Last month, yet another Frazetta painting was sold for big bucks. This time, it was his original painting of Vampirella used on the cover of Warren's VAMPIRELLA #1.
Frazetta created the iconic image in collaboration with Warren and her costume was designed by the late artist and historian Trina Robbins. He wasn't thrilled with it and after it was photographed for publication, he got it back and painted over it. What you see here is the result and it's pretty startling to see Vampi sans costume!
When the gavel dropped at Dallas' Heritage Auctions on February 27, 2026. it sold for $3,125,000.
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Lot Description:
Frank Frazetta Vampirella #1 Cover Painting Original Art (Warren, 1969). The definitive image of the Drakulon Queen, straight from the master's brush. Frank Frazetta's painting for Vampirella #1 wasn't just a cover, it was the first glimpse fans ever got on the stands, and it hit like a lightning bolt. In one glance, Vampirella arrived fully formed: dangerous, alluring, and impossible to ignore. The image has since become one of the era's most recognizable horror-comics icons.
By the late 1960s, Warren Publishing's momentum from Famous Monsters, Creepy, and Eerie had started to cool, and James Warren wanted a jolt. With the pop-culture buzz around Barbarella still fresh, he set out to create a sexy new kind of horror figure, one who could tempt you into picking up the magazine and still dispatch the monsters once you opened it. Warren put it best: "When Frank portrays a woman he injects a certain mystique... I wanted my Vampirella to have that same mystique." Vampirella would be more than a hostess, she would headline her own continuing feature.
Her look came together through a perfect storm of ideas. Warren and Frazetta shaped the concept, with Trina Robbins offering key design input as the costume took form. Warren even commissioned an alternate cover from a French artist, then walked away from it and turned back to Frazetta. Frazetta finished the published painting in only a few hours, a detail that still feels unreal when you see how effortlessly it commands attention.
The result is pure Frazetta theater: Vampirella framed against a looming moon, her silhouette cutting the night like a blade. Shadows hint at something not quite human, a quiet nod to her vampiric origins before the stories even begin. Frazetta himself never warmed to the costume, and years later, in 1991, he revised the original painting in a way he sometimes did with select works, painting out the outfit and boots before it went to auction. Even so, the essential image remains unmistakable, down to the brushwork and the faint trace of her iconic collar.
Vampirella went on to an uninterrupted Warren run through 1983, leaning into more mature horror and cementing her place as a pin-up legend with fangs. Decades later, she's still thriving, and it's hard not to circle back to the same source: that first cover, that first look, and Frazetta making a new icon in a single moonlit frame.
Created in oil on Masonite board with a matted image area of 21" x 15.25", Plexiglas-front framed to 24.25" x 30.25". Very light edgewear, extremely faint craquelure to the upper background visible only under raking light, faint horizontal lines from prior matting, small faint scuff at lower center, pinpoint abrasions in the upper background, UV examination reveals a yellowed varnish drip near the lower edge, none affecting the central image or figure. Signed and dated 1991 by Frazetta, when the alterations were made. In Very Good condition.