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)
Roleplaying games come alive, both in the imagination and at the table, through a mixture of visual, verbal, and mathematical elements. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) was, from the very beginning, at least partly defined by its distinctive pop-art visuals. Indeed, a case can be made that the game's art appealed as much (or more) to new players as its premises or mechanics ever did -- fantasy worlds are rendered most real, after all, by the imagery they entail, whether painted by words or by brushes.
By 1976-77 D&D's visual style had evolved, with an eclectic look akin to the book covers, record jackets, and alternative comix of the time replacing the fan art seen in the original 1974 booklets. Erol Otus was one of a handful of artists who came to embody TSR's 2ND-Wave (1977-82) artistic sensibility. Nearly every fan of Moldvay-Cook-Marsh D&D knows, for example, that it's Otus's paintings that grace the box (and rulebook) covers for the Basic and Expert (B/X) sets -- the power of his storytelling calls to viewers as palpably as the contents, leaving little doubt about the appeal of B/X D&D's pulp-fantasy milieu.
Otus's images most often depict, or at least imply, ongoing narratives of one sort or another, while his visceral pop style combines elements elsewhere seen in 1930s pulp illustrations, 1970s sf-fantasy paperbacks, and early Iron Maiden album covers. Most of his efforts were for 1e Advanced D&D products, but the power of his B/X visuals indelibly marked those rules' incipient diegesis -- the implied world in which game events are said to unfold -- and added a countercultural edge that the later work of Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, and Clyde Caldwell (among others) never contemplates.
Links of Interest
• "Art Evolution Special: Erol Otus" (BlackGate.com)
• "Erol Otus" (Tome of Treasures)
• The Erol Otus Shrine (Tumblr)
• "An Interview with Fantasy Artist Erol Otus" (Tor.com)
