Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos
With the death of under appreciated fantasy artist Frank Frazetta this week, and the resulting Twitter skirmish, I decided to profile this book by another artist that is near and dear to my heart: Basil Gogos.
Growing up I was, and still am, a huge fan of Universal Studios Monsters. I remember the USA network used to show Dracula and some of these other classics late at night on the weekends. The creepy atmosphere and engaging characters held my attention from the start of the classic music to the end. I discovered the Hammer films in my twenties, and haven’t looked back since.
When I first came on the internet in the late 90s, I did a image search for some of these great characters, and made a discovery: Basil Gogos. Most of these monsters had been in black and white, and suddenly here they were in deep vibrant colors. This literally blew my mind. The figures were spot on, not caricatures of my beloved monsters from childhood, but real honest to god pieces of art.
Gogos is most famous for his covers to Famous Monsters of Filmland, but has a very diverse portfolio. He did men’s adventure magazines, a myriad of other movie posters, album covers for Rob Zombie (who also writes the forward for the book) and the Misfits,and one of the best images of Christopher Lee’s Sauromon I’ve ever seen.
This book captures these images in high quality and on nice glossy paper. There are photos of the master painter, and most interesting to me, some of his pencil drawings.
If you are a fan of the genre, or simply an appreciator of great art, I can recommend this book to you.
5 out of 5.
