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Art of the Genre: An Interview with Stephen Hickman

Art of the Genre: An Interview with Stephen Hickman

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lemurian-princess-254You know, life in LA is never easy, we all just make it look that way. I guess that’s why a few months back I got a rather rude awakening from none other than John Hocking. I’d just gotten back in from completing the Michael Whelan assignment, and considering everything that went into that, I was feeling pretty stoked.

The interview finally goes to press, I pop open the Champaign, and then what happens? Hocking rings me and asks when I’m doing a Stephen Hickman interview. Hmmmm, at that moment I felt like an NFL quarterback who just won the Super Bowl, goes off the field to the locker room to celebrate and has the owner pull him aside and ask, ‘what are you going to do next season that will get us back here?’

I mean come on! Can a guy get a moment to bask in the glory? Well, the answer is no, not here at BG L.A… The next thing I know O’Neill is calling, Kandline sits crying at the reception desk over a failed casting call, and Ryan Harvey won’t stop pestering me that he’s a published fiction writer so he should have the bigger oceanfront office. Yep, business as usual…

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Art of the Genre: Cosplay

Art of the Genre: Cosplay

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There are two incredible things in this picture, and they aren't the outfits
There are two incredible things in this picture, and they aren't the outfits

I live in L.A., Tinseltown, Hollywood, the City of Dreams, and you’d think that being here would overwhelm me with fantasy, but in reality it’s never that way. Sure, now and then you’re someplace ordinary and run into a ‘star’, but seeing the reality of that always seems a letdown as well.

I think that’s why having an office next to Ryan Harvey is so special, because he’s even more a Peter Pan than I am, and his creative vision is always spilling out into the reception area. Kandline, or Kandy as I call her, helps too, her ‘I’m going to make it’ and goth-prep style always bringing a smile to my face when I roll in late from a long line at Starbucks.

Still, I live a pretty mundane life if you don’t include trips on the BG Zeppelin. I have a wife, a son, and bills to pay just like most folk in the world, but there are those moments in time when even I dream about what could have been if time worked a bit differently.

What do I mean? Well, I’m talking about those crazy kids today and their ‘Cosplay’. You see, I’m a Halloween junky, like last year I dressed up in full costume each Friday of October to pick up my son from pre-school. That being said, however, I end my persona-swaps after All Hallows’ Eve, but if life were different, if I were younger, and if Cosplay had existed in 1990 I’m pretty sure my life would have been drastically different.

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Art Evolution 2011: Janet Aulisio

Art Evolution 2011: Janet Aulisio

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obsidiman_merchant-254Art Evolution continues with the second entry into this exclusive club for 2011, but if you’ve missed any of the other contributors you can find them here.

I can’t remember the first time I saw a Janet Aulisio piece of art, but I presume it was in the pages of FASA’s Shadowrun RPG in 1992. Like most games of the era, interior work was done in black and white line art [although FASA was the first to include color plates which took the product to whole new levels of RPG design]. Janet, for her part, was tasked with adding a different level of art to the games 2nd Edition and her technique stood out in a style I like to refer to as ‘art of the scratch’.

This is a kind of Russ Nicholson school of art, a concept where ink is used in every aspect of the picture, even the negative space. White is almost seen as an enemy, and Janet herself has said ‘I’m like any other artist, greedy for lots of space to spread my art’.

Oddly, I was instantly taken with her style. I note this as ‘odd’ because to that point I’d been a kind of beauty purist, a clean image always more appealing to me than sketchy stuff. I can only guess that by 1992 my former ‘teenage eye’ was being replaced by something more accepting of a larger world of artistic style.

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Art of the Genre: An Interview with Matthew D. Wilson

Art of the Genre: An Interview with Matthew D. Wilson

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iron-kingdoms-254Once again I get a chance show you all the inner workings of the Black Gate LA offices. Yep, it’s always about living the dream, so I hope you enjoy the view.

After having finally convinced my secretary, Kandline, that cosplaying an elf wasn’t required when she challenged me to afternoon games of Conquest of Nerath, I sat back in my chair and watched a trio of surfers try to catch some rather pathetic waves rolling in along our bit of the Redondo beachfront. From across the hall I could hear Ryan Harvey spouting copious amounts of venom toward Peter Jackson and his newest release of dwarf images for the upcoming Hobbit adaptation, something along the lines of ‘Rankin and Bass will be rolling over in their graves about now!’ a consistent theme.

Enter the dreaded buzz from the front desk. Yep, John O’Neill was at it again, this time his rather brief list of demands of the west coast offices ending in my traveling up the 405 to Santa Monica for an interview with Privateer Press Creative Director Matt Wilson.

Now if you know one certain fact about Matt, it’s that he’s a kind of workaholic. I dig that about him, and while he’s no longer in the Pacific Northwest exclusively doing Privateer work, his mind is ever pushing for bigger and better things at that gaming company.

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Art of the Genre: Leiber, Mignola, and Graphic Novels

Art of the Genre: Leiber, Mignola, and Graphic Novels

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Mignola... when doves fly...
Mignola... when doves fly...
In 1991 I wasn’t a fan of the Mike Mignola. To be frank, I actually couldn’t stand his artwork, but again I was twenty and my taste in art leaned much toward the polished standard and less toward the truly talented.

At that time I also wasn’t much of a reader. Sure, I read almost every day, taking in as much fantasy as I could, but for the most part it was also commercially driven stuff that in the final call of ‘what matters in fantasy’ it would almost all be found woefully lacking.

So it was with great interest that I discovered Epic Comics rendition of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser on my comic shop’s shelves. It was noteworthy because it featured art by Mike Mignola, was adapted by Howard Chaykin, and had a kind of darkness to it that was antithesis to the flare of most superhero books coming out of the early stages of the comic boom.

For me this series created a kind of enigma, that being that I loved fantasy but had only associated with Fritz Leiber in the TSR gaming supplement Lankhmar: City of Adventure. [Note: At the time I role-played in TSR’s Lankhmar, the song ‘One Night in Bangkok’ was on the radio and to this day I can’t say the world Lankhmar without setting it to a British vocal intonation accompanied by the words ‘City of Adventure’, just as Murry Head would began his song with ‘Bangkok, Oriental Setting’. BTW, it has to be the only Top 10 song in history that makes Chess seem downright cool.]

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Art of the Genre: The Critical Hit Update

Art of the Genre: The Critical Hit Update

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tank_the_dragon_-_text_beneath_box-300Well now, I’m making this special appearance because I promised Zachary, who I haven’t seen in some time actually, that I’d post up news on The Critical Hit. News, you see, has finally happened, although it all seems very mixed at the moment.

A few months back, after posting several comics here in Black Gate, Jeff Laubenstein and I sold our comic, The Critical Hit, to Wizards of the Coast for a new website comic launch they were going with this summer. It was a kind of veneration to the old Dragonmirth comics found in the back of Dragon Magazines, so I thought The Critical Hit fit very nicely with that concept. So did Jon Schindehette the Creative Director at Wizards, and so Black Gate’s loss was to be Wizards gain.

Today, Friday the 8th, the test of The Critical Hit went live over at the Wizards D&D website so I hope that all of you who enjoyed the few comics I posted here will journey on over and take a look at it here. We’ve been getting beaten up a bit in the comments section, so if you do like the piece and would like to see it continue, please sign in and comment yourself. Otherwise, I guess I won’t see you in the funny papers!

Art of the Genre: Art of Anthologies

Art of the Genre: Art of Anthologies

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Stephen Hickman brings the Man-Kzin Wars to life as a beautiful anthology produced by Larry Niven
Stephen Hickman brings the Man-Kzin Wars to life as a beautiful anthology produced by Larry Niven

I’m not really sure if this can be classified at ‘art’, but certainly there is an art to the creation of anthologies. I mean, for all intents and purpose, Black Gate is an anthology, the scope and size of these new issues making it more a book than a magazine.

John O’Neill, our venerable editor, has done a fantastic job of giving his readers both the feel of an anthology while also being committed enough to each story as to provide wonderful art with it. That artistic contribution, in my opinion, is something that helps define what Black Gate is trying to do, and although the art direction in each issue’s very essence isn’t held to a single vision, the coherence of the product is still maintained in the highest quality.

Black Gate also weaves a thick quilt of characters within its pages, the repeated inclusion of certain authors allowing stories and characters to build, grow, and foster a relationship with a reader that many contemporary anthologies can’t produce. I’ve seen reviewers try to knock this, but in the end several have come around to indicate that John’s repeated choices are one of their favorite pieces of the magazine.

The art of the short story in its very nature is a simple entertainment, a microcosm of imagination that I fear is too often read like a teaser trailer found before your main attraction at the local Cineplex. In them we are often required to be told rather than shown a story, and I’m reminded of the musky depth of Don Lafontaine’s voice when I’m provided back story inside stories of already limited words… his signature opening ever echoing in my brain… ‘In a world where…’

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Art of the Genre: The Black Company

Art of the Genre: The Black Company

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Kerdark grabs a chance at the original Black Company cover
Kerdark grabs a chance at the original Black Company cover

In 1984 author Glen Cook published The Black Company. In 1990, my freshman year in college, this book was passed to me by a person on my dorm and I spent the next decade following the exploits of the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar.

Now, as a storyteller myself, the book resonated with its rather unique concept, that it was actually a tale written by the Company annalist as he continued the four hundred years of written tradition the company had laid down since its came out of the distant south.

This is a military book, although cast in a fantasy setting. To that point, there are wizards present, although all of them are seemingly either competent illusionists or powerful necromancers. You don’t see any fireballs or lightning bolts, and the craft of a medieval military is kept up in rather precise fashion as the Black Company moves from what I would perceive as northern Europe, through Africa, and finally ending up someplace in India.

It’s a fantastic tale, one so well crafted that I’m actually floored even today when I remember a three-book long twist that had me shaking my head and calling for Cook to be given a Hugo. If you haven’t read the series, I certainly suggest it, even if the first book is over twenty-five years old and what was acceptable for publication then is much different than today. I still think these books hold water and are well worth your time, but on to the reason I assume you’re here, the art.

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Art Evolution 2011: Russ Nicholson

Art Evolution 2011: Russ Nicholson

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nicholson-invite-254Yes indeed, there’s yet another addition to Art Evolution! Now you didn’t think I’d sit idly by after the success of my 2010 Art Evolution Project wrapped up did you? No, certainly not, and although I’d managed to hit twenty artists in that mighty collaboration, I wasn’t satisfied because I knew there were many more artists still out there who deserved spots in what my project finally materialized into.

Still, I must admit I was pretty burned out after the initial run, so I took a couple of months off, focused on Art of the Genre, and retooled as I let brew the countless images of other great RPG artists still on my now venerable list.

By February I was convinced that Art Evolution needed further contributions in the modern era of role-playing, and I also thought that at least one more 90s talent and an old-school contribution would best serve the spectrum of what was already in print. To do this, I decided I’d include only five artists this year, five stalwarts who, like all those before, defined and inspired with work that was a step above their contemporaries.

So, without further diatribes into the ‘why’, let me take you to the ‘who’, but first, we strap into the time machine bound for the dawn of the big 80s…

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Art of the Genre: Art Road Trip

Art of the Genre: Art Road Trip

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John O'Neill, Jeff Easley, and me before the waitress kicked us out.
John O'Neill, Jeff Easley, and me before the waitress kicked us out.

Ok, so here’s the deal, I like art. Yeah, I know, that’s hard to believe and all, but it’s true. This passion of all things visually marketed in oil, acrylic, water-color, and the like brought me to Art Evolution, and from that platform I’ve fostered many great relationships with artists.

In November I posted the Art Evolution piece on artist Jeff Easley, and when I asked him if he enjoyed it he responded, ‘Yeah, if I ever do an art book, you can do the intro.’

Ok, I’m going to give you a second to let that sink in…

As absolutely insane as it sounds, Jeff Easley, icon of TSR and modern fantasy art has never, ever, done an art book. Well, if you know me at all you know my response, which went something like this, ‘Uh… Do the intro? Heck, I’ll do the whole book!’

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