Art of the Genre: Behind the Curtain at Black Gate L.A.
First off, thanks to all the readers who read and posted about last week’s Art of the Genre article ‘The Top 10 RPG Artists of the Past 40 Years’ and if you haven’t taken a look, I hope you do right here! Oh, and remember, it isn’t who is the ‘best,’ but who was the most impactful.
Second, and putting into practice a bit of the Wizard’s First Rule, I thought I’d dip into the email ‘bag’ and pull back the curtain on a part of my life here in L.A. You see, there are often questions sent to me concerning Black Gate L.A. offices, like possible internships with us, and many times just inquiries as to ‘who are you?’ My current favorite of these is artist Jeff Easley’s request to ‘Post pictures of Kandi!’ which I got last week. Well, since I had a moment today between a lunch at the Red Lobster with John Scalzi [hey, he’s from Ohio and I’m from Indiana, so to us that is still an awesome and upscale establishment, so sue us!] and my two hour commute into downtown for floor seats at a Lakers game with Bill Simmons, I decided I’d introduce all my readers, and those of Black Gate in general, to our working version of ‘The Office’ here in LaLa Land.
For the purposes of keeping readers’ interest, I’m starting with our resident part-timer, ‘Goth Chick’ Sue Granquist. She spends half her time here in L.A. working with the horror genre movie industry and the other half in Chicago around the Midwest convention circuit — and bringing our editor John O’Neill coffee. She and I have a strange relationship, and I swear if she wasn’t so damn Goth and I wasn’t so damn married, there would have been an illicit office affair years ago, but as it is we just have fun insulting each other as much as possible.
I took this picture about a month ago, while we were having lunch on the veranda outside the office on the ‘beach side’. Chick, as I affectionately call her, although hating the sun most days, had decided to join me for lunch and afterward sat on the railing with her back to the Pacific. I had a nice vantage point and told her, ‘Chick, I bet I could take a photo of you from here and then Photoshop the railing out of it to make you look like you were suspended in the clear blue SoCal sky.’ ‘Art,’ she said using her nickname for me, ‘I bet you a bag of black licorice jelly beans you can’t.’
Well, as you can see, I got those damnable jelly beans and they sit on my desk to feed to gulls swirling in the sea breeze out my window when I’m felling particularly peevish.
