Richard Powers was a popular artist with an arresting and distinctive style who did the cover for scores if not hundreds of books. He was called upon by Ballantine Books to supply covers for their line of authorized paperback reprints of the Edgar Rice Burroughs creation.
His artwork is at once attractive and strange and not at all what one might expect for a blood and thunder property of this type. The abstractness of many of the images makes for an effective cover, if not necessarily the most powerful jungle scene.
Below is a gallery of the Powers covers. These are the best scans of these handsome covers that I was able to gather.
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Powers' covers have the same "feel" as Jesse Marsh's artwork on the Tarzan comic book during the same period.
ReplyDeleteCoincidence?
I did find a good scan here of one of Powers' cover illustrations. It gives a nice look at his ue.techniq
ReplyDeleteThese are the editions my father bought when they first came out and which I first read some years later around the time I was in the third grade (circa 1971-72). Great artwork!
ReplyDeleteThis was the sixties. Powers loved the French abstractionist Yves Tanguy and it shows. Abstract art and formalism were very big in those days. Ed Emshwiller was famous outside SF for his avant-garde films. Jack Gaughan of course combined heavy simplifications with a very careful reading of what he illustrated. Frazetta and Krenkel did Burroughs covers for Ace. Reportedly Don Wollheim had issues with Frazetta, who in a different context I heard seldom read what he was illustrating and preferred things like Tarzan or Conan to space opera because he liked drawing wild things more than technology. Since Wollheim loved technology one may assume there were issues
ReplyDeleteFrazetta was both more formalist and more exaggerated than he is given credit for. It is both in his poses, which are very dynamic, and his colors which he uses like N. C. Wyeth but amped up a bit. I was looking at some contemporary Tarzan artists at Tarzan.org just now and it struck me they owed a lot to Russ Manning, who a friend complained in the early seventies drew everyone wet; like they just stepped out of the bath (he did). It made me very nostalgic for the sixties and for these covers in particular. Thank you.
I'm starting a new look at ERB materials in the coming year and it is nifty indeed to get a response to a post from a decade ago on the same stuff. Thanks for the insights.
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