Okay, I probably should have saved this until next week, as I’m really wanting people to focus on Thor Loser this week, but I went and blabbed on Twitter (and Facebook) and then felt obligated to put this up. I couldn’t help it. I was just so damn excited when I turned these pages up while poking through my art collection.
So, just promise me you’ll check out Thor Loser and the E-Book Trailer below, and my marketing/promotion conscience will be assuaged, okay?
You may think you know what the first Dragonlance comic was, but you’d be wrong.
Here’s the story:
A couple of years back, James Mishler was intereviewing me for a Comic Buyer’s Guide article about D&D in comics. We were talking about the old D&D ads that ran in comic books — which were done by me, Bill Willingham & Jeff Dee, by the way — when I mentioned a pitch for a Dragonlance comic that Tim Truman and I had done back in the early days of DL, when it was still in development — even before the final character roster had been set. James said he’d love to see it, and I said I thought I had some crappy xeroxes somewhere, but I couldn’t turn them up.
So, today I’m going through my files, trying to find original coloring samples for The Twilight Empire — in the hope of scanning them to reprint the series online and in books, maybe. I found a bunch of them, though not all that I was looking for. But I came across a box that holds a lot of art that I’ve picked up over the years, from colleagues and at conventions and stuff. Opening it, I discovered some art I’d forgotten I owned. That spurred me to continue and see just what else was in this box. Lots of things I’d forgotten about, it turns out.
And some of it was considerably better than crappy xeroxes.
There were two pages in the Dragonlance proposal Tim & I did. What I found was a pristine Photostat of page 1, and the original coloring for page 2. They were gorgeous, so I figured I’d share them with you, below. (I might have a written proposal somewhere in my files, too — but that’d be a lot less gorgeous.) I scanned the pages and then had to match the color plate — done separately — with the B&W plate for page 2. So far as I remember, there was no color version of page 1. I cleaned them up just a bit, so they’d look almost as good as new. (Colors and acetates can shrink over time.) And … Presto! Here they are!
Click on the thumbnails to bring up the bigger images. Enjoy!
Art copyright Tim Truman. Story copyright me. Dragonlance copyright you-know-who. All Rights Reserved.
