Death Dealer II

Take a closer look at Frank Frazetta: Death Dealer II.

FRANK FRAZETTA (1928–2010)

Death Dealer II

oil on board

30 x 18 inches (76.2 x 45.7 cm)

framed: 41 ½ x 29 ¼ inches (105.4 x 74.3 cm)

Painted in 1986.

PROVENANCE:

The artist

By descent to the present owner

EXHIBITED:

East Stroudsburg and Boca Grande, Frank Frazetta Art Museum, on permanent exhibition, 1986–2010.

LITERATURE:

James Silke, Death Dealer: Prisoner of the Horned Helmet, New York, 1988, front cover (illustrated).

Death Dealer II is among the most recognized works by one of the world’s most influential fantasy artists.

Born in Brooklyn, Frank Frazetta began studying at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts at eight years old and was working in comics by sixteen. A skilled athlete, he turned down a contract with the New York Giants to pursue a career in art. By the mid-1960s, Frazetta’s paperback covers for Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories had brought him recognition for his visceral approach to fantasy illustration, marked by muscular figures captured in moments of explosive action against dark, atmospheric backgrounds.  Celebrated covers for Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars novels followed. 

Over his illustrious career, he was named a Spectrum Grand Master in 1995 and elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1998. When the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opened in Los Angeles in September 2026, he was among the few illustrators given a gallery of his own.

Death Dealer II is one of the defining paintings of his artistic legacy: the work in which he returned to the Death Dealer, his most famous original character, more than a decade after he first painted him. After its completion, it remained with Frazetta for the rest of his life and has stayed with his family since his death.  According to his family, Frazetta considered it one of his favorite works. It is now being offered at auction for the first time.

While almost all of Frazetta’s best-known paintings gave form to characters imagined by other writers, the Death Dealer was entirely his own creation. According to his family, he painted the 1973 original, a warrior on a black horse with his face concealed beneath a horned helmet, in response to a critic who had questioned his artistic standing. As the painting became better known, notably on the cover of Molly Hatchet’s 1978 debut album, the novelist James Silke proposed a series of novels around the character in the mid-1980s.  Frazetta painted five further Death Dealer oils, four of which became covers for the books. Death Dealer II appeared on the first, Prisoner of the Horned Helmet, in 1988.

Death Dealer II reverses the mood of the 1973 composition. Where the earlier warrior sits mounted and motionless above the battlefield, here he stands on foot atop a mound of fallen creatures, his axe held at the top of its swing, as clawed and serpentine forms rise from the darkness around him. The picture is built on a single vertical, running from his feet through his raised arms to the axe head, so that the whole composition seems to gather itself for the blow. Against cool blue-grays, Frazetta reserves red for the eyes, a streak across the sky and the fiery light behind the figure.

Frazetta often returned to his published paintings to revise them, and he repainted several of the later Death Dealers after their first appearance. However, Frazetta left Death Dealer II exactly as he finished it. Painted as he returned to work after several years of illness, it hung in the Frazetta Art Museums in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and Boca Grande, Florida, which he founded with his wife, Ellie. The painting has since had a considerable afterlife of its own. It has been reproduced for decades as prints, posters and statues, and in 2022 it supplied the artwork for the card “Seize the Day” in Magic: The Gathering’s Frank Frazetta Secret Lair series.

“I think I know him a little better than anybody else,” Frazetta said of the Death Dealer in 1994. Death Dealer II gives expression to that intimate understanding: the famously enigmatic warrior exactly as his creator imagined him, painted at a moment of artistic return and kept by Frazetta for the rest of his life.