Stephen Fabian turned a venerable ninety-five years of age on January 3. He has illustrated everyone from Robert E. Howard to A. Merritt to Jack Vance to Gene Wolfe, creating art for publishers such as Arkham House, Donald M. Grant and TSR. In 2006, Mr. Fabian received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. He is, without a doubt, a living legend of fantasy art.

I've written numerous posts on the DMR Books blog regarding Stephen Fabian. In fact, my series examining his illustrations of REH's works earned me an award from the Robert E. Howard Foundation. This time around, it seemed right to look back over Stephen's entire career, from 1965 until his well-earned retirement fifteen years ago.

To do that, I'm going to rely mainly on Mr. Fabian's own words, straight from his official website. I will edit, slightly, here and there for clarity and brevity, but I wanted other fans of great fantasy art to hear the man in his own words.

Here is Stephen describing his life before becoming an artist and how he got his surprisingly late start:

‘My interest in science fiction began way back in 1951 when I was a 21 year old airman in the U.S. Air Force at Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, Illinois, where I taught an electronics course in the Advanced Radio and Radar School. One evening I was at the base PX browsing the magazine rack looking for something to read and noticed some pulp magazines that featured beautiful artwork on the covers. Titles like "Famous Fantastic Mysteries," "Fantastic Novels," and "Astounding Science Fiction". Inside those issues I saw wonderful story illustrations by Virgil Finlay, Lawrence Stevens, Edd Cartier, and Hubert Rogers, and I was hooked. I bought those magazines, read them over the weekend and they turned me into a science fiction fan. In 1953 my time in the Air Force ended and I was a New Jersey civilian again. I worked at Dumont TV Labs for five years, at Curtis Wright for another five years, and in 1963 I found myself working for Simmonds Precision Products, an electronics company in Vermont.
In 1965, when I decided to learn how to draw and paint, I went to the one bookstore in Middlebury, Vermont, where I lived at the time, and was lucky to find five art instruction books by Andrew Loomis, one of the great golden age illustrators. I bought them all; "Fun With a Pencil," "Drawing the Head & Hands," "Figure Drawing For All It's Worth," "Three Dimensional Drawing," and "Creative Illustration". I started with "Fun with a Pencil," reading and doing all the drawing exercises in the book, and over the next two years, during spare time I read all five books, made hundreds of drawings, and finished with the painting projects in "Creative Illustration". This painting is my copy of the "Mermaid" painting in that book, but I made lots of changes so it's not an exact copy.’

“Copy” or not, that’s a beautiful painting. His mastery of the brush and palette after studying for such a short time is astounding.

Within two years of beginning his study of art, Fabian started getting his art published. Many artists require two decades. The man was born to draw (and paint; see his "Mermaid" above).

‘In 1967 I was reading the letter section in a science fiction magazine and noticed that one of the letters was from the co-editors of a fanzine titled "Twilight Zine," and they were asking readers to contribute artwork to their fanzine. The co-editors were Leslie Turek and Cory Seidman who were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at that time. Their fanzine was published by the MIT Science Fiction Society, Cambridge, MA. I found the courage to create this drawing and mailed it to them. Several months later I received a copy of "Twilight Zine, No. 24" and saw my drawing on the cover. I was overjoyed, it was my first drawing to be published, anywhere. There is something about having one's first artwork accepted for publication that is special, the wonder of it is never equaled. And it was my first tiny step on the road to becoming a professional Science Fiction illustrator.’

Strangely enough, the Twilight Zine cover isn't listed in his ISFDB entry. Stephen would get numerous fanzine/prozine jobs over the next five years. Those led to him being nominated for Hugos as "Best Fan Artist" from 1970 through 1974.

His first pro job was for Fictioneer Books, a publishing house run by David Anthony Kraft. The Vultures: Showdown in Hell's Canyon was released in 1974. Fittingly enough, considering the rest of Fabian's career, it was a hardcover collection of two Robert E. Howard yarns.

From there, Stephen was off and running. He still did plenty of (paid) work for fanzines, but various pro publishers were quite interested by this time. Ted Dikty was one of them:

‘Back in the late 1960s Ted Dikty was among the first editors to send me assignments on a regular basis, and that helped me to keep going on a full time schedule. Ted ran Starmont House and FAX, publishing stories that had originally appeared in magazines during 1930s and 1940s, the "Golden Age" of the pulps. Other small press houses like "Gnome Press," "Fantasy Press," "Shasta," Fantasy Publishing Co., Inc.," "Arkham House," all reprinted stories by the better pulp writers. They printed only a few thousand copies of each title, at best, never made much money and by the late 1960s they were all out of business, except for Arkham House, which is still publishing books today. I have illustrated 10 books for Arkham House.’

Fictioneer Books approached Fabian again, this time to do three Conan posters:

‘This is the first of three "Conan" poster paintings I did for Fictioneer Books in 1976. The Conan figure in the painting also appears on the dust jacket of the book, "Wings in the Night" by Robert E. Howard, published by Wildside Press in 2005. The three posters were quite a challenge for me because they were done early in my career and I was a bit unsure of myself as yet, but poster art was another part of publishing that could be added to my source of income so I tried to do a proper job.’

‘Back in 1976, Fictioneer publications asked me to do three "Conan" poster paintings that they hoped to sell as a set. This painting was supposed to be one of the three. But, they were not quite satisfied with it and asked me if I were willing to do another one. Actually, I did not have to do so because there was no clause in our contract that required their approval of the paintings. But it was very early in my career and though I was disappointed, I agreed to do another painting. This one was later sold to an art collector so the time and effort I put into it was not wasted.’

In 1977, Stephen illustrated one of his early classics, Underwood-Miller's The Eyes of the Overworld, by Jack Vance:

‘A good book is something special, especially if it's written by Jack Vance. I did however, have a problem when I illustrated his books because while I was reading his stories they were so absorbing that I often forgot to underline descriptive words and sentences, or to bracket interesting paragraphs that might make a good illustration. When it came time to do the illustrations I would discover that I had forgotten to make notations in the manuscript. I had to go back and re-read lots of sections in the manuscripts. Jack Vance made me work overtime!’

‘[The drawing below] was intended to be the wraparound dust jacket art for a book to be titled, "The Adventures of Dragoman" by Otis Adelbert Kline, which was scheduled for publication in the early 1980s by Ted Dikty of Fax Publications. I also did 7 full page story illustrations in color pencil for the book.
After the artwork was done and before the book actually went into production, Dikty was advised by a book market "expert" that the author's books were not selling, and convinced Dikty not to produce the book.
When Dikty sent me a check in payment for my artwork he enclosed a note telling me of his decision. I was really disappointed and even though I got paid for my work, I thought my time had been wasted. Kline's work is considered by some critics to be poor imitations of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. That may be true with Kline's "Mars" books, but I don't think it applies to the Dragoman stories.’

The two pics above are the cover and the second plate from that projected Dragoman book. Such a shame it was never published. As it is, if you squint kinda hard, they could be illos from a lost El Borak tale.

Around the same time, Donald M. Grant approached Fabian to illustrate The Dream of X, a shortened version of William Hope Hodgson’s classic, The Night Land:

‘This drawing was intended to be the dust jacket art for the book titled, "The Dream of X," by William Hope Hodgson, published by Donald Grant in 1977.
When the book was published and I received my copies, I was a bit disappointed to see that Grant had used one of my story drawings for the dust jacket instead of using the drawing I specifically made for the DJ. I don't know why, but he decided to use my Dj drawing for the endpapers in the book instead.
When Grant received the finished books from the book binder, he invited me to his home in Rhode Island to sign a number of "special edition" copies. The special edition books have a different fabric for the covers, and each book is contained in a box.
All the books (no boxes were in sight) were stored in his garage and piled up on a few tables. Whoever did the stacking had mixed up the regular edition books with the special edition books, the ones with a more expensive cover fabric. The problem was that the regular edition fabric and the special edition fabric were the same color and the difference between the two was hard to discern. Grant had to examine each book with a magnifying glass, under a lamp, to pick out the special edition copies that I had to sign. I didn't want to embarrass him so I did not ask why he did not select a different color fabric for the special edition.’

Above is one of the Fabian plates from that Grant edition.

The 1980s would be, in some ways, the high point of Mr. Fabian’s career. Not only was he doing work for several fiction publishers and periodicals, he began creating illustrations for TSR, especially their ‘Ravenloft’ line. Ravenloft played to Fabian’s aptitude for macabre subject matter, developed during his time at Arkham House and other small presses.

Stephen would leave TSR in the mid-90s, by which time he was in his sixties. He still had plenty of work, doing book covers and illustrations for fantasy/horror periodicals like Weirdbook and Weird Tales. In 1998, Fabian created one of the great projects of his later career, In Lovecraft’s Shadow. After that, he immediately turned around and painted covers for Wildside’s massive “Weird Works” series, which reprinted thousands of pages of Robert E. Howard’s fiction and poetry. Book-wise, he more or less ended where he started: with REH.

One of the most recent books to feature a Fabian cover is none other than DMR Books’ edition of Far Away & Never by Ramsey Campbell.

Well, I’m running short on time. The rest of this post will consist mostly of Stephen Fabian’s art, with minimal commentary. Raise a glass to a living legend, sword-brothers! Happy birthday, Mr. Fabian.

As always, the Stephen Fabian official website is the first place to go for serious Fabian fans.