Kelly Freas, an illustrator who produced sleek, stirring images for science fiction and fantasy books and helped shape the image of Mad Magazine mascot Alfred E. Newman, died Sunday. He was 82.

My first acquaintance with Freas was, oddly enough, the 1977 Queen album News of the World, which featured a modified version of his famous painting, The Gulf Between.

The world of sf/fantasy has a history of producing art that’s more given to flamboyance than nuance, but the soulfulness of the robot in that painting was pure genius, speaking to our culture’s growing unease with the “Frankenstein Complex” – a creeping technophobic anxiety over technology that was seemingly developing an autonomy of its own. Regardless of the genre, great art finds a way of articulating things that lie just beyond the power of mere words, and this was Freas’ gift, I suppose.

Freas may be gone, but it will be some time before his influence dies out….