Black Gate

I’m a fan of Dragon Magazine, or at least I was back in the 80s. That’s not to say that the now fully online version doesn’t have its good points, but when it comes to what I remember fondly from my youth, Dragon certainly ranks up there with the greats.

One of the most memorable things about the magazine were the advertisements, almost all for games that I couldn’t readily find in a gaming store. I loved looking at these and dreaming of owning games like Aftermath, Talisman, or my personal favorite Bug-Eyed Monsters: They Want Our Women.

As a child of the late 70s and early 80s I missed the creature feature glory days of the 50s and 60s, so this game was my first real indoctrination to the world of female exploitation by powers beyond the scope of simple men.

This campy style of art was so over the top, so ludicrous, that I was drawn to it like a moth to flame. I’m certain marketing departments knew this as they’d been advising great artists to show such evocative scenes on movie posters and pulp magazines for a half century before I came into the picture.

No matter my desire, both for the game and the women represented, I didn’t acquire Bug-Eyed Monsters: They Want Our Women until 2002, but by that point I’d passed the simple acceptance of the awesomeness of it all and started to question the why…

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Art Evolution 2011 ends this month with our final artist of the year, but I have to say that once again it was a thrilling ride. Black Gate had the distinct pleasure of featuring the talents of Russ Nicholson, Janet Aulisio , Eva Widermann, and Chuck Lukacs this year and our final entry comes from the epic talents of Steve Prescott.

Now Steve has been doing this a long time, all the way back to the early days of White Wolf when an art director from the company visited his college campus and reviewed portfolios. For my part, I found Steve through Paizo’s Pathfinder. I remember waiting with anticipation for each Pathfinder adventure path to arrive at my home as the company slowly rolled out Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne.

Both of these six volume series helped set the stage for each of the Pathfinder Iconic characters which were all done by artist Wayne Reynolds. When the company’s 3rd adventure path, A Second Darkness, began I was greeted with a cover credited once again to Wayne, but as I looked over the image I knew another artist had taken over the project with an incredible eye for detail.

Let’s try to put this in perspective, however, because taking over Iconics from Wayne is like replacing Joe Montana at quarterback. Thankfully, like the 49ers of the early 90s, Paizo had their own version of Hall of Fame QB Steve Young with Steve Prescott.

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Eowyn… a fantasy lover’s dream… When I first read Tolkien, I fell in love with her, and really what boy wouldn’t? I’m pretty sure I was in love with her even before I read Lord of the Rings, having watched the Rankin and Bass Return of the King where the Pelennor Fields is laid out in all its animated glory.

Pelennor Fields gets me every time, my adoration of Theoden and his fear that he will never be good enough to sit at the table with his ancestors a strong enough subplot to carry the battle into my top five literary moments. Theoden, however, pales in comparison to Eowyn’s battle with the Lich King, and this cements her as a heroine for the ages.

Her conflict and resolution have been the subject of countless artist’s visions, and you’ll not find a Tolkien calendar, omnibus, reference, etc without this scene portrayed in it. Somehow, Eowyn has transcended the pages, surpassed Frodo and the ring, eclipsed Aragorn and the shards of Narsil, and overshadowed Gandalf and the Balrog while talking hold of Tolkien’s world as the image to both render and remember.

I, like all of you, have seen countless renditions of this conflict, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that I had a new take on the subject material capture my imagination. Before I detail this, let me first set the stage.

I’m a pretty big fan of The Art Order, a site run by Wizards of the Coast Creative Director Jon Schindehette. He does some great stuff over there, and I have to say that some of my favorite topics deal with contests, or should I say ‘challenges’.

One of this year’s artistic competitions revolved around Eowyn and the Nazgul, each artist tasked with the following line, ‘There’s nothing complicated about this challenge – review the scene in the book, and create your own interpretation of the scene…’ The requirements didn’t end there, and if you continued to scroll down you discovered what I perceived as the most interesting aspect of the challenge, the judging, which read as follows, ‘As always quality is a major player in the judging as well as fulfilling the art order, but this time you are also going to be judged on the innovation of your interpretation, and the storytelling of the piece.’

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School is getting back in session, the joyful days of summer turning into a slog of winter, and yet for one small moment in time the thought of school isn’t such a bad thing in kid’s minds. Why, you might ask? Well, because of the chance to shop for school supplies, and this is especially true for the younger set.

I’m sure most of us can well remember heading to the store where you got to go down the school supply isle like it was Christmas morning. Everything was new, crisply packaged, and waiting to be organized into that perfect set of a survival gear for the beginning of classes. In a sense, it was almost like you were a little soldier, explorer, adventurer, etc, and that Trapper Keeper was your backpack ready for the unknown.

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Art Evolution 2011 moves forward with the inclusion of a more modern artist, and I’m happy to report the second European talent of the year!

I have to say that I was/am a huge fan of Wizards of the Coast’s D&D 3rd Edition. I’ll not bore you with the details of why, or tell you it’s better than any other edition of the now venerable game, but I will contend that upon its release the art department spared no expense in bringing in new talent and vibrancy to the appearance of the game.

True, if any of you know the history, Hasbro bought the company in the early 2000s and promptly destroyed the final bastion of shared gaming artistry when they fired all their in-house artists from ‘the pit’, but I’ll contend for the sake of argument that not all bad things came from doing so.

By this, I’m saying that not using a set amount of salaried artists opened the flood gates for a whole world of new talent eager to make their mark on the game and the industry as a whole.

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