Flights of Fantasy

Refreshing my memory about one of the cartoons in last Saturday's Graphical History Tour, I came across a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons doodles I had drawn 40 years ago this month.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Sept. 8, 1983

The previous year, I had written a much-too-long article for the ill-fated Kenosha Tribune about GenCon, the annual August convention of fantasy gamers hosted by TSR Inc. Originally held in the company's hometown of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (hence its name), the convention moved to the more spacious University of Wisconsin at Parkside just outside of Kenosha from 1978 to 1984.

In 1983, I stuck to drawings, GenCon having included an art show in that year's convention. GenCon was held August 18 and 19, 1983.

I had a hard time finding the original of this pen-and-ink drawing, until I remembered that in spite of the stiffness of the characters, I liked it enough to have it framed and hanging it in my old apartment.

"Arbar Laurethôl's Inexplicable Dream," August, 1983

Sure enough, there it was, somewhat yellowed from its years on a wall, still in a frame on a basement shelf of odds and ends from my apartment that have never found a home in our house. 

I'm fairly certain that I don't have the original drawings for the D&D creatures in the Ranger clipping at the top of this post, however. I do have some similar sketches for the GenCon recap in a Ranger the next September; but if I ever got the kobold, grimlock, and white dragon drawings back from the Ranger, I probably slipped them into my AD&D manuals that got soaked after our basement flooded several years ago.

For someone who hates drawing buildings, I certainly included quite a bit of architecture in "Arbar Laurethôl's Inexplicable Dream."

"Attack of the Corbinards"

I dispensed quickly with the task of drawing any architecture in "Attack of the Corbinards," in which Hitchcock gets medieval. It could probably have benefited on a cinematic level from a more populated battlefield. 

None of these drawings were stored with the others; this one shared a folder with some charcoal drawings and wound up with some charcoal smudges on it (removed with Photoshop).

But I believe it was included in the 1983 art display. It doesn't have a title on the back, but it does have my signature and the numbering of the exhibit organizers there. The signature on the front of these, by the way, is a quondam runification of my name.

Further technical arcana: the siren and "Arbar Laurethôl's Inexplicable Dream" were drawn on bristol board, whereas "Attack of the Corbinards" was drawn on plain old typing paper. It also wasn't printed in the Ranger, so now it's a Bergetoons exclusive.