“I consider myself an average guy who has been blessed with a gift. That doesn't mean my life’s a walk because of this gift, but rather that I knew very early in life what direction I would be going in. I talk to people all the time that aren't sure of the direction they took or will go in. So in that I'm content. I hope the powers that be will allow me to continue to participate in this very wonderful field. I like very much what I do.” — Ken Kelly

Things have been turbulent here in Essi-Keh. Misfortune in several forms has manifested at my homestead, with two separate cyber-incidents keeping me effectively offline for over a month. Time to once again buckle on the steel and saddle up.

With the various shenanigans and whatnot keeping me off the webz, I only found out today that yesterday was Ken Kelly's seventy-fifth birthday. Tribute needs to be rendered unto such a living legend, albeit a day late and on very short notice.

I certainly nailed Ken's birthday in 2019, writing up a 'Painting Metal' post--on time--about his career, with an emphasis on his art for heavy metal album covers. Check it out here.

As Ken's ISFDB entry shows, he's been a pro in the art field for a solid fifty years, with well over one hundred book covers to his credit, along with plenty of covers for classic issues of the Warren magazines. Kelly's main markets for his first fifteen years were pretty evenly divided between sword-and-sorcery and sword-and planet, along with his covers for post-apocalyptic series from Robert Adams and John Maddox Roberts. After that, the S&P gigs thinned out quite a bit, with sword-and-planet's great champion, Don Wollheim of DAW Books, ascending to SFF Valhalla.

Meanwhile, Tor Books kept cranking out Conan pastiches in the 1990s and Baen Books blessed actual Robert E. Howard fans with their 'Robert E. Howard Library' series. Ken was tapped to do covers for both.

At the dawn of the new millennium, Nightshade Books enlisted Mr. Kelly to do the covers for their two collections of Karl Edward Wagner's 'Kane' tales. According to ISFDB, those were his last covers until 2014. However, I know for a fact that, in the mid-2000s, Leisure Books used Ken's art for their reprints of the 'Weird Works of Robert E. Howard' series.

As I said, it's been seven long years since a book cover was graced with one of Ken's paintings. However, he did the cover for Eternal Champion's Ravening Iron CD in 2020. Perhaps he can be lured back to do a few more S&S covers...

Mr. Kelly's artwork was an integral component of my childhood and youth. He made cool and glorious things even moreso. Happy seventy-fifth birthday, Ken.

Mr. Kelly’s official website can be found here.