel fully intended and expected to retain his original art and copyrights. As Barry Windsor-Smith once so beautifully expressed it: "I love comics as an art form, but I hate it as a business." There was no way in the world that Frank would agree to a super-lousy deal like this while he was at the height of his mainstream popularity in the mid-1970s. It was similar corporate shortsightedness that prevented FF from doing the very 1st Star Wars painting for STAR WARS(1977)...although I'm guessing many people nowadays(myself included!) really wish he HAD done that prototype SW painting, if only for historical reasons.

After the whole COA debacle Frank gave up on Conan completely and switched his barbarian allegiance to Kane. After doing 4 excellent Kane paintings throughout the 2nd half of the 1970s FF quit Kane too and pretty much abandoned barbarians as a subject matter for his paintings. His cover paintings during the 1980s were almost evenly split between his own character the Death Dealer(not really a pure barbarian by my reckoning) and more overt science fiction concepts for the popular writer L. Ron Hubbard(mostly lovely wraparound covers for the anthology series WRITERS OF THE FUTURE).

Lancer's very handsome cover mockup for COA wasn't revealed to the general public until the very late date of Xmas 2014. It put to shame Sphere's highly insensitive red type on white background graphic design which hideously clashed with the dark earth tones of Frank's COA painting.

I 1st saw the 1986 repainting in the 16 page bonus folio section in the deluxe edition of LEGACY(1999). This was the 1st draft of the painting and was very slightly cropped on the viewer's right side so you could not see the 6 of the 86 copyright year. The Fenners didn't provide any written copy for this particular image. The Frazetta faithful would have to wait an extra decade and a half to finally see a fully uncropped repro of this painting with the full Frazetta copyright 86 signature. Technically speaking since Frank signed the 1st draft with 1986 there is a possibility he did the 2nd finished draft in a later year...although Occam's razor would prefer the simpler explanation that he did BOTH drafts in 1986. I'm just happy he put a year date on it or we would be completely clueless as to WHEN he painted it at all. For the record I still greatly prefer the 1973 original over the 1986 repainting. I also liked the 2nd draft of the 1986 painting over the 1st draft which makes sense because it is much more detailed and finished.