Frogs

It's finally time to cover the humble frog's presence in retro speculative fiction art. Moistorized. Flourishing. Occasionally rising up for eco-terroristic revenge.

Science fiction artists don't have quite the same collective love for frogs as they have demonstrated for cats. Still, frogs are up there. They exemplify the harmless side of nature, while retaining a thin layer of slime needed to differentiate them from cuddlier forest animals like bunnies.

You can't get more straightforward with sci-fi frog appreciation than Frank Frazetta's "The Moon Frogs," a 1973 cover artwork done for Doubleday's Science Fiction Book Club.

Why frogs? Because Frazetta felt like it. As he says on page 178 of Legacy: Selected Paintings and Drawings by Frank Frazetta:

"One of the reasons I stopped doing movie posters regularly is because I just got bored. Usually what they wanted was what they'd seen someone else do – originality meant nothing. I like variety. I like all kinds of things. They just couldn't understand why money wasn't enough of a reason to take on a job. The book club stuff was fun – no one told me what to do. They were happy to have me and I was happy for the variety."

Darrell K Sweet's 1986 cover for A Golem in the Gears, by Piers Anthony, includes a few majestic frogs in a scene featuring a classic genre scenario: Tiny person deals with local wildlife.

Often, artists would throw in a more subtle frog, just to highlight a naturalistic setting, as Mike Hinge does for this 1972 artwork.

Of course, alien frogs may look a little different. This 1981 Tais Teng work appears to use the body of a frog and the head of an iguana.

For a 1979 cover to Terra Astra #398, Eddie Jones adds a few legs to his frog and depicts it with an eye-catching blue-purple sheen.

My favorite alien frog design might the lil fella near the lower right-hand side of this 1990 illustration by Danny Flynn.

Shout out to Deepthot, a long-time frog poster. A while back, he shared this surreal 1978 artwork by Todd Schorr, "Chrome Frogs."

Hajime Sorayama is famous for his hyper-real chrome animals, yet oddly enough, this first image from him features a real, non-chrome frog, being used as bait to capture a chrome fish.

Don't worry, he has a chrome frog illustration as well.

Rodney Matthews loves anthropomorphic critters in his fantasy-infused work, so he has a tough-looking frogman in this one.

Terry Oakes' 1978 cover to Frank Herbert's The Dosadi Experiment also features a frog-humanoid. I haven't read the title, but the Wiki page mentions an alien "frog god" with a resemblance to the main character.

Virgil Finlay's September 1948 interior illustration in Fantastic Novels magazine for "Conquest of the Moon Pool," by A. Merritt, looks like it would be more at home in my Fish-People post, but it's apparently "a gigantic frog – a woman frog… six feet high if an inch," according to the story.

I don't need to quote anything from the story Frank Kelly Freas was illustrating here, though – he's conveying a lot inside a single image, complete with a little environmental storytelling with the abandoned crowns and bemused creepy-crawlies in the background.

Contrast that joking frog-transformation with Christian Broutin's surrealist horror version of the same, for a 1977 illustration in Histoires d’Aberrations.

I already included a crop of Paul Kratter's ad illustration in my Computer Plant Life post, but here's the full advertisement, scanned from the October 1986 issue of EDN magazine.

And while I'm featuring images from past posts, here's Dave Trampier's cover art for Dragon Magazine #40 again, for an article on "Awful Green Things in outer space."

Jack Kirby's 1977 Black Panther #1 cover features "King Solomon's Frog"

Let's wrap up with a few frog horror illustrations. First, there's Enzo Sciotti's poster for 1972 cult classic Frogs. I like this crop, but the full poster's over here.

Johnny Bruck's 1970 cover to Atlan #14 features an alien frog attack.

My favorite frog horror illustration by far, however, is from another '70s German publication: Rudolf Sieber-Lonati's cover for Macabros #4. This cover's telling an entire story, just like the earlier Frank Kelly Freas illustration. It's just a little darker.

Cool Links

Enzo Sciotti: Horror Movie Posters - The People's Graphic Design Archive

Enzo Sciotti, the guy who did that poster of the frog eating a human hand, is apparently a big name in film poster design. Here's a quick writeup on him that includes a sidebar on Milan vs Rome poster design.

"His style is characterized by highly expressive painting, built through intense colors, dramatic contrasts, and extraordinary attention to the rendering of faces and atmospheres. Figures often emerge from dark or misty backgrounds, while unsettling details such as wide-open eyes, deformed hands, skulls, blood, and monstrous creatures immediately capture the viewer’s attention."

The formula for narrative non-fiction - ‪Erin Biba

"Once you know the formula for narrative non-fiction it’s hard to enjoy reading it tbh because it’s often just watching a story check off bullet points in a specific order."

Miami Vice embraced a high-tech look while Hollywood clung to the past - AV Club

I should put together a list of films to show the zoomer/gen alpha crowd in order to get their reactions to how weird movies used to be. (They still are, but they used to be, too.) I feel like Death Becomes Her would be a hit, maybe What's Up Doc or The Apartment. This article makes a pitch for the 2006 Miami Vice being bolder than you might remember.

Music Rec: Has anyone noticed that you're counterintuitively more likely to feel nostalgic for the stuff that was everywhere during your childhood but that isn't really to your taste, because you stopped pay attention to it for so long afterwards that the association with your childhood had time to really gel? Just asking for no reason. Anyway, here's a mix called "songs you downloaded from Limewire."

Next Time: Paying users get the Friday email, about the mononymous artist Jael and her 68-year career.