When I was doing my tribute post for Bernie Wrightson a few weeks ago, I saw some stuff in my Bernie stash that certainly belonged in the “sword and planet” category. I just saw another of Bernie’s S&P pieces—I’d seen it before—and it nudged me to pull together a gallery of Wrightson’s work in that category.

Of course, DMR Books loves sword and planet fiction. Howie Bentley’s Under a Dim Blue Sun was one of the first DMR publications. I would call most of the adventure SF that DMR has published since then as ‘planetary adventure’ rather than its sub-category, S&P. That doesn’t lessen their merit, simply their category.

Bernie was born in 1948. When Donald A. Wollheim and Ace Books opened the paperbackian floodgates and sparked the ‘Burroughs Boom’ in 1962, Bernie was at the perfect age to become an ERB fan. We know that Michael Kaluta also became a Burroughs—and REH fan—around this time. The Ace paperbacks introduced Wrightson to Roy G. Krenkel and Frank Frazetta. The former became an artistic mentor and the latter was a major artistic influence upon Bernie.

I’ve long argued that the first chapter of The Gods of Mars is adjacent to Lovecraft’s cosmic horror—HPL loved the novel at the time. There was plenty of horror-ish fodder in ERB’s Mars and Venus novels for young Bernie to love. All I can say is, it’s a pity that Bernie never gave us his vision of what the Barsoomian Plant Men might look like.

Wrightson started crafting S&P illos from the start of his amateur career in the late 1960s on through the 1970s. After that, we find very little in that category. Let’s just be thankful that Bernie ever turned his masterful eye in that direction.

Feel free to check out the Wrightson gallery below.

The Wrightson sketch which Jeffrey Jones turned into a classic S&P book cover.