Oliver Frey is one of the most important artists working in the medium of commercial illustration. Frey worked on some of Britain’s greatest comic institutions — the Fleetway War Picture Library, Dan Dare in Eagle, and The Trigan Empire in Look & Learn, as well as his celebrated 1930s-style opening sequence for the film Superman — The Movie. But for an entire generation of boys in the 1980s, it is Frey’s exuberant art on the covers of cult computer games magazines that came to express the sheer excitement of the games they played — heroes, space ships, villains and action!
This lavish book — a must for every collector of graphic art — documents his work between the 1970s and today. The prime focus is on his staggering output in the 1980s and early 1990s when he produced hundreds of computer game magazine covers, software games inlays and incidental illustrations that set the international video games market alight. While the paintings will be familiar to many magazine readers, few will have ever seen the originals as beautifully reproduced as this, and free of the commercial sales lines and slogans that cluttered them as magazine covers.
The book kicks off with a detailed biography, which features some of Frey’s teenage work and concludes with a section on the art techniques he has employed over the years. Most of the featured paintings are accompanied by Frey’s own commentary.
About the author
Film-maker, magazine publisher and writer Roger Michael Kean, who has been a friend and colleague of Frey for over 30 years, is uniquely placed to present this celebration of his work. Kean has overseen the editing of more than 20 Thalamus historical reference titles, and this is the third book he has written for Thalamus Publishing.
Table of Contents
- Foreword
- A Boom in Videogames, Ludlow 1983
- The launch of Newsfield
- The Early Years
- The lure of the movies
- Failed film student, good corporal
- Turning Professional
- The making of a British resident
- On the silver screen in ‘letterbox’
- A different calling
- Crashing Into the Bigtime
- End of one era, start of another
- 1 Monsters and Aliens
- 2 Space Manoeuvres
- 3 Mechanical Mayhem
- 4 The Gaming Experience
- 5 Sporting Types
- 6 Grue and Gore0
- 7 Heroes and Villains
- 8 Weird and Wonderful
- 9 A Frey Miscellany
- Oliver Frey’s Art Techniques
- Index of Covers