Yeah, it’s Frazetta.
Frank Frazetta’s original art for the cover of Eerie #23 (September 1969)
sold for $5,400,000.00 via Heritage Auctions.
The Grand Comics Database notes about the cover:
Frank Frazetta republished this painting, with slight revisions, as a poster titled “Egyptian Queen.” The face of the woman is different in the poster. In an interview in The Comics Journal #174 (February 1995), reprinted on the magazine’s website, Frazetta said, “I’ll never forget, the ‘Egyptian Queen.’ I got that whole painting done, in about a day and a half, and I looked at it. It was done as far as I was concerned. Then I looked at her face, and I didn’t like it […] so I finally just settled for any face, and brought it in, and they printed it that way, and then I forgot about it. So, a couple of months later I get it back; now I was fresh again. And I just looked at it and ‘Pow!’ I whacked in the face you see in all the prints.”
Heritage Auctions about the face revision:
Although Frazetta would revise many of his published works from this era even years after publication, in this instance he seemed to know that The Egyptian Queen was an unqualified masterpiece from the outset. Immediately upon receiving the piece back from publisher Warren in 1969, Frazetta made only very slight and subtle changes, softening the Queen’s eyes to make them even more resonant, thus creating this definitive, strikingly wistful visage that has become indelibly fixed in all fans’ minds from the scores of prints, posters, and publications of all sorts over many decades, including the painting’s iconic 1977 publication as the cover of Creepy #92.
Hat tip to Bado, who broke the news to me.
A bit of Frank Frazetta trivia about Eerie #23:
That issue of Eerie that showcased Frazetta’s Egyptian Queen cover also ran Archie Goodwin and Frank Frazetta’s public service comic “Easy Way To A Tuff Surfboard!”
The PSA had ran in various Warren Publications since 1966 and would continue into the 1970s.
Its claim to fame is that it was Frazetta’s last sequential comic art effort.