In 1977, David Trampier was one of the lead artists for Gary Gygax' TSR, as they pushed to create a more advanced version of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. As such, he did scores of top-notch illustrations for the original Monster Manual, Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and other TSR books & publications, including the striking orange [cover] for the 2nd book.
Around the same time, Trampier began a ground-breaking, monthly comic for TSR's flagship AD&D "Dragon" magazine, called Wormy. It was done in markers, ink & watercolors, with plenty of shadows and bright colors to make the artwork pop pleasingly off the pages. It usually consisted of 1-2 pages, and ran for eleven years, until 1988.
I found Wormy remarkable for a number of reasons. Not just because of the beautiful art, but because it also walked a fascinating line between sardonic, punny humor and being fully committed to its characters & environment, essentially AD&D's parallel to Tolkien's Middle Earth. Wormy and the denizens of this world were strikingly well-realised characters, full of their own motivations, intelligence, schemes and flaws. Indeed, Wormy reminds me a bit of Walt Kelly's classic [Pogo], but beyond the character's humorous natures, in this work, the characters played for *keeps*, up to and including successfully killing each other off.
The final point I want to make is that the first modern graphic novel is generally considered to be either Rich Corben's Bloodstar or Jim Steranko's Chandler: Red Tide, both published in 1976, but the pages of Wormy, taken collectively, to me are easily of the graphic novel format, and started coming out only a year later.
Getting to the goods, for this initial installment, I've taken the first seven published pages and enhanced them with BigJpg and GIMP, correcting a few small errors along the way, and uploaded them to Imgur.
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