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Volume 8240

Roy G. Krenkel Revisited

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<><><>Thomas A. Simmons

I'll come right out and say it: Roy G. Krenkel is my favorite Edgar Rice Burroughs artist. I'm quite sure this is because his cover illustration for the Ace paperback Pirates of Venus inspired a 13-year old kid back in the day to pull the book off the rack, shell out the 40 cents for it, and armed thus to enter a world of adventure and wonder I've never entirely left for the past six decades. A strong case can be made that the Ace paperback covers by Krenkel were, per Danton Burroughs, "a key factor in the 1960s revival of my grandfather's writings." They also caused a new generation of readers to sit up and take notice of the relatively obscure artist who created them. RGK, as he often signed his work, would ultimately complete 21 covers for Ace during the period 1962 to 1964. When it became obvious his meticulous illustration techniques were putting him behind schedule, Krenkel enlisted his pal Frank Frazetta to take on part of the workload — which, as most fans know, Frazetta proceeded to do with a vengeance.

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RGK’s Pirates of Venus cover for the Ace edition

Not until decades later did I become interested in "who" Roy Krenkel was. To learn more about him I’ve relied in particular upon a few souls — some of whom are new-found friends I’ll mention later — who have stepped forth to shed light on what has proven a rather perplexing subject for a number of writers over the course of time. Roy Gerard Krenkel was born in Bronx, New York on 11 July 1918 to Frederick and Louise Krenkel, both of whom were children of German immigrants. He was 41, she was 34, and Roy would be their only child. Frederick Krenkel’s parents were Wilhelmina and Joseph Krenkel, who in 1900 listed his occupation in Manhattan as a merchant tailor. His son Frederick is listed as a clothing cutter, an occupation he would hold for the rest of his life. Roy’s parents, or perhaps it was a subsequent overzealous marketer, may have called him "Junior," but the son harbored no intention of becoming a clothing cutter like his father. As Roy humorously told Camille Cazedessus in a 1964 ERB-dom interview, he was never a Junior: "Roy G. Krenkel, Jr. is not me, and I, not him, did the Ace and Canaveral work and won the Hugo."

By 1925, Fred and Louise Krenkel had moved with their seven-year old son from the Bronx to a small house at 176-39, 133^rd Road in Springfield Gardens, Long Island, which at the time must have passed for the suburbs in New York City. Both of Roy’s parents would die while living in the house on 133rd, and eventually so would Roy. What we know about him during his youth is centered on art: Roy “drew a lot,” sketching and “doodling” incessantly. At age 10, he won a medal for a piece he submitted to an art exhibition by New York City school children. Later, he collected art books, studied art history, frequented art museums, and associated with others who were also interested in art. Graduating high school in 1935-36, he attended classes in 1938 at the Art Students League in Manhattan taught by George Bridgman, an acknowledged expert in human anatomy applied to art. But war was on the horizon: his 16 October 1940 draft card described Krenkel as six feet in height, weighing 175, with a light complexion and brown eyes and hair.

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RGK self-portrait, 1943.

Roy G. Krenkel enlisted in the U.S. Army on 23 January 1942, part of a wave that followed closely on the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor which thrust the United States into war against Imperial Japan. It is probable he was assigned to the 77th "Statue of Liberty" Infantry Division, consisting of personnel from New York City and the area. On enlistment, the 23-year old Krenkel gave his marital status as single with no dependents, his occupation as "actor”, and his education as four years of high school. While it isn’t clear if Private Krenkel accompanied his unit when it left for Hawaii on 23 March 1944 (in December 1943 he was admitted to hospital suffering from neuritis and sciatica), it is known that he was released for duty at some point during 1944 and served in the liberation of the Philippines from 23 November 1944 through February, 1945 because he later made reference to having been there. The division also participated in the invasion of Okinawa, but if Krenkel was present and mentioned it afterward, the fact has not been recorded. He was discharged from the Army on 11 May, 1946. 

Returning stateside, Krenkel immersed himself into drawing and studying. “I sold my first piece of art in the late 40s, say about 1949. I went to several schools, Hogarth’s, Artist’s League, Cooper Union, but I didn’t learn too much from them. Just a little here and there,” he said in 1964. RGK’s work at home routine may seem surprising to some: “Everybody laughs when I tell them I work in the living room, sitting on the couch, with the cat on the table and the TV on; the radio too if my father’ll let me. I don’t like to work in the quiet. I like to have people talking and things going on. I usually start about 9 in the morning, work till 10 at night, and watch both late late shows, hit the pad, and start over [the next] morning. Some days when I’m hot, I can whip something out, but that’s rare and most of my good stuff is semi-accidental,” Krenkel said in his self-deprecating way. For some reason, Roy didn’t seem particularly impressed by his art — but almost everyone else was. 

 An RGK concept likely used by Frazetta
 for Ace’s Tarzan and the Lost Empire cover.

In Burne Hogarth’s classes at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, Roy filled in by teaching art technique to a group of artists who were mostly younger. Artist Michael W. Kaluta quotes a Jesse Marinoff Reyes posting, “It was [in Hogarth’s class] that he met a group of young cartoonists, Joe Orlando, and [Al] Williamson and Frazetta — with whom he would later collaborate at EC Comics in the early-1950s, as well as inking Williamson for Atlas (Marvel) and the American Comics Group. Krenkel would also share studio space with another important EC artist, Wally Wood, and you thusly have something of a ‘genius cluster’, or group of immensely talented individuals working in and around one another, competing or collaborating and sharing ideas. The extant roster of creatives coming in and out of Bill Gaines’s EC offices can also be tied into this, whether John Severin and Reed Crandall, or Bernard Krigstein and Johnny Craig, not to mention Jack Davis, Al Feldstein, and Harvey Kurtzman. One piece that is often cited in the history books is a splash page done with Williamson in an issue of EC’s Incredible Science Fiction (September-October 1955, issue #32) for a story, ‘Food for Thought’ in which Krenkel rendered an eerie alien landscape. Lush, detailed and strange, it was a high water mark for illustration in comics up to that time.”

RGK illo for The Chessmen of Mars colored by Bruce Bozarth.

<> Regarding RGK himself, Kaluta asks us to “Picture if you will, a taller, ganglier, most likely happier Doc Emmitt Brown as seen in the Back To The Future movies, high-water pants, penny loafers, Roy bouncing on his toes, chuckling , amused with himself and the world. In his cataloging of his surroundings Roy found most everything meeting with his approval, or passed over as if having nothing to do with Life As We Know It.” He was generous, sharing his knowledge about art and art history unstintingly with others, as well as large quantities of his art itself. Kaluta recalls that “although a reader might gloss past dozens of Roy’s gems while absorbing the contents of each Amra magazine, the images are prone to reappear in the reader’s mind once every little while, enhancing any random REH or ERB thought, as they may have been intended to do. In gathering together the wealth of sketches and drawings, the word ‘Plethora’ lights up the stage. There’s little need to study any of these seemingly off-hand ‘doodles’ (as Roy would name them) except to be rather stunned if one suddenly totaled up the vast number of small, appropriate gifts Roy gave us and the world.”

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<>RGK illo scanned from Amra Vol. II, #48 (1968)

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Long-time book dealer Bud Plant recalls Krenkel as an avid, almost obsessively particular, collector. “I used to see Roy at the 1970s NY Comic Art Cons, when I was setting up there. He'd buy stuff like Donald M. Grant books from me, such as the Robert E. Howard collections. Contrary to most artists, he was super fussy about condition; he once brought a small, minor hardcover book back to exchange it; it had a loose thread in the sewn binding.” Mr. Plant further recalls, “Roy was the historian out of all the Fleagle crew and his artist buddies: Frazetta, Williamson, etc. He turned those guys on to the fathers of illustration such as Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Joseph Clement Coll, Franklin Booth. I think there may even be quotes from Bernie Wrightson and Kaluta about Roy opening their eyes about the fine book and magazine illustrators of the past. [RGK and I] shared that love of all the classic illustrators; I bet he could have taught me quite a lot if we'd spent some time together. He was a very nice man and a generous artist, doing [gratis] pieces for countless fanzines.”

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RGK cover art for Amra Vol. II, #15 (1961)

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    Krenkel was a frequent attendee at the New York City Comic Con, conceived and organized on an annual basis by his friend Phil Seuling. It was there in 1977 that an aspiring young artist named Mark Wheatley encountered him. “This was my first New York con after I had moved to the area and had begun working professionally as an illustrator and comic creator. This was also the first time Marc Hempel and I met face-to-face, as he had come out to attend the con. I only had a few small gigs under my belt and was essentially unknown. I had my portfolio with me, with some hope of showing my art and getting more work. But I had stashed the portfolio and was walking around empty handed. Within a few moments of entering the dealers’ room for the first time, I was approached by a tall man with a wild shock of white hair, and I instantly recognized he was RGK, since I was a major fan. He told me, more than asked me, ‘You’re an artist, aren’t you.’ I answered, ‘I am! How could you tell?’ He grinned and said, ‘I know these things.’ So, I told him, ‘Well, I know you’re an artist!’ He looked like he had been caught. ‘Yeah, I’m Roy Krenkel.’ I told him I was a fan. He acted like that was the last thing he wanted to talk about. And instead, he told me that I was going to have a great career as an artist. I asked him if he had seen my work. By this time he was starting to act distracted, looking around at the crowd. ‘I don’t think so, but I can see it in you.’ I thanked him and we headed off in different directions. We never saw each other again!”

RGK illo scanned from Amra Vol. II, #48 (1968).

What universally stands out when culling opinions about RGK is that people were in awe of the man’s talent — and yet, writing in Qua Brot in 1985, Bhob Stewart noted that when their friend Ken Feduniewicz called RGK “the spiritual godfather of us all,” Roy shot back, “Boy! I don’t know! That sounds like a lot of crap to me!” Yes, he was a perfectionist and yes, he was modest and unassuming to a fault, but he was also pleased people liked his work. For many, RGK seemed to be a classic introverted homebody who was somewhat nerdy and eccentric — but his friend Chuck Hoffman also noted he could be “animated, energetic, [and] even boisterous,” while others recalled his “barking” laugh: not the traits of an introvert.

Toward the end of his life, Krenkel became increasingly “impoverished.” As he had done for others throughout his life, by freely imparting his knowledge of art history and technique, giving away his art or charging ridiculously low fees for it, lining up friends with art gigs or, after he’d won the Hugo Award, by crumpling his sample sketches and tossing them into the wastebasket for his School of Visual Arts students to salvage, lovingly straighten out and save for posterity, so people stepped up for Roy: Frank Frazetta found inking and set-up work for him, close friend and writer C.J. Henderson provided sumptuous meals and bought him a new TV set when his old set failed, and another “dear friend” offered him a burial plot — which he accepted.

Roy was a lifelong smoker. Chuck Hoffman says that “the day he learned he was dying he did this drawing in black and blue ballpoint pen called ‘The Medusa’. It depicts a bulky androgynous figure, with a bulbous face and enveloped in a cloak, lurching forward with one arm extended. Instead of serpents for hair, there are these massive coils of what could be smoke flowing outward from the figure's head and filling the top of the illustration. Or, the coils might be flowing inward and attacking the figure.” Roy Gerard Krenkel passed away on 24 February, 1983 from complications of lung cancer. Just before he breathed his last, when a friend asked him why he was smiling Roy reportedly answered, “Why not?” Krenkel’s grave is located at Green-Wood Cemetery, Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn, New York. His long-time pal, supporter and associate Frank Frazetta was one of the pallbearers.

RGK self-portrait.

Michael Kaluta shares this story about RGK’s cat: “Roy claimed to keep his cat schooled in its natural attitudes and graces, that, come feeding time, he’d set the cat’s food bowl on the left waist high kitchen counter top… there was a counter top of equal height and depth on the right hand side, the two counters being bisected by the kitchen door… a span of at least three feet, or perhaps as many as four. Between the two counter tops Roy would securely set a house broom, the tall pole handle with the fan of sweeper straw on the other end. That delta of bound straw would, laid onto the counter, firm up the broom as a viable ‘bridge’ with no chance of tipping or rotating. The right hand counter was easily cat-accessible, Roy having set a chair with a healthy stack of books up against the drawers, making, in fact, a ladder from the kitchen floor to that right hand counter top. Hence the only access the cat had to the food bowl on the left hand counter top was across a round inch-wide broom handle between 3 and 4 feet across. Roy would preamble this story with the admonition, or perhaps schooled information, that a cat needed to be challenged and that one should endeavor to challenge one’s cat at every opportunity. There were natural feats any cat could accomplish should it deigned to care to, and, even against the feigned recalcitrance often noted in house cat behavior, a cat would take on all challenges of balance and dexterity if so challenged with firm authority. To be able to eat that evening, Roy’s cat would have to ’tightrope’ from one counter top to the other in Indian Trail across the length of round broom handle — and Roy’s cat would ace it, not caring to note Roy’s absolute delight in the performance. On rare occasions, when his cat felt he was not to be trivialized, the cat would take one spring leap from kitchen floor to the counter top on which his meal was waiting. This was, of course, something that delighted Roy even more, and, could he figure a way where the challenge was always to leap from floor to food, Roy would have definitely set forward that challenge.”

RGK’s (or someone’s) cat gets into the act:
 a bookplate for a friend.

Information on RGK is, quite literally, scattered to the four figurative winds. There is no extant biography, and as Krenkel himself said, “I’m no writer of autobiographies.” Snippets appear across a wide spectra, from prefaces in printed books and online postings to archival source records and input from those who knew or met him. I can’t express how much I appreciate the testimony I received from new friends Michael W. Kaluta and Charles “Chuck” Hoffman; together with those of pals Mark Wheatley and Bud Plant, their recollections were the glue that held this piece together. In addition, I used interviews and personal letters like those in Bhob Stewart’s fine piece in Qua Brot #1, Camille Cazedessus’ interview with the artist in ERB-dom, the book Roy G. Krenkel, father of heroic fantasy: A Centennial Celebration (2018) as well as ERBzine, Ancestry and Wikipedia. People I whom I thank for comments, anecdotes and permission to use their material include new friends Bruce “Tangor” Bozarth and Larry “Deuce” Richardson as well as Scott Tracy Griffin and Bill Hillman. A recap of RGK’s oeuvre (not including his countless “doodles”) is located here: https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?901

RGK’s favorite ERB cover, for the Ace edition of The Mastermind of Mars.

ROY G. KRENKEL FEATURES IN ERBzine.com

https://www.erbzine.com/krenkel/

BIOS ~ PHOTO GALLERIES ~ SKETCHES ~ ACE COVERS ~ 20 RGK ART COLLAGES

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