The following is an interview with New York Times-bestselling and award-winning comics creator Fred Van Lente and acclaimed Wizards of the Coast and comics artist Tom Fowler regarding the recent Kickstarter campaign launch for the graphic novel, Gamemasters: The Comic Book History of Roleplaying Games, in collaboration with Clover Press. In this interview, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief Barbra Dillon chats with Van Lente and Fowler about their shared creative process in bringing the history of RPGs to life in comics form, the incredible backer rewards available to supporters of the campaign, and more!
Barbra Dillon, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief: Congrats on your recent Kickstarter campaign launch for Gamemasters!. As life-long gamers, what can you share with us about your experience of bringing this history to life through the sequential art medium?
Fred Van Lente: Inside me, there are two wolves, one named Comics, the other named RPGs. Gamemasters feeds both simultaneously, and they both win! It feels great.
Tom Fowler: “Life-long gamer” may be a leap for me. There was a stretch between the ages of 13 and 37 where I didn’t play anything at all. That stretch (shamefully) includes most of my career in illustrating the games I wasn’t playing. I know better now, though. Gamemasters, in my recollection, started about 7(?) years ago with a phone call from Fred asking if I wanted to draw a book about the history of basketball.
“No.”
“Baseball?”
“No.”
“Well, is there anything you’d like to do a comics history of?”
I shrugged and said, “I don’t know… D&D?” As I recall a few months later, Fred had written the first three or so chapters. I’ve been pecking away at it between jobs ever since.
BD: How would you describe your shared creative process in not only researching the various stages of tabletop RPGs, but also demonstrating the mechanics of the games themselves?
FVL: Great question. I’ve run a couple groups for a while now, one monthly group for geez, over ten years, and then a weekly group that moved to Zoom during the pandemic. We’ve been together since 2016 or so. I used them as my guinea pigs, which was super fun and illuminating for me. Together, we played Gettysburg and Diplomacy, which aren’t strictly RPGs but were the games that got TSR founder Gary Gygax into gaming. We played Gygax’s Tomb of Horrors, one of the original adventures run at a convention, using the O.G. D&D rules. We played Ghostbusters, whose system was used for the basis for the tremendously popular Star Wars RPG. Paranoia, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu…the list goes on! This has been a super fun book to research, and since it’s about gaming, how could it not?
TF: The research and mechanics is all Fred’s job. My job starts in the telling of it. Fred and I have worked fairly closely together a number of times over the years, so we have a pretty good understanding of each other’s ebbs and flows. For me, when I look at a script, my immediate response is to take in all the information and try and figure out if there’s a better way to interpret on the page. Whether that’s massaging what’s already there or suggesting how something could be expressed differently. Always while in conversation with Fred, of course. And more often than not it’s just a minor tweak if anything at all. We’ve both been in the trenches for a long time and that kind of communication flows both ways without either of us getting a big head or hurt feelings. I will say, though, for some of the earliest games we covered I literally had to get Fred to draw me pictures so I could understand how they worked. You want an orc bashing a werewolf over the head, I’m your guy. You want little coloured markers advancing across Gettysburg, I’m going to need some help.
BD: Fred, this book follows your critically acclaimed graphic novel, The Comic Book History of Comics. How do you feel that your experience in crafting the prior book aided or diverged from your process with this new graphic novel?
FVL: It’s interesting, comics as we know them have been around since the nineteenth century, and this really is only the 50th year of the existence of RPGs, since Dungeons & Dragons debuted in 1974. It’s weird to be doing the history of something that’s not as old as you are (by only a couple of years though, cough cough). Still, it is exciting to trace the origins and development of a single idea, this idea of people sitting around a table sharing an imaginary adventure together, a single campaign told over several sessions. We begin in the 6th century with chess, and end basically yesterday with Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m excited for people to join us on this ride.
BD: Tom, in looking back at your incredible body of work, what can you share with us about your experience in revisiting your artistic roots with tabletop gaming?
TF: It’s been kind of a weirdly refreshing experience. I don’t know that I fully appreciated what I was a part of while I was working in the tabletop industry while I was there. Indeed, I’ve discovered a number of things through the book that I only vaguely remember from when I worked in a comic book store when I was in high school, and feel like I may have missed out. I’m doing what I can to catch up these days.
BD: What makes Clover Press the perfect home for this project?
FVL: Clover has a great history of quality art books, and we have a lot of specific demands for this book to make it look like an early 1980s AD&D hardcover, and they are game to try everything, which is terrific. Also, Hank Kalanz, our Clover editor, was one of my first pro editors in comics at (gasp) Malibu. Remember Malibu, kids? Its Ultraverse and Magic: The Gathering debuted the same year, 1993. Magic, Hank, and I are still around. The Ultraverse is locked in a vault made of adamantium, guarded by laser-eyed robot dogs. It’s funny how things can turn out, isn’t it.
TF: Personally, Hank Kanalz has been in my corner for the better part of the last twenty years. Both in his years at DC and Wildstorm (where he championed Jeff Parker and my book, Mysterius) and now by giving us a home with this book. Beyond my personal trust and affection for Hank, Clover just makes really good-looking books. And if you’re going to embark on a project like this, you really want a publishing partner who’s going to help you stick the landing with a handsome product. Something you can really squish a bug with.
BD: Lastly, are there any specific backer rewards that you would like to highlight as part of the Kickstarter campaign?
TF: There’ll be a bunch of stickers and prints. We’ve talked about puzzles and game mats. But I’m putting my money where my mouth is and offering a large number of original art pages to be sold through the campaign, as well as the original, fully painted, wraparound cover!
The stretch goal I’m most excited about is extra chapters covering some tangents from our main history, drawn by Allison Sampson, Ryan Dunlavey, and Chris Schweitzer!
Fred and I have discussed a number of other goodies, but we’re going to keep them secret until we’ve nailed down a few more details.
FVL: You can own Tom’s amazing wraparound cover if you pony up enough dough! And there’s only one of them! Talk about exclusive covers, this is the most exclusive of them all…
