I learned yesterday of the passing of great American fantasy artist Ken Kelly (1946-2022). And like many others was saddened. We lost a great one. Frank Frazetta will always be the untouchable standard by which we judge sword-and-sorcery artists and fantasy visuals in general, but Kelly was in the next circle, a select group that for me includes the likes of Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Neal Adams, John Buscema, maybe Michael Whelan, Bill Willingham, and Roy Krenkel.

I don’t know, I’ll leave that list for another day. We need to Deuce to sort all this out.

I have a hard time writing about artists because their images speak so much louder and more potently than words. Just spend a minute looking at the covers of the Berkley Medallion Conans, and your tribute to Kelly’s passing is paid. Maybe you are lucky enough to have copies with the foldout posters intact. Kelly’s iconic images of Conan alone make him an S&S immortal, and of course they only scratch the surface of his epic 50 year career.

But I’m going to write about him anyway.

To properly honor Kelly I need to put on the old man nostalgia hat for a moment, as I am wont to do.

Today I feel like art has become a bit disposable. It’s a blessing and a curse that you can drop an artist’s name into your Google search bar and be visually assaulted with just about every image he or she has ever painted or sketched. It’s great to have so much richness at your fingertips, but it’s also overwhelming, even decadent, perhaps.

But pre-internet, to see these images you needed to truck to the comic book store, or record store, or your second-hand bookshop. It was an experience that required effort. Artists meant the world to me, their images, physical and tangible, were a gateway for my imagination to wander. Part of the appeal of book-buying and filling out your DAW Elric collection was getting all of the Michael Whelan covers together, just so you could look at them. So when I found, second-hand, the three Conan Berkely Medallions, even though shorn of their posters, I was overjoyed, because I had Ken Kelly to introduce me to his vision of the barbarian, on my shelf.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, as much of the words of REH and Fritz Leiber, images are also part of the story, and the experience, of reading. At least for me. And fantasy paperback art in the mid-’60s helped tell, and sell, the stories, far better than much of the computer-generated sameness we see on so many fantasy covers today. Some of it was junk, sure. But Kelly was gold.

Kelly was a master of light and dark. At his best his illuminated full color heroic figures were all the more startling and eye-grabbing because of the inky pools of blackness behind them. The incredible contrast was stunning, bringing warriors into stark relief. See for example the cover of the Berkley People of the Black Circle, or Skull-Face. Dark weirdness and horror, mixed with muscular heroism, the essence of sword-and-sorcery.

I did not know for years that Kelly painted the covers of Love Gun and Destroyer. Gene Simmons today ought to write a big fat check to the Kelly family’s charity of choice, because that iconic Destroyer album cover making the boys far more jacked and epic than they ever were in real life absolutely helped catapult KISS to a new level of stardom. Love Gun is an amazing blend of sword-and-sorcery, and 70s rock, into one glorious, immortal image.

Then there’s his work for Manowar. I love these dudes, and again their career was absolutely boosted by Kelly’s illustrations. Manowar has a great vocalist, they can play, and they embraced their sword-and-sorcery/macho warrior schtick to the hilt and carved out a great career. But Kelly absolutely played a hand in their international fame with the likes of Kings of Metal and The Triumph of Steel.

Back in the day you listened to the likes of “Fighting the World” or “Mountains,” stared at those jacked dudes on the cover of your album or CD, the triumphant barbarian, and were transported out of your banal ‘80s suburb, to a place where you were the hero.

In short, Ken Kelly’s images took us somewhere else. They were part of the story, and our story. And I thank him for it.

RIP.

Brian Murphy is the author of Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (Pulp Hero Press, 2020). Learn more about his life and work on his website, The Silver Key.