Kelly Freas, 82

As the contemporary art world moved with the millennium from minimalist post-pop into the current, abundant strangeness of alien lands, fairies and wizards, as the whole Lord of the Rings influence on contemporary painting mingled with the techniques and design sensibility of 80s heavy-metal album covers (Matthew Barney and the German artist Martin Eder stand out), we can only now evaluate the achievement of a generation of artists often ignored, when not dismissed as pure hacks.

Kelly Freas, who died last Sunday at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 82, was of this generation.

Born in 1922 in Hornell, NY, Frank Kelly Freas took to drawing early on. Coming into his own in the 1950s-after a war stint in the Pacific theater spent painting half-naked women on the nosecones of bombers-Freas began his professional life as a commercial illustrator. Early advertising gigs soon led him into the realms of science fiction and fantasy. Soon, his stark, harrowing images of sexy Amazonian women, apelike monsters, deranged robots, sleek spaceships and vengeful aliens-think the original Star Trek, but before Star Trek, arrested and broken down into storyboards-graced the covers, frontispieces and pages of world masterpieces by the likes of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, A.E. Van Vogt, Poul Anderson, Frederik Pohl-the list goes on and on. Freas' work in this field earned him 11 Hugo awards for achievement in science fiction, five of them awarded in consecutive years.

Freas' most recognizable contribution to the way we see was his cocreation of Alfred E. Neuman, the freckled, tooth-deficient, "What-Me worry?" face of MAD Magazine. Spending five years starting in the late 1950s as the main cover artist for the then-groundbreaking and entertaining humor magazine, Freas drew his mark onto significant pop art in a way that Warhol and his ilk could only dream of.

Many commissions followed, including-the fiction made real-his designing of the official patch of NASA's 1973 Skylab 1 orbiting space-station, and the cover of Queen's 1977 album News of the World. Recent years didn't see Freas' drive waning: He did an illustration that was used in the film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and was finally awarded a Doctor of Arts degree in 2003 from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, an institution he had first attended in the late 1930s.

Now, with most commercial illustrating work done on computer, Freas' ethic would seemingly be a thing of the past. But so-called serious art is just now recognizing the value of those great old sci-fi images-not as kitsch, but as expressions of technological power, our sense of wonder, and the fear that both inspire.