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.

Kenosha Festival of Cartooning

A number of issues have made it difficult for me to attend this year's Kenosha Festival of Cartooning as much as I would like, but I was able to make it down to the University of Wisconsin at Parkside last night to see the editorial cartoonists' panel discussion.

Ann Telnaes (Washington Post), Wiley Miller ("Non Sequitur"), Jen Sorensen (The Nib, Fusion), and John Hambrock ("The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee") discussed the role of editorial cartooning in this election year, as well as the reactions some of their cartoons have provoked. (It shouldn't be necessary to say, but strangers phoning a cartoonist's mother is way, way out of bounds. How would you like it if we drew your mother?)

If you're in the area, you'll find the rest of the festival at the Kenosha Public Museum downtown. If you're lucky, the exhibit of editorial cartoons, with works of Garry Trudeau, Kevin Kalaugher, Steve Brodner, Mike Ramirez, and many more might still be up at UW-P's Rita Tallent Pickens Hall.

Stormtrooperback Saturday

Readers who followed the link from the Bergetoons Facebook page the other day might have noticed that the graphic on the FB post wasn't actually from this week's cartoon. Actually, it was a portion of this:

Back in my college days and well into my 20s, I was a Dungeons & Dragons player, and even attended a couple of GenCons back when they were hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. I wrote a running narrative of one of the campaigns I played in, and this was an illustration for the cover of Volume IV.

Our dungeon master (the person who devises the setting for the other players to role play in) wanted to switch us over from a medieval game to a futuristic one, to which end he placed one suit of storm trooper armor in a dungeon. My fighter character tried it on, found that it was much lighter yet more effective than the chain mail he was wearing before, and happily took it as his own.

It had the drawback of being radioactive, but my character wasn't smart enough to make the connection between the suit and his hair falling out.

In more traditional garb

I also remember a Star Wars-themed game I played in at one of those GenCons in which all us players were Sky-Walk-R clones trapped in a filming of Episode IV -- the only episode to have come out at that point.  The slightest deviation from the plot could prove fatal to a character; and when time came for the game to be over, the surviving Sky-Walk-R clones were still trapped in the trash compactor of the Death Star as we players were struggling to remember how that particular problem was overcome in the movie.

It is quite possible that we had neglected to instruct R2D2 to tap into the Death Star's main computer.

World AIDS Day

I chose not to draw this week's cartoon about World AIDS Day today. After 30 years, I'm not sure what new things there are to say about the disease.

And yet, after 30 years, I'm unsettled as to what image to use to symbolize AIDS. Ten years ago, I used a skeletal death figure, even though many people living with AIDS have reason to object to that as a characterization. (And, in my very limited personal experience, I count among my friends about as many living with AIDS as have died from it.)

In October, 1985, I was asked to draw an illustration to go along with an article about AIDS by Kari Dixon for the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin - Parkside. For that illustration, I chose to illustrate the pariah effect the disease had in those days, when it was new to the public consciousness and there was no treatment.

(You have heard of Nathaniel Hawthorne, I hope. I certainly expected that a college readership would have.)