First off, no, this has nothing to do with Terry Brooks…
So I recently saw Conan 3D 2011… and yeah I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not going to go into that because it’s been beaten to death elsewhere, and certainly here on Black Gate. Still, I had to wonder after seeing it, what did the world of Hyboria get for its 2011 dollar?
Considering the movie reviews and box office receipts, whatever the cost for art direction it was far too much. As I watched, I contemplated the words of John Fultz and his thoughts concerning the imagery of the movie when he said… wait, I’m going to go look this up so John can’t complain I misquoted him… Ok, here we go…
The Hyborian Age has never looked so wondrous, splendid, and believable on screen. From the virgin wilderness and Cimmerian villages to the decadent, sprawling cities, the vast monasteries, and the ancient citadels with skull-shaped caves, the movie simply looks fantastic. The costuming too is spot-on and suitably grimy, evocative, and well-designed. Same goes for the props: swords, spears, armor, ships, etc.
Herman Lau's Nouveau look at Eowyn and the Lich King... Click for Larger Image
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.’
I know when you saw this that somewhere inside you felt it too...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.
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.
Da Vinci didn't make the list because of the timeframe... but still... how about those eggs?So as it often happens here a BG L.A., John O’Neill issues a challenge and then we beat writers have to find a way to make it happen [Ok, so that only me and Ryan, but still]. John was looking over stories that got good hits from various sites around the internet and then phones me to say that I should do a piece on ‘Top 10s’ because people seem to really like top ten lists.
Ok, so after hanging up with him I yelled for Kandline to bring me the LA Times, which she was currently using to keep nail polish from dripping on her far too short skirt. After she made her way into my office I tried to convince her to help me determine what might be an interesting top ten. She suggested ‘Top 10 Disney stars who have a chance at winning an Oscar’, but Ryan Harvey shot that one down from his office next door as the sound of Miley Cyrus from the reception desk delivered wooden lines like a chorus of malevolent crows.
After some further consideration, these without my secretary’s help, I finally decided to go with the old standby of an art related article. That being said, I’m happy to bring you the Top 10 Fantasy Artists of the Past 100 Years.
Now you might be wondering how I came into possession of this list. Well, I went deep into my contacts and put together fifty names that consisted only of artists, art directors, convention organizers, and RPG publishers. Not a single voter on this panel didn’t have a vested interest in the topic at hand, and when all was said and done my list contained over fifty incredible names, but alas, I was only looking for 10, so that’s where we are. Oh, and if you’re wondering, no, I didn’t vote [no matter how much I would have loved to].
You 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…
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.
Art 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.
Once 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.
Well 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 WizardsD&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!
