The Iron Ace Art

While all of the Age of Aces aviation titles feature the original artwork for each story, it has been modified to better fit our book designs. In general, the original artwork flowed around the opening of the adventure, but in our volumes it’s expanded to fill an entire page or spread to serve as a “cover” to the story. Also, to unify the book we run the story’s title in our own font, stripping out the lettering done by the artist. Here on the web though we can offer a “dvd extra” of sorts — the full, unmodified artwork as it originally appeared in the pulp.

The nine Iron Ace stories appeared in Sky Birds Magazine which was not a Popular Publications title like many of our other books, and, as such, the illustrations were not as generous. Many of the illustrations as you can see were a half page at best, and all needed to fill a two page spread in our book, so a lot of addition artwork through clever cloning had to be done. Frandzen employed crop lines in a few of these illustrations that we carried over to them all — whether it be the sine curve border of “The Laughing Skull” or a sharp crisp diagonal of “Sentinels of Satan” — to unify the look of the book and give it it’s own distinct character.