The Pre-Raphaelite Barbarian
The first thing you notice about Barry Windsor-Smith’s Conan comics is their beauty.
Starting in 1970, Smith drew almost two dozen of the first issues of Marvel Comics’ translation of Conan into a monthly color comic book, and added a few more stories in the oversized black-and-white companion magazine Savage Tales. Scripts for those stories, often direct adaptations of Robert E. Howard tales, were by Marvel veteran Roy Thomas, but Smith has stated that he had a prominent role in the plotting of the comics, sometimes even providing dialogue.
Smith’s work has an elegance and power to it unusual in comics, then or now. His line-work is detailed, expressive, and precise: the right marks in the right places. Compositionally, his work is always clear, always energetic.
And it’s alive, because his characters are alive; they move through three-dimensional space, they have realistic body language — more than that, their forms express what they feel and think.
Perhaps above all, Windsor-Smith’s design — of clothes, swords, balustrades, towers, armour, even ships and stone walls — is constantly inventive, deriving from the organic forms of art nouveau and the near-hallucinatory realism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
This has the crucial effect of building a world for Conan and his adventures, a setting with texture and, implictly, a history. We see the shining kingdoms and the jeweled thrones about to be trodden under sandalled feet, and we believe in them.
It’s only polite to introduce yourself properly, and as this is my fourth posting on this blog, a proper introduction is really overdue. So: Who am I, and what am I doing here?
John O’Neill’s editorial in Black Gate 14 touched on gaming, on wargaming and role-playing, and on the way these things shaped the way friends interact. It hit home for me, because I recognised in my life much the same sort of phenomenon John described in his own.
I have a habit of buying books — a compulsion, really. Older books, mostly, from book fairs and small used bookstores. Things that look unusual, and which, in the absence of an immediate reason on my part to read them immediately, often sit on my shelves for some time before I get around to them.
Role-playing games have always interested me because, at heart, they’re about stories. They’re ways to tell stories that you don’t know in advance, ways to bring people together to create something unpredictable but still structured in a narrative form. Now, that said, the question is: how do you go about doing that? If you’re writing a module, an adventure, that referees are going to pick up off a store shelf (or download from a web site), what do you give them to help create that story with their players?