Two weeks and one day ago, my exiled friend, Nero the Pict, swooped down in his Japanese chariot from beyond Yo Adrain’s Wall and took me on a tour of Pennsylvania small owns, and ultimately, to the Frazetta Art Museum in the Pocono Mountains in East Stroudsburg, PA. An Italian-American who loved to play baseball with his boyhood friends and who had done well selling his art ad becoming the first cover illustrator to retain the rights to his work, Frank was aghast when he found out that frank Junior had been beaten and robbed in Brooklyn. He purchased an estate in, designed a castle-like studio-dwelling and entertained visitors who sought to commission art work.

Touring the small museum one can see that Frank’s mode of the short, vibrant—yet softly rounded—women that spent so much time at the knee of their barbarian lords on the cover of the Conan illustrations he was so famous for, where based on real nude studies. The wedding of Frazetta and Howard was perfect and the depiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ characters by Frazetta was an amplification of the author’s themes, for the same reason, a reason that becomes obvious to the viewer as they walk through the evolution of his work at the museum.

What Howard did radically and Burroughs did more traditionally was wed masculine power and feminine sensuality in a shared image. Frazetta obviously developed this as his central theme and became the perfect illustrator for Howard’s work for the stark contrast that Frank worked out so methodically in his studio were uniquely suited to Howard’s hyper-masculine vision of heroism so often viewed in narrative from a female perspective. Burroughs work for which Frazetta seemed most suited for was the Pellucidar series set in a primal hollow earth.

Our visit was made quite enjoyable by Frank Junior and his beautiful wife—who seems like she could have been snatched from one of his father’s paintings. I would have to say that the high point of the visit was when Nero pointed at the painting of Conan holding a Pict by the neck in one hand, ready to cleave the writhing form with his double-bladed axe and said, about the dangling Pict, “That dude looks like Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones—well she said Frank was a Sinatra fan…”

Visit Frank, his wife, and his father’s fantastic art at

It is right off of #209 across from some storage facility, in a wooded ridge, with franks old driveway running parallel to #209 about70 yards from the road, on the left, if you are headed into Stroudsburg, which is a dump and home to a travesty of commercialism bearing the Frazetta name but dedicated to selling superhero costumes.