Artist Glen Orbik died on this date in 2015 after a long battle with cancer. His star had risen steadily during the previous decade and he seemed destined for even greater things.

I became aware of Glen’s work around 2005, when I picked up Wandering Star’s The Illustrated World of Robert E. Howard, where I found his illo for “Skull-Face” amongst the Howardian work of eleven other talented artists. Jim and Ruth Keegan were the art directors on that project. Here’s what they had to say about Orbik’s involvement:

“In 2004, when we were choosing artists to do paintings for The Illustrated World of Robert E. Howard, we immediately thought of Glen, and asked if he would contribute a painting of Skull-Face. He did, and as usual, he hit it clear out of the park.”

From then on, I kept seeing his art, especially on books from Hard Case Crime and for the “Gabriel Hunt” series of thriller novels. Over the next decade, Glen painted covers for books by James Reasoner, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joe R. Lansdale, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Donald Westlake, Harlan Ellison and other notable authors. Orbik—a comics fan since childhood—was also getting plenty of work from Marvel and DC doing covers. In 2015, it looked he might need, maybe, five more years until he really hit it big. Those were five years he didn’t have.

To me, Glen could do “classic pulp” art better than just about anybody. His paintings looked like they could legitimately be on some pulp from 1939 or a Gold Medal paperback from 1951. He had the feel of that nailed, with a style that recalled Walter Baumhofer, Norm Saunders and other pulp-era greats.

We lost Glen way too soon, but he left us one hell of a pulptastic legacy. Glen Orbik’s official website is here.

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