Books

Fastner & Larson's Tricks & Treats Volume One

By Leroy Douresseaux
November 23, 2007 - 11:24

Entitled "Where's My Treat?" this image speaks for itself.

FASTNER & LARSON’S TRICKS & TREATS, VOL. 1

If hip-hop culture, with its emphasis on wide hips, thick butts, and ample breasts, had official fantasy artists, they would be Fastner & Larson – the team of airbrush artist Steve Fastner and penciller Rich Larson.  For over two decades, the duo has produced a body of work built around a mixture of Disney, EC comics and B-movie monsters, pin-up and glamour girl art, and men’s magazine (Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, etc.) cartoons.

Fastner & Larson’s Tricks & Treats Volume One is a recent collection of their work.  More or less a portfolio presented as an art book, most of Tricks & Treats is built around T&A and cheesecake.  The book’s dominate theme is the presentation of scantily-clad girls celebrating beloved American holidays, in particular Halloween and Christmas, in strange ways.  The 44 images contained herein reveal Fastner & Larson to be both imaginative and skilled.  These grown men, forever trapped in a kind of horny teenaged boy purgatory, clearly have a love of what they do, and it’s evident in such images as “Where’s My Treat” (which is also used as the cover image) and “Midnight Bath,” which finds Tinkerbell of Walt Disney’s Peter Pan caught in a compromising position just because she’s taking an innocent bath inside a flower.

It seems that Fastner can take whatever image Larson pencils and transforms it into a visually striking image by using the airbrush technique.  Of course, there are some paintings that while skillfully executed seem a tad ordinary in subject matter, but they are few and far between.

Fastner & Larson celebrate Christmas with such spicy affairs as “Under the Mistletoe, which finds a trio of randy elves determined to view the fruits of what’s under the skirt of Sinta (Santa’s naughty niece), and also the comical “Polar Bare,” with its phallic symbolism and sexual innuendo.  My favorite pieces, however, are the Halloween numbers, especially “Cauldron” (which doubles as the back cover).  A witch and her black cat find something in the pot looking to get a peek of the witch’s cheeks.  Funny and inventive, “Cauldron” epitomizes Fastner’s and Larson’s Universal Monster’s meets Playboy aesthetic.

B+

 

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12