BEGINNING in August, 1978, and ending in May, 1982, Bantam Books, under the guidance of their legendary art director Leonard P. Leone Sr., began issuing a series of non-Robert E. Howard material continuing and supplementing the much earlier Lancer/Ace Conan paperback series.
Darrell Greene (credited as Darrel) painted the cover art on volume 1: Conan the Swordsman by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter.
Bob Larkin painted the covers for volume's 2 thru 6: Conan the Liberator by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter; Sword of Skelos by Andrew Offutt; The Road of Kings by Karl Edward Wagner; Conan and the Spider God by L. Sprague de Camp; Conan the Rebel by Poul Anderson.
All six covers are shown below in ascending order of their sequence. (Note: 1 and 5 have had their images flipped over; Conan is not, and has never been, left-handed).
BOB LARKIN'S illustrations for the Conan series are some of the best non-Frazetta Conan paperback covers ever produced. They astonished me when I first saw them in Waldenbooks back in 1979 and '80, and I'm no less taken today (Larkin's cover art for the The Savage Sword of Conan magazine published during the 1970's and 80's are pretty jaw-dropping too!).
Larkin was fairly new to the paperback scene in the 1970's, but he was already demonstrating a remarkably mature talent (he started illustrating commercially in 1969). Prior to painting the Conan covers, Larkin had completed three excellent illustrations for Janet Morris's science-fiction series Silistra, on volumes 2, 3 and 4, respectively. However, the cover art on volume 1 was painted by Boris Vallejo, so apparently in an effort to unify all of the covers under one sustained look Leone was having Lou Feck, his veteran all purpose artist, redo all four books with new illustrations for their subsequent second printings in 1981.
Bantam was also in the midst of reprinting their Conan series that year, starting with Conan the Rebel, Conan the Swordsman, and The Sword of Skelos. Each book was given a brand new cover illustration also by Feck, or at least it sure looked that way upon first glance, which by turn replaced Greene and Larkin's cover art. Why Leone wanted this change is not known, because it seemed to me that even with Greene's inclusion, uniformity had been already been nicely established by Larkin, and Larkin could have easily created a new illustration for Conan the Swordsman to match his others (the same goes for Vol. 1 of Silistra). Nevertheless, Feck was starting to get more sword & sorcery type commissions and to me that was a good thing. However, a closer examination revealed that none of the three Conan's were signed by Feck, and two of them were actually signed as by Zorin.
Now, just who in blazes was Zorin? And why was this person taking credit for what I assumed was Feck's artwork? And, just as important, why had Leone allowed this to happen?
In those days the information highway was pretty narrow in comparison to what it is today, so I had now way of knowing the particulars about decisions made behind closed doors in the publishing industry. I only knew that someone with a possibly fictitious name was now painting in a manner that seemed to emulate an already established industry stalwart. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just Feck painting under a nom de plume for personal reasons.
A few years later I came to realize that Feck was no longer producing cover art at all, ceasing around 1981 or 1982. Not being any wiser, this still being the pre-internet days, I merely assumed that he had retired or moved away from the book-cover business like so many other high profile artists had, i.e., Bob Abbett, James Bama, Dean Ellis, Frank McCarthy and Don Stivers, to name just a few. Then in 1997, through information provided by artist Vincent Di Fate, I came to learn the truth about Feck's disappearance. In November of 1981, Lou Feck had died, the victim of a sudden heart attack. He was just 56 years old. But long before that revelation was sprung, Zorin, the enigmatic artist, had ceased to be even a supposition to me. Then, in the 2000's when I began to earnestly collect paperbacks again based entirely upon their cover art, Feck naturally crept back to the top of my want list.
And not so surprisingly, so did Zorin.
But this time around I wanted to know the truth of their dual existence!
To eliminate conjecture, I decide to compare each Conan cover against several confirmed Feck covers that I already owned. Almost immediately I was able to identify components that had been repurposed from other Feck illustrations. Of course I was fully aware that Feck routinely cribbed from his own work to save time and effort, especially when rush jobs and deadlines had to be met. That was the give that Feck gave to his clients when they pushed him to be so ridiculously fast and reliable.
It would also seem that the two models who posed for Conan the Rebel and Conan the Swordsman are the very same two that posed for Kull The Fabulous Warrior King, Feck's earlier masterwork from 1978, though that's not necessarily evidence by itself because most New York based illustrators all solicited from the same modeling agencies. Nevertheless, my assessment upon finishing the examination was exactly what I thought it was going to be even before I had begun the process: form, tone, style and brushwork all held to these being the work of Lou Feck.
To me it was no longer an argument.
I'm convinced that Zorin is Lou Feck, but with Len Leone's passing in 2013, how could I ever know with certainty. One option would be to try and contact one of Feck's peers* and ask them if they can provide some clarity on the subject. Thirty-six years later though, the truth of those circumstances is hardly important to anybody outside of those directly involved, but it is fun to surmise.
*ADDENDUM:
Yes, Zorin is Lou Feck! That fact was confirmed to me personally by Bob Larkin and photographer Marc Witz. These men were great friends with Feck during those marvelous Bantam years. According to Larkin, Leone was trying to create a name (Zorin) that would be associated with sword & sorcery and heroic fantasy cover art, for reasons only an editor could have. His ruse might've been successful had Feck not been whisked away to the big art studio in the sky.
So at long last "The Mystery of Zorin" is officially solved.
Many thanks, Bob and Marc!
NOW let's have a look at the covers that helped Feck secure the way to Conan:
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If we regard Feck's Kull the Fabulous Warrior King (Bantam, 1978) as the "foundation" upon which he was going to build his reputation for illustrating sword & sorcery, then Cleopatra's Daughter, by Andrea Ashton, is definitely its "walls." The "roof", I suppose, could belong to Companions on the Road, a historical fix-up novel by Tanith Lee. Bantam published both paperbacks in 1979.
These period subjects seemed to bring out the best in Feck's abilities, which certainly didn't go unnoticed by Leone, hence his getting commissions a year later for both William C. Heine's The Swordsman and Janet Morris's Silistra series, and finally the Conan's.
One thing I failed to mention before was my complete admiration for Feck's Conan the Rebel illustration. I consider it as one of the very best Conan paperback covers ever produced. Feck's leaner version of Conan was exactly how I pictured him my mind's eye while reading the original Robert E. Howard stories.
Barbarians, including Conan, are generally depicted as brutish and grossly muscled; I've even seen Conan drawn exceedingly stout, like he
was some kind of two-legged rhino with a mullet. But I prefer my barbarians to look and move like lions and tigers and not bears, so here's hoping that the next generation of illustrators will grab the barbarian
by the mane and move him into a more realistic place and build, just
like my artist heroes Renato Casaro, Darrell Greene, Bob Larkin and Lou Feck did lo those many
years ago.
POSTSCRIPT: to learn more about Feck visit my previous article, The Fantastic Paperback Cover Art of Lou Feck (April, 2018).
[Originally posted in Berserker Books in 2014. © Revised July, 2018.]
