For any slightly older readers (OK, not _that_ old!) who grew up in Britain in the 1980s, you may remember the seminal early video game mags from Newsfield, including CRASH for ZX Spectrum and sister mag Zzap!64 for Commodore 64, often sporting very distinctive painted cover art.

Well, the fairly new book publisher Thalamus Publishing (which, yes, keen-eyed folks, has the same logo as the Newsfield-related former game publisher Thalamus, and involves a number of the Newsfield co-founders), has recently published The Fantasy Art of Oliver Frey, showcasing the main behind that self-same, often awesome cover art.

As the book blurb explains: "Frey worked on some of Britain’s greatest comic institutions — the Fleetway War Picture Library, Dan Dare in Eagle, and The Trigan Empire in Look & Learn, as well as his celebrated 1930s-style opening sequence for the film Superman — The Movie. But for an entire generation of boys in the 1980s, it is Frey’s exuberant art on the covers of cult computer games magazines that came to express the sheer excitement of the games they played." Here's a full CRASH cover gallery, if you want to get a basic idea of his rather fun style - haw, Solar Jetman!