Black Gate

I walked into work today, a holiday themed hot chocolate in my hand and was greeted by Kandi as usual, although her normally blonde locks were now blazing red. Granted it was eye-catching, perhaps even stunning, but as I looked at her from my office I couldn’t help but wonder what the obsession was with redheads… especially in fiction.

I picked up my phone, buzzed Ryan next door and hear the distinctive Black Hole Soundtrack ringer.

“Hello?” says Ryan.

“Hey,” I reply. “Did you see Kandi?”

“Yeah, why?”

“What did you think?” I asked.

“I thought she was channeling some Christina Hendricks,” he answered.

Exactly! Kandi turned from Barbie to Firefly’s Saffron in the course of a night, but she still had something going for her that the bulk of fantasy redheads don’t… clothing.

You see, redheads don’t like clothes… At least that’s what I was brought up to believe. I’m really not sure why this is considering that in my forty years on this planet every single redhead I’ve known was intelligently required to wear clothes because their freckled skin would burn a nice shade of crimson in less than five minutes if exposed to the sun.

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I walked into the Black Gate L.A. building this morning and Kandi read me the following message as I passed the reception desk:

“Fantasy and Western Artist Darrell K. Sweet passed away on Monday morning.”

I looked at her, those silky blues eyes staring back at me as if to ask what she should do. I had no answer, simply taking the note and walking into my office before closing the door…

I’d spent the past year working to get in contact with Darrell, all my attempts falling short, and now it was too late. Too late to find some unknown tidbit of information from one of the most recognizable fantasy artists of the past thirty years.

When I did my infamous ‘Top 10 Fantasy Artists of the Past 100 Years’ article earlier this year, I didn’t include my personal Top 10 list, only the added and evaluated contributions of 50 industry experts. Darrell didn’t make their list [actually he didn’t get a single vote other than mine], which I thought was a huge travesty, but nonetheless he’d made mine prestigious list because I can’t readily remember fantasy literature without him.

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Erol Otus hates me… It’s a dead on fact, something that can’t be changed, I’m afraid, and yet I find myself having a hankering to talk about him in a favorable light. I went after Erol for Art Evolution, and he was the very first artist I’d never met to get an invite to the project. Erol wasn’t interested, and no matter what I did to try to entice him he just kept getting further away from a commitment. It’s the name of the game, a numbers game, and John O’Neill once told me that if I went out to get 20 artists and my approach had a capture rate of 19, then whatever went wrong couldn’t be put on me.

Still, the more Art Evolutions I did, the more I found people asking for Erol and what his contribution would look like. Erik Mona over at Paizo went so far as to say that without Erol my project would never be complete.

To tell you the honest truth, when I was young I detested Otus’s contributions to the field. I thought his work was that of a child among men, and if you showed me an Otus image I’d sneer at it in veritable disgust. Remember, however, that youth doesn’t represent good taste, and certainly as the years went by and my eye for art changed, a greater respect grew for Otus’s work. Now that’s not to say it became ‘better’ art, but it did facilitate a nostalgic bent to my youth that softened its edges and helped me accept what it was.

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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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