Designers & Dragons: The Column

This article ended up being about twice as long as any of the boxed material in Designers & Dragons itself, but I let it expand because online publication allows for more "space" for this sort of thing. —SA, 12/5/11

Dungeons & Dragons has a long history with the comics industry. Some of that history was related in Designers & Dragons in the histories of TSR (pages 19-23) and Kenzer & Company (pages 310-311).

But, there's more to the story than that.

The First Comics: 1981-1982

Our (hi)story begins in either 1979 or 1980 at the art department of TSR. By this time, TSR had realized that D&D was a big success, and as a result the company had been split into two separate buildings: one for the business employees and one for the creative ones. The art department was located with the rest of the creators, and at the time included Jeff Dee, Erol Otus, Paul Reiche, Evan Robinson, Jim Roslof, and Bill Willingham. Within that group, Jeff Dee and Bill Willingham were both interested in comics. In fact, Dee had already produced his own comic-book super-hero RPG, Villains & Vigilantes (1979), as is described in the Brief History of FGU (pages 71-77).

Because of their interest in comics, Dee and Willingham approached Gary Gygax about the possibility of starting a line of TSR comics. It was an idea whose time had probably come, as underground fantasy comics like The First Kingdom (1974), Cerebus (1977), and ElfQuest (1978) were coming of age and in the next decade would lead to comics more explicitly derived from D&D, such as Arrow Comics' The Realm (1986). However, Gygax turned the idea over to the Dragon magazine editor--perhaps because the magazine had usually included some comics--and it died there.

Meanwhile, TSR's ad department was thinking about comics of their own. They had decided to produce a series of full-page ads in both black & white and color that were designed as comic strips. The first 9-page strip, probably drawn by Keenan Powell, featured a group of three adventures--an elf, a fighter, and a magic-user--exploring a dungeon, fighting a shadow, and then facing green slime. It appeared in Marvel Comics in 1981.

When Dee and Willingham saw the ad, they didn't like it. And, looking back, it does have issues. The art style is crude, and the panels aren't separated like they would be in most modern comic books. Besides that, the D&D continuity is somewhat poor. The wizard chases away a Shadow with a Hold Monster "charm" that also lights up the dungeon. And the party doesn't even have a cleric! Dee rushed off to tell the ad department about the problems with the strip … and was promptly given the job of continuing it.

Jeff Dee drew the second strip (which includes a cleric suddenly stepping out of the shadows), then Bill Willingham drew at least six more. Steve Sullivan was meanwhile doing the writing. These eight (total) strips were broken into two adventures. The first four, starting with that shadow fight, detailed a journey into a dragon's lair. The next four took many of the same adventurers out into the wilderness and then ended mid-story, with the final words of the comic being, "Could the end of the quest lie here?" (Answer: apparently so.) These comics all appeared in Marvel Comics between 1981 and 1982 and were largely focused on the Dungeons & Dragons Basic and Expert Sets of the era.

A second series of strips that ran simultaneously in 1981-1982 is less well-known. They appear to have been published in Dragon Magazine, Epic Illustrated, and/or Heavy Metal. The first four strips featured an expedition into the "Dungeons of Roakire" while the last two, labeled "Quest Through The Savage Country", began a new adventure that was cut-off midstream. The paneling, captioning, and coloring style for these strips are quite different from the work in the Marvel Comics strips, so they might not have shared the same creative team. A "WTW" signature which doesn't match the "Willingham" that Bill Willingham typically used confuses things more.

In any case, in 1981 both Dee and Willingham left TSR. They'd go on to work with FGU, then pass out of the industry for a time. Willingham did the last of his strips freelance, after which the ads department decided to cancel them, returning afterward to more traditional ad design.

For several years, those 14 pages of comic ads would be the sum total of the TSR comic corpus.

The Dragonlance Expansion: 1987-1991

By the mid-1980s, TSR was growing increasingly sophisticated with its expansion into other media. They'd pushed into the book trade in 1982 with their Endless Quest (1982-1987) books and onto television screens with their Dungeons & Dragons cartoon (1983-1985). Much of this new sophistication culminated in the Dragonlance project, which TSR simultaneously released as adventures (1984-1986) and novels (1984-1985).

TSR opted to use Dragonlance to break into comics as well, not with original works (which would wait another few years), but instead with adaptations of the three Dragonlance Chronicles novels.

The Dragonlance Saga: Book One (1987), an 80-page graphic novel that adapted the first half of Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984) was scripted by Roy Thomas, former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics and also a comic writer. He was at the time best-known for his long-run on Marvel's Conan the Barbarian (1970) and his golden-age super-hero comics such as the All-Star Squadron (1981).

This Dragonlance comic was well-reviewed, and could have-been a classic if given the right support. Unfortunately, TSR mainly distributed it using their existing connections, which put it primarily into game and book stores. Some combination of TSR's lack of reputation in the comic industry and their production of the entire series as graphic novels--which were relatively rare at the time--kept it from achieving larger success in the comic book field.

Thus, while TSR did publish four more Dragonlance graphic novels (1988-1991), advancing the storyline into Dragons of Spring Dawning (1985), they never finished the storyline, and the books are almost unknown today. The fifth and final volume is one of the rarer TSR collectibles, regularly earning prices over $200 online.

Of course by the time that TSR published The Dragonlance Saga: Book Five (1991) they were already onto a new comic venture--one that is hinted at by the last two Dragonlance comic volumes. Where previous volumes had said "A TSR Graphic Novel", volumes four and five instead stated they were "A DC/TSR Graphical Novel".

And there was a good reason for that ...

The DC Explosion: 1988-1991

Just as TSR was getting started with their Dragonlance graphic novels, they were also negotiating a deal with one of the top two US comic companies--DC. No doubt, the Dragonlance graphic novels had helped generate interest with the comic company, despite their traditional distribution. TSR was also increasingly crossing over with the comic field thanks to their Marvel Super Heroes (1984) RPG. Somewhere amidst all of that, DC and TSR came to a deal, and the result would be 126 different comics published in four years, spread across five major series and a few specials. They would include (for the first time ever) totally original comics based on the Dungeons & Dragons game and its major settings

The D&D comics line kicked off with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1988-1991), written by Michael Fleisher--a long-time comics industry writer, best known for writing "The Wrath of … the Spectre" (1974) and Jonah Hex (1974). It portrayed a fairly typically D&D adventuring party and was most notable for its location in Waterdeep, making it the first comic book depiction of the Forgotten Realms.

All of the DC D&D comics were carefully divided into arcs, often four books in length. After Fleisher wrote the first arc, Dan Mishkin took over for four more issues. He was another comic industry writer, the creator of Amethyst (1983) and Blue Devil (1984), and the writer of lots more. That brings us to issues #9-12 of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which were written by none other than Jeff Grubb.

Jeff Grubb calls himself the "engineer" of the Forgotten Realms, as he was the one that took all of Ed Greenwood's "architectural" notes (complete with penciled-in "t"s) and refined them into the crunch and fluff actually needed for an RPG release. Grubb was also no stranger to fiction, having co-authored Azure Bonds (1988)--one of the first Realms novels--with his wife, Kate Novak. He was able to carry all of that experience over to his four-issue run on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which was thus considered a success. Though Mishkin would step back in to write the rest of Advanced Dungeons & Dragon's 36-issue run, Grubb wasn't ignored. DC, apparently, was pretty happy having a TSR employee write what they figured would be "pre-approved" scripts. The result was a second comic, Forgotten Realms, which ran 25 issues itself (1989-1991).

Together the two series formed the spine of DC's extensive D&D comics production. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was notable for its willingness to focus on individual members of the adventuring party, telling personal stories in a way unusual for the medium at the time. Forgotten Realms, meanwhile, was absolutely saturated in the settings of the Realms thanks to Grubb's waist-deep immersion in it. The two comics also crossed over with the Avatar media event that TSR was running in 1989--which additionally included adventures and novels and was doubtless built upon knowledge won from the Dragonlance project in the years before.

Two other D&D comic series ran at DC during the same time period: Dragonlance (1988-1991), a 34-issue comic primarily by Dan Mishkin that played interesting games with chronology; and Spelljammer (1990-1991), a short 15-issue series created by Barbara Kesel that marked the first appearance of the Spelljammer universe in comic books.

DC also produced a definitively non-D&D comic book that they'd licensed from TSR: Gammarauders (1989), by Peter B. Gillis, which was based on TSR's cybernetic critter combat game (1987, 1989). It ran for ten issues.

The various DC comics series were supplemented by a couple of annuals and a three-book mini-series, War of the Gods: Avatar (1991), where Barbara Kesel adapted the three-book Avatar trilogy (1989) sometime after the fact. The comics apparently did well and there were plans for more. James Lowder was tapped to write a Ravenloft comic, while Advanced Dungeons & Dragons #36 (December, 1991) promised an issue #37 the next month.

But, they were not to be.

The reasons for this abrupt ending are already described in the Brief History of TSR. The company started stepping on their own licensee's toes--not for the first time. Other examples of the practice can be found across the company's lifespan. The Brief History of Judges Guild (pages 65-70) describes how TSR got into the supplement business despite (perhaps) contracts to the contrary. TSR similarly got into the action-figure business after licensing out the rights; to avoid violating their contract, they put out action figures with zero points of articulation.

In the case of comics, the problems originated in TSR West, who had begun testing the waters the same year that the DC series began with Agent 13: The Midnight Avenger (1988), a graphic novel that adapted two print novels by Flint Dille and David Marconi. It was part of a general expansion of Dille's Agent 13 setting, which was simultaneously made into the pulp-era background for Top Secret/SI--as described in TSAC2: Agent 13 Sourcebook (1988). Apparently, it did well enough for a follow-up, Acolytes of Darkness (1990), which adapted the third and final Agent 13 novel for the comics media.

By 1990, TSR West had become comfortable enough with the graphic media that they decided to publish comic books too. Or, rather, they began publishing "comic modules", called such because they included four pages of gaming material to differentiate them from the comics rights that TSR had exclusively licensed to DC. Ironically, the DC comics often had game stats for the characters and monsters met within the pages as well, so there wasn't a lot of difference.

There were five TSR West Comics in all: 13: Assassin (which updated the Agent 13 campaign setting to the 1990s), Buck Rogers: XXVc, Intruder, R.I.P., and Warhawks Most of them focused on brand-new IP, and none of them conflicted directly with the DC D&D comics. However, DC hadn't just licensed D&D rights, as shown by their Gammarauders comic.

The new line of TSR West comics caused friction between DC and TSR. It's been cited as a reason for DC's reluctance to renew the D&D license after 1991. AT TSR, it also created a new impression of DC as a potential competitor--which led to Jeff Grubb being forbidden from writing further Forgotten Realms comics. (The vice-president who had originally OKed the work arranged it so that Grubb could finish out his run.)

As a result of this new friction, DC's line of TSR comics came to a very sudden end.

For almost two decades afterward, those four years of D&D comics from DC would be the high point of D&D's penetration into the comic medium--both by quantity and (in this writer's opinion) creatively.

After the DC/TSR deal ended, the shadow of those comics was still felt in D&D supplements over the next several years, as various designers worked to bring characters from the Forgotten Realms and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons comics into gaming material canon.

Thus the Selune's Smile tavern and its owner, Kyriani, from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons appeared in City of Splendors (1994), while several of the comic's other major characters got statted in Lands of Intrigue (1997), which even detailed what they'd been doing since the comic ended. They all then reappeared in Dragon Magazine #246 (April, 1998), while Kyriani also made cameos in Powers & Pantheons (1997) and For Duty & Deity (1998). Dale Donovan and Steven Schend were the main culprits behind these many AD&D appearances. Not to be left out, the crew of the Realms Master from Forgotten Realms was detailed in Dragon Magazine #247 (May, 1998) by Kate Novak.

So, the characters from some of DC's D&D comics were very busy in the mid-to-late 1990s. However, the comics themselves … had vanished.