Iconic Images: Freas's ‘Please... fix it, Daddy?’



Frank Kelly Freas (1922-2005), known as ‘Dean of Science Fiction Artists’, is one of the most celebrated of all genre cover artists. A fifty year career, and hundreds of magazine and book covers, produced many memorable visions, but it is ‘Please... fix it, Daddy?’, the image of a plaintive-looking robot holding in its gigantic hand the broken body of a dead soldier, by which Freas is best known.

It was originally the cover for the October 1953 issue of John Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction, illustrating Tom Godwin's first published story ‘The Gulf Between’. Godwin is probably more famous now for ‘The Cold Equations’, in which a spaceship pilot has no choice but to sacrifice the life of a stowaway if he is to have enough fuel to complete his mission, however much he would prefer not to. ‘The Gulf Between’, frankly not so good a story as ‘The Cold Equations’, concerns two rival military officers, Knight and Cullin, who disagree over the nature of the ideal soldier. Cullin thinks the crucial thing is absolute obedience, where Knight prioritises human initiative. In a complicated storyline, Cullin suborns a robot to take revenge on Knight, a plot that goes awry and results in Cullin's death. The story's title speaks to its moral: that the gulf between human and robotic understanding will inevitably reveal the latter to be deficient.

What makes this image so iconic? It has to do partly with the expertly rendered limpness of the dead human body; and more, I think, with the skill with which Freas paints the doleful countenance of the robot. It's not clear how the apparently seamless metal out of which the creature's face is constructed can shape itself into such an expression; or more precisely, the evident rigidity of the robot's massive body throws the poignancy of its facial expression into sharper relief. The dab of blood on the middle finger of the robotic left-hand looks almost dainty, until we remind ourselves of the difference in scale between machine and man, and match that dab to the caved-in human chest. The title tells us the metal man didn't know what it was doing, perhaps didn't know its own strength, is sorry for the damage. It strikes home precisely because we understand, as the robot does not, that death cannot be reversed. All in all, it is a masterpiece of sciencefictional pathos.

Roger Taylor, the drummer in British rock-band Queen, clearly thought so, because two decades later he proposed hiring Frears to recreate this image as the cover to Queen's sixth studio album News of the World (1977).  Frears, a fan of classical music, had never heard of Queen, and took some persuading; but eventually he executed the commission with panache, replacing the dead soldier with members of the band: guitarist Brian May and lead singer Freddie Mercury in the gigantic hand, Roger Taylor and bassist John Deacon spilling from it.



Opening the gatefold of the original vinyl record sleeve reveals a completely different context to the original Astounding story.



Here the giant robot appears to have gone on a rampage, breaking through the domed stone roof of some futuristic rock-concern venue to snatch the musicians out with life-crushing force before reaching back in to grab terrified audience members. It's an object lesson in how context alters our reading of an image: the robot's facial expression here looks less anguished and more inquiring, as if offering the bodies to some implacable robot deity. Less ‘Please... fix it, Daddy?’ and more ‘Is this enough of a sacrifice?’

Freas's image has suffered the fate of all truly iconic artworks. It has been plagiarised, as in this 1980 Japanese SF magazine cover:


... and parodied, as here by US animated cartoon Family Guy:



Indeed Family Guy's creator, Seth MacFarlane, has something of an obsession with the News of the World artwork—he was, he claims, traumatised by it as a child. In one episode of the comedy, ‘Killer Queen’ (series 10, episode 16, originally aired March 11, 2012) the show's antihero baby protagonist Stewie suffers nightmares after seeing the image.


You see his point. As an image of machinic implacability and human fragility, it is rendered immensely more haunting, and even unnerving, by the yearning expression of the killer. It is deserves its place as one of SF cover art's great icons.

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