VAMPIRELLA LIKE YOU'VE NEVER SEEN HER BEFORE

Last month, yet another Frazetta painting was sold for big bucks. This time, it was his original painting of Vampirella used on the cover of Warren's VAMPIRELLA #1.

Frazetta created the iconic image in collaboration with Warren and her costume was designed by the late artist and historian Trina Robbins. He wasn't thrilled with it and after it was photographed for publication, he got it back and painted over it. What you see here is the result and it's pretty startling to see Vampi sans costume!

When the gavel dropped at Dallas' Heritage Auctions on February 27, 2026. it sold for $3,125,000.

Click on image for larger size.

Lot Description:

Frank Frazetta Vampirella #1 Cover Painting Original Art (Warren, 1969). The definitive image of the Drakulon Queen, straight from the master's brush. Frank Frazetta's painting for Vampirella #1 wasn't just a cover, it was the first glimpse fans ever got on the stands, and it hit like a lightning bolt. In one glance, Vampirella arrived fully formed: dangerous, alluring, and impossible to ignore. The image has since become one of the era's most recognizable horror-comics icons.

By the late 1960s, Warren Publishing's momentum from Famous Monsters, Creepy, and Eerie had started to cool, and James Warren wanted a jolt. With the pop-culture buzz around Barbarella still fresh, he set out to create a sexy new kind of horror figure, one who could tempt you into picking up the magazine and still dispatch the monsters once you opened it. Warren put it best: "When Frank portrays a woman he injects a certain mystique... I wanted my Vampirella to have that same mystique." Vampirella would be more than a hostess, she would headline her own continuing feature.

Her look came together through a perfect storm of ideas. Warren and Frazetta shaped the concept, with Trina Robbins offering key design input as the costume took form. Warren even commissioned an alternate cover from a French artist, then walked away from it and turned back to Frazetta. Frazetta finished the published painting in only a few hours, a detail that still feels unreal when you see how effortlessly it commands attention.

The result is pure Frazetta theater: Vampirella framed against a looming moon, her silhouette cutting the night like a blade. Shadows hint at something not quite human, a quiet nod to her vampiric origins before the stories even begin. Frazetta himself never warmed to the costume, and years later, in 1991, he revised the original painting in a way he sometimes did with select works, painting out the outfit and boots before it went to auction. Even so, the essential image remains unmistakable, down to the brushwork and the faint trace of her iconic collar.

Vampirella went on to an uninterrupted Warren run through 1983, leaning into more mature horror and cementing her place as a pin-up legend with fangs. Decades later, she's still thriving, and it's hard not to circle back to the same source: that first cover, that first look, and Frazetta making a new icon in a single moonlit frame.

Created in oil on Masonite board with a matted image area of 21" x 15.25", Plexiglas-front framed to 24.25" x 30.25". Very light edgewear, extremely faint craquelure to the upper background visible only under raking light, faint horizontal lines from prior matting, small faint scuff at lower center, pinpoint abrasions in the upper background, UV examination reveals a yellowed varnish drip near the lower edge, none affecting the central image or figure. Signed and dated 1991 by Frazetta, when the alterations were made. In Very Good condition.

THE SPIRIT ASKS: GOT ANY CRAYONS?

Published by Poor House Press in 1974, THE SPIRIT COLORING BOOK contains classic splash pages from Will Eisner's THE SPIRIT strip, each printed in black and white so anyone can color it in paint, ink, marker and yes, even crayons!

The page reproduced here is about 10" x 14". If you have a printer big enough, you can either print it full-size or reduce it using Photoshop, Corel, etc. If you are planning to color it using wet media, I suggest printing it on card stock such as Bristol Board.

Have fun!

HOLLYWOOD IS A WOMAN'S TOWN

Yesterday we saw journalist Helen Louise Walker's informative article on Boris Karloff from 1932. We also saw an article from a film fan magazine later that year in which Miss Walker declares "Hollywood is a Woman's Town" and gives her reasons why.

She returned to the subject at least twice more; Her comments on the topic were discussed in Stephen Sharot's February 15, 2022 essay "Hollywood is a Woman's Town’: Masculinity and the Leading Man in American Fan Magazines of the 1930s", published at the Wiley Online Library:

Helen Louise Walker provided evidence that Hollywood was a woman's town from interviews with male stars. Gable is quoted as saying that the differences in salaries say it all: ‘feminine glamor, appeal, whatever you choose to call it, is worth more at the box office than anything a man can offer. Nearly all of the well-known women in Hollywood earn more money, per week, than men do’, and in a town where women earn more money than men ‘things get all topsy-turvy’. An unnamed ‘leading man’ under contract to MGM complained that a man's reward for achieving a big following at the box office was that he was ‘allowed to support one of the important women stars!’ Somewhat circumscribed statements of the female influence were provided by Errol Flynn who stated that, ‘there is probably no other place where men discuss their business and professional affairs with women as freely and as fully as they do here’, and by Humphrey Bogart who mumbled that the men let the women think that they control them. Walker's conclusion was that ‘women rule Hollywood pretty conclusively—and that men like it’.

The following images were taken by Ray Jones, probably in the early 1930s, and show Walker with actor John Boles. The snipe on the back of each photo reads: "Miss Helen Louise Walker, on the staff of Motion Pictures Publications, interviews John Boles, Universal's singing star" [Source: eBay]. Mainly a portrait photographer, Jones was the head of Universal's stills department in the 1920s into the early 1930s (he later worked for Paramount) and was the uncredited stills photographer for THE MUMMY.

MODERN SCREEN February 1937 "Is Hollywood a Woman's Town?" by Helen Louise Walker:

SILVER SCREEN October 1939 "How Women Rule the Men in Hollywood" by Helen Louise Walker: