Sweet Home, Jimmy Bama!

I don't remember the first time I saw a James Bama painting, but at some point I became aware of this amazing style showing up across the paperback rack. Most likely it was a western painting but it could have also been a Doc Savage, I don't remember. But once I noticed the style and the signature I started to notice that it was all over the rack, in all genres and I quickly became a James Bama fan.

This was back in the 1960s when you could pick up a paperback for 40 to 60 cents and even though I was just a kid I would sometimes pick up books simply because of the cover. I collected paperbacks with paintings by Frank Frazetta, Jeff Jones and James Bama. When Bama's book of Western art came out in the 1990s I gobbled it up, buying copies for family and friends. I wanted to share this amazing artwork with them and was a little disappointed that the only thing I could share was his fine art. A new book from Flesk Publications, James Bama: American Realist has rectified that problem.

Written by Brian M. Kane with an introduction by Harlan Ellison, this gorgeous tome is 160 pages in color. Interspersed with Kane's biographical text are quotes by some pretty powerful artists, such as Evertt Raymond Kinstler (who has known Bama since they were both 15), Boris Vallejo and Mark Schultz, not to mention dozens of quotes and observations by Bama himself, but it's the color illustrations that this book is really all about.

Laid bare in over 260 illustrations is the full depth and breadth of Bama's career. If you know Bama only from the Docs or the western work, or perhaps the Aurora monster model kit boxes or his hundreds of other paperback covers, if you only know one aspect of his work, this book is for you. You get the whole Bama here. More than 85 of these amazing paintings are shot from the original art and they are augmented with over 30 personal photographs, ranging from family photos to modeling shoots.

If you're a Doc Savage fan you not only get all of Bama's amazing Doc covers, but a number of the Steve Holland photo shoots that inspired them. What I particularly like is that in many cases you can compare the photo to the painting and see what Bama adds to each; his innate sense of color and design, the way the figures in his paintings glow with some inner strength that is not present in the photos. Some people say that Bama just paints reality, this book should remove that notion from their heads.

If you were a fan of the Aurora monster model kit boxes, this book contains them all. A few of these I don't think I've ever seen before. But that is just indicative of the completeness of this book.

Bama abandoned the commercial art world at the height of his career in the 1970s and this book covers both of his careers. It's dominated by his commercial work but there is plenty of his fine art work as well. Like I said, this book is complete.

James Bama: American Realist is broken up into seven portfolios, "Portrait of an Illustrator," "Men's Adventure," "Science Fiction and Horror," "Pop Culture," "Doc Savage," "Westward Ho!," and "American Realist." I learned something new about Bama in every one of them. It might be a painting I knew nothing about or something personal about the man or the model. This is just such a complete retrospective of the artist. It's beautifully printed and interestingly laid out. I like the little touches, like Bama's signature on the header of the even pages and the detailed cross-references from quotes to the pages where a specific illustration can be found.

I have the deluxe edition, which is signed and numbered, with slipcase, and Paul Jilbert’s fascinating one-hour documentary of Bama on DVD, so the first illustration in my book is this wonderful pencil self-portrait signed by Bama. There's something in the looseness of the pencils, in the pensive look on Bama's face, something that makes it a wonderful, personal, almost intimate introduction to the book. It seems to say, "Hi, I'm Jimmy. What follows is my life's work."

You turn the page and you are bowled over by a portrait of Robert Kennedy and I wonder, "How can Bama paint hope?" Maybe it's in the eyes or the gesture of the hand, whatever, it makes an immediate and powerful impact. And it's just the first of the many treasures to be found within.