Visual Milieu 2: Bill Willingham

Despite being a key member of TSR's 2ND-Wave (1977-82) art team, Bill Willingham is probably best known as a comics creator. His writing and/or art has appeared in any number of titles since the early 1980s, including Green Lantern, Batman & the Outsiders, Elementals, Coventry, and Fables. His success in comics comes with no little irony given that critics of his Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) visuals often argue that their "cartoony" character is ill suited to "serious" fantasy gaming.

Be that as it may, D&D's sensibilities were undoubtedly influenced by the comic books of the 1960s and 1970s [1] -- which, along with cheap paperback books, were the pulp literature of the day. And Willingham is no different than a host of other '70s pop artists -- John Byrne, Jeff Dee, Keith Giffen, and Barry Windsor-Smith, among others -- who understood that cartooning (as opposed to illustration) could engage consumers, especially pre-teens and teens, as effectively as any then-current style.

Willingham's TSR efforts were slick, inviting, and dynamic precisely because they tapped into the ethos of the era's comic books. His work may lack the visceral weirdness of Erol Otus's renderings or the high-fantasy realism of later (post-1982) D&D imagery, but there's no disputing that Willingham helped define the game as a pop-cultural artifact, fully in tune with artistic trends of the day.

Note

[1] In a recent interview, Timothy Kask reiterated the oft-noted fact that Marvel Comics' Doctor Strange led to the psionics system presented in Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry. The general impact of comic books, including Marvel's Conan the Barbarian, on the game's early development has routinely been noted by both observers and participants, including Robert Kuntz.

Links of Interest

• "Bill Willingham" (Tome of Treasures)

• "Bill Willingham" (WordPress)

• "Bill Willingham and the Iconography of D&D" (Corky.net)

• "Bill Willingham Interview" (The Comics Journal)