Art of the Fifth Wheel - Jim Holloway!!!

 I'm returning to D&D art, returning to TSR's Pit. The Pit had the Four Greats of fantasy genre oil painting - Elmore, Easley, Parkinson, and Caldwell. Then there was Jim Holloway. He worked at TSR's pit from 1981 to 1983, had a freelance career before and after. For the after, Holloway continued to do commissions for TSR, including Dungeons and Dragons. Somewhere I read Jim Holloway was self trained, self taught. Somewhere I read he was the workhorse of the Pit. He did produce a very large catalog of black and white inks that filled the interiors of many D&D books. That has to be my focus, because that is where I mostly encountered his work. But let it be know that he did interiors and covers for many RPG games, most notable MechWarrior, Battletech, Paranoia, and Tales from the Floating Vagabond, plus covers for Dragon Magazine.  The guy was prolific and adapted to genres ranging from comedy to horror, fantasy to sci-fi, ninjas to westerns with 1930s gangsters in between. 

Holloway tends to be forgotten or dismissed in the shadows of the Four Greats. Maybe because he did a lot of humor. It took me a little longer to appreciate him as much as Elmore and Parkinson. What do I love about Holloway's D&D art? His work is kinetic. More importantly to me, his work connects to the real world, and to history. As an old member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, I have a great appreciation for Holloway's weapons, armor, and garb connecting to real world history and settings. It also connects to older D&D with David Sutherlands use of historical armor and weapons rooting the game to something more historical, and thus real, gritty. It makes for good fantasy RPG in my opinion. 

You get an excellent sense referencing historical armor and weaponry in the two black and white interiors below. I'm not sure where Holloway's comes from, but Sutherlands is from the original D&D Holmes Basic boxed set, happily stamped onto  into brain from age 5 or 6. I have to wonder if Sutherland was an early influence on Holloway's TSR artwork. They both used generous amounts of black shadow silhouette. 

                                Holloway (generic goblinoids)

                        Sutherland (pig faced orcs!)

One thing stands out in Holloway's style, sets him apart from the Four Greats. He uses hard, black shadow in his black and whites, sometimes blocking out most of a figure as nothing but black silhouette. It may have been his secret to quickly turning out interior pieces for the Pit. True or not, it is very distinctive and often times very effective. I've mentioned his kinetic energy in figures and scenes, true historical references. There's something else that sets him apart - his women tend to look real. They are not models or bombshells. That must be another reason he gets overlooked, shoved to the back. His women have a certain look. Nerds. The girl at the game table. The down to earth classmate. It's refreshing, but not exactly what draws in pre-teen and teenage boys. 

The Tap is Open Again

 Two memories from long ago came back today.

Sage was watching a YouTube video of her friend's cousin in a bare fisted boxing match. It was a brutal contest as expected. Sage had never seen anything like it. It brought back a memory from ages 4, 5, or 6. I've only got the age range because it was Spearfish, South Dakota before the year in England. We were in the basement of another kid's house. He had boxing gloves we put them on and boxed in that unfinished basement, then in the front yard. That's what kids do when they find boxing gloves. It was silly really. Nothing brutal. Somewhere in that evening (it was evening I remember) GI Joe fits in there, the Sunboy cartoon. Did we see it at a video store? I can't remember. That probably puts the year at 1982, or 81 at the earliest. 

The second memory I told the girls about this morning (maybe), and I already forgot what it was. 

We've Got Two Years

 This week I've felt it heavy on me, especially on the edge of sleep and waking. It does wake me. Solveig will finish high school in two years. If i get into the weeds it's more than two years. There is another month and change left in her 10th grade year, then we have two months of summer. That gives me a little more pause for calm. But two years is so close. 

Solveig does not seem so much like sixteen. She is. I'm in denial. The change started for me after we left Vietnam at the end of her 7th grade year, then summer in Vietnam, then back to Estes Park Colorado in August 2023, then home schooling Solveig and Sage there for two months, then the move to Falls Church, Virginia, where Solveig started 8th grade a day or two before Halloween. And that's when it hit. 

First, an old foreign service colleague who's daughter is the same age as Solveig invited her to a Halloween party. Half the girls there were decked out in makeup  trying out sexy little costumes for the first time. I hope for the first time. I don't think Solveig had a good time. I need to mention that Solveig wnet to Marry Ellen Henderson Middle School. Shin reached out to parents somehow before we arrived asking who would be willing to do some play dates with Solveig before she started school so she would feel more comfortable with the transition. I don't know if Shin used the word play date. Maybe. It felt like that. Even if she did not, the response was awkward, hesitant. Girls at that age are very discerning about who they chose to be seen with, hand out with, be friends with. Parents don't make arrangements. I think Solveig met one group of girls at a cafe, one or two of them were also at the Halloween party, and that was it. She didn't do anything with them after that. We also connected her to an old friend from before the three years in Vietnam. No spark. The connection fizzled. 

Solveig's first two months of 8th grade looked very lonely to me. She closed up. She came home directly from school, sketched, did homework, looked out the window. She developed acne and his behind her hair. Most importantly, she started listening to music. She got earpods, (not my idea. I hate those things.) and plugged in and started becoming a discerning teenage girl building her identity around music and anime. American middle school identity building. 

Time marches on. It's hard to fathom that was almost three years ago now. She is not closed up anymore. She emerged from that shell she created, cur cled into, then emerged as a teenage girl. In two years she will be an adult. Legally. And I am crumbling out of middle age into my later years. Sometimes we wake up, and the world seems like it is turning to ashes. 

Havana Crickets, microwave, or middle-aged man

Last night I didn't sleep so well. I received texts from a contact, texts he had forwarded from a Signal channel to which I did not have access. The texts were from a variety of people describing symptoms from anomalous health indicients (AHI) otherwise known as Havana syndrome. The name AHI took on a twisted new meaning, and the symptoms hit home. 

Havana syndrome takes its name from the first widely reported cases originating in Havana, Cuba, among the American diplomatic community. It seems it started as odd, somewhat painful sounds in the night that left individuals in pain, suffering from headaches, confusion, buzzing and ringing in their ears, nausea, dizziness, distorted and blurred vision. Members of the diplomatic mission pieced together that is was something they were suffering together, not alone,and Havana Syndrome was born. The State Department and U.S. executive branch dismissed it as a species of cricket native to Cuba, their night chorus of vibrating legs creating oddly pitched sounds which drove home the adverse effects. The cases kept coming, expanding to China, Russia, Austria, the USA. Affected individuals expanded outward to include the Departments of Commerce and Defence, CIA, staffers at the White House. The Executive Branch dismissed it as a type of mass hysteria. 

Foreign service officers like myself speculated Havana syndrome was caused by a type of sonic attack deployed by Russian or Chinese agents against U.S. diplomats, military personnel, and spies. It turns out we were not completely wrong. Russia developed a microwave weapon, reduced its size and energy needs so that it can be carried in a bag by a single individual. It targets one or two people, microwaves hitting them and causing the odd sounds inside their heads and an array of side effects. Probably the USA has similar weapons. The government still does not acknowledge this is happening. 

In 2021 my wife, kids and I visited the touristy town of Sapa on the edge of the mountainous border of Vietnam and China. Vietnam's highest point, Mount Fancy Pants, rises above the town, which is a collection of Vietnamese resorts and their accompany infrastructure surround by indigenous mountain villages of Hmong. It's very picturesque and a major tourist draw for Vietnamese and smattering of international tourists. It's also isolated, accessible by one decent two-lane road which twists in hair-pin turns for perhaps 20 miles from the valley floor containing the main branch of the Red River, where a major highway goes from Hanoi into China. The drive from Hanoi to Sapa takes around 4-6 hours depending on the car and driver. 

Why am I concerned about location and drive times? I have to wonder if and why a foreign adversary hit me in Sapa with a microwave gun. Was I even hit? If yes, was it there, and why the hell there? Maximum suffering for me and amusement for my attacker? 

We stayed in a small hotel popular with guests from the U.S. Embassy, not too far from town, perched on a steep hillside. We spent a pleasant afternoon hiking the hillsides, marveling at the views that became ever more enveloped by clouds, talked to water buffalo, ducks, and puppy dogs, watches Hmong travel up and down the road in their traditional clothing. They were poor and seemed to put all of their value into their beautifully crafted clothing. We had an excellent dinner at the little hotel, which is famous for its cooking, sat around a wood burning stove and played card games as the hotel became completely encased in thick fog. My wife and I had a room, our two daughters another. It's hard to say if they were on a ground floo;, the site was so steep, but the rooms faced directly onto the valley. Either a sidewalk or balcony passed in front of them. I'll have to review the pictures my wife took. 

Sometime in the night I woke. Something woke me. It wasn't a noise. I opened my eyes and felt the world spinning around me in the darkness. It was not a lazy spin, but fast, akin to being on a carousel. I felt ill and squeezed my eyes shut, tried to make the feeling go away. Lay there, frozen. It wouldn't stop. I'd never felt anything like it. In the dim light of dawn I opened my eyes again. Shit. The room was spinning around me. I can barely write about this without seeing and feeling that spinning room. I felt the the need to get to the bathroom, stepped out of bed, was flung to the floor. I crawled to the bathroom, everything still spinning, vomiting along the way, vomiting in the toilet. I was going to shit my pants next so hauled myself onto the toilet and was thrown violently off, sliding across the tiles of the bathroom floor, shitting myself a little and vomiting again. 

So they day continued, but I figured out if I held my head and my gaze still, then the spinning stopped. Movement of any kind sent my world spinning violently again. Sometimes the spinning started again on its own, but not as crazy as when I moved my head or gaze. Closing mt eyes started the spinning again. I imagine it felt like being in rolling car crash. I've never been in one, but there is no other way to describe this feeling. I could not figure out what was happening to me. I'll save the answer for later. I still didn't know. it was horrifying. My wife thought I had food poisoning from fish we had eaten the night before, so she took the girls out to see one of the Hmong villages. 

I am exhausted and will save the rest of this for another post. 

I forgot

 Oops, I forgot my daughter's birthday! My second daughter, Sage, was born two weeks after I finished chemotherapy to treat Hodgkin's lymphoma. My brain was rather mushy. For several years I couldn't get her birthday correct. First I was off by a month and several days, then just off by several days.  Now I do know and remember Sage's birthday. As I write this she is 12 years old. I think. Yes, that's right. Sage is an interesting kid. She was born massive, super solid, had a big head. She was energetic and enthusiastic. For her first couple years being near her head was dangerous. She loved to throw her head back when she was excited. I think she broke my nose once doing that. She gave me several gobstoppers to the jaw and almost knocked me out another time with a hand bang to the head. 

She was a character. In the foreign service, when assigned to a post abroad, we have government issued furniture. We always have these long dining room tables made from dark, heavy wood. I hate them. My kids, however, have always used at least half of these tables for art, games, school work, and simply making huge messes. These tables feature prominently in our lives and in my memory.  We returned to Shanghai after my chemo and Sage's birth, staying there another year. Sage had a highchair at the long, dark table. I guess at some point she started to resent being stuck there, or the reverse, maybe she lorded it over us from her highchair perch.  I write this because out of the blue she started doing this thing from the highchair. She would look at her big sister, mom and dad in turn with a squinched mischievous and tight lipped grin, then start huffing and puffing through her nose like demon about to explode. The first time she did this we were shocked then melted into laughter. Maybe that's why she kept it up for several more weeks. But that is how I think of Sage in her earlier years, energetic and ferocious, and mostly glowing with happy positivity except when she was a rage of anger or heartbreak. 

I remember in Brazil sword fighting with Sage. Not with real swords of course; wooden ones. Solveig and I, plus Sage, free-for-all with no sides. Sage was around age three, so Solveig around age six or seven. Either Solveig or I accidently tapped Sage on the knuckles. Not hard, but it must have surprised her. She became a force - huffing and puffing, screaming and cackling with rage and laughter, put the fear into Solveig and I as we ran all over the house to escape her unrestrained blows. That's how I member Sage in her younger years. 

She is different now. We all change. She's still very much her own spirit, does her own thing. She dropped the unabashed and exuberant force she once projected and exchanged it for a more sensitive and quiet repose. She's super creative, like Solveig, but more so. Solveig is meticulous. Sage is wild and careless, starting and finishing project after project in one short burst after another. Their creative energy is amazing, especially Sage. I can't keep up.   

At age ten Sage made a couple of length choose-your-own path adventure comics 30-50 pages long. Just one example of those creative bursts.  

Trafficked - a human story

 I haven't written anything about my current career - foreign service officer, U.S. Department of State. I'm currently at the U.S. Embassy in Maputo, Mozambique. On questionnaires requiring employment type, I normally have to choose between government worker or diplomat.  I consider myself a consular officer because that's what I've done for the last 15 years - American citizen services abroad and visa adjudications for non-citizens to travel to the USA.  In this context I've worked on some harrowing, wild situations. My girls don't understand much about what I do. Tonight the subject of the American prisoner came up. Both of my girls met him several times when we got him out of prison but still essentially under house arrest while we worked our tails off to have him repatriated to his home in the USA. He wasn't under house arrest because he had no home in Mozambique. We had him in a hotel across the street from the clinic where our panel physician is one of the directing doctors, and several doors down from the police station which manages diplomatic cases. I can't go into further details due to privacy issues. 

Anyhow, "the American prisoner" as my girls know him came up tonight. He was in a documentary on National Geographic called Trafficked., the episode about unwitting or "blind" drug mules. The journalist and producer of Trafficked, Mariana van Zeller, has a friend in Maputo who helped her put together a film crew, scout locations, etc. to do the documentary. In the process, the friend became involved with the American prisoner, communicated regularly with his daughter back in Minnesota, and helped arrange  care for the American prisoner in Machava Prison, things like food and laundry service. Without supplemental help, food in the prison is limited to two meals a day at most, and it's typically just water and paap, or water and matapa, or water and bread, just the barest of staples to survive. The prisoners also grow their own produce and corn, and there are fruit trees. 

The friend's husband is a dive instructor, which is why this all came up tonight. My younger daughter wants to do a scuba class. So we went from talking scuba to the American prisoner, and I mentioned that there was a documentary about him. My younger daughter was surprised and excited, asked if she could see it. We watched it tonight. I had watched the first half previously when I was doing consular visits to the American prisoner, but avoided watching the entire episode because I needed to keep a professional distance. Why. 

If anyone ever does read this, the answer is that the job of the American government is not to get Americans out of jail abroad. When American citizens leave the USA they become subject to the legal jurisdiction of the country they enter. Imagine if every foreign national in jail or prison in the USA had a foreign government telling judges how to rule in their national's case, or telling the jury how to reach a verdict, or telling the justice system to let their national go, unfair trial, our prisoner is innocent or your prison system is lacking and should not be allowed to detain our citizen. 

The role on an Embassy and consular officer is to provide detainees with a list of local lawyers who can represent them, who know the law in their country and how the judicial system works. In addition, the Embassy and consular officer ensure detainees are treated humanely as far as local conditions can, have access to required prescription medications, and if needed, supplemental "nutritious" food, like protein bars.Visits to pretrial and trial detainees are once per month, more when necessary. If and when American citizen detainees are found guilty, the Embassy ensures visits once every three months to the prisoner to check on their overall well-being, and in many situations pass books, learning materials, family letters and such. If lucky, maybe we can pass a pack of cigarettes or a bucket of KFC as well. In my career I've advocated for medical and family visits for detainees and prisoners, helped arrange funds to buy them food, clothing and other services that prisons systems in many countries do not provide. That's the job of family. If you are in prison in Shanghai and you are from Shanghai that makes sense. If you are from the USA and were arrested visiting Shanghai for the first time, it doesn't make much sense, and that's when the Embassy intervenes to help supply the basics.  Disappointing,right? Even infuriating? But there it is; our job is generally not to get Americans out. 

Put another way, our job is not to be finders of fact. That is the roles of investigators, police, prosecutors, judges, and the occasional jury. We do not discriminate between the innocent and the guilty. We provide services to all detainees and prisoners. In Shanghai I provided services to an American detainee and teacher who was charged with sexually molesting six of his elementary school students. Does that change anyone's calculus on the USG being responsible for springing American citizens from jail abroad? How do we determine who is innocent and who is not? We don't. I'm not even saying the teacher was guilty of that heinous crime, if it occurred at all. (You can look it up and find the various sides.) We provide basic services, ensure American citizen detainees and prisoners have access to legal representation, try to prevent overt and extreme abuse in prison, find a baseline of humanity in the situation. 

Back to the American prisoner in Maputo, Mozambique. He is out and went back home to his daughter in Minnesota. The documentary doesn't show this. It ends in February, 2024. I cannot share with you how he got out or went home. He has the right to privacy and as a government employee I cannot violate that right. My daughters know he got out because they met him while he was staying at the hotel. I visited him almost every evening to help with food. When I did not, Mariana's friend in Maputo and her husband, the scuba instructor, did. Well, the American prisoner did learn how to order take out, so in the end we were not with him every evening. But there is the right to privacy, so I shared very little about the situation and story with my girls. The documentary was the first time my younger daughter learned the story of the American prisoner whom she ate pizza with and who offered her soda. She learned about his daughter. She was impressed. She was also impressed there was a documentary about the whole thing, It's probably the first time she's felt connected to the news or something on TV, that these are real things, not just stories. My daughter is 12. 

Tonight is the first time I've reflected on the experience. There were times when the situation became excruciatingly real - especially the conversations I had with the American prisoner's daughter, and taking to his cell mates in the aftermath of the Christmas riots and prison break that left so many people dead, saying goodbye and God bless to them the day the American prisoner left Machava Prison for good, leaving those injured souls behind. The American prisoner was never a number to me, never just part of the job. None of them have been. I take on their stories and their baggage. As hard as I try to keep a professional distance, they seep into my blood.  

I'm not very healthy. My health has always been worse since becoming a foreign service officer. I guess this is one reason why. I just want to stock groceries at a Trader Joes back home, where ever home is. Somewhere in the USA. 

Dungeons and Dragons Art Review - Jeff Easley, from Masterful to Derivative

 I started this blog years ago and it found a brief following because of the D&D art. I was focused on the four great oil painters from TSR's Pit. After all that time I never dedicated a post to Jeff Easley. The man was a master. He still may be, but his best work was done 40 and 50 years ago. My absolute favorite was the first orange spine AD&D book we bought, first because of the cover below, and then the content. I loved the art inside and out. 

The book came out in 1986, four years after Jeff Easley began working at TSR. I guess he did the painting as an on demand cover, but it is so foreign to most AD&D or D&D adventures of the time. It's way more imaginative than most encounters in the game would be.What is the monstrosity clinging to the mountain top? Don't know. Makes it scarier.  This is so much more evocative than run-of-the mill D&D. The vista, with river meandering off into the sunlight, the peak rising into a thunderstorm with lightning streaking down, the old bones and treasure chest merging into earth. Note that not only one of the adventurers is doomed to be either eaten or, more likely, tossed to his death, but that another is already falling to likely death in the lower right corner of the cover. In true Easley fashion, the primary warrior's armor has no basis in reality or game mechanics. I just love this one.  It is a major departure from the great art D&D books featured in their earlier years which generally depicted scenes that could be pulled directly from the game's mechanics. I enjoy both types, but Easley's vision is just so much more imaginative. 

Here's the best Jeff Easley painting I've never seen before until writing this post:

Jeff Easley 1981 cover from the late-era pulp, Creepy, done around age 27

Jeff Easley started working for TSR in 1982 with encouragement or an invitation from his friend Larry Elmore. Wikipedia states that the masters in TSR's Pit had him painting gemstones on the borders to the Endless Quests books. Look at that gorgeous painting above. They wasted this man's talent on border decor? That did not last long though. Easley was soon working on every cover painting to AD&D's collection of orange spine books, eleven in all by my count. Every one of these paintings is a masterpiece. Check out this link to Scott Taylor's Art of the Genre that looks at his top ten of these covers. He states there are two that did not make his list. One is Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis' Dragonlance Adventures. I cannot figure out what that twelth book might be.  

Of the four greats, Easley, Elmore, Caldwell, and Parkinson, Jeff Easley stayed with TSR the longest, even doing a few covers for Wizards of the Coast when they bought D&D in 1995. But by this point Easley's hot streak was over. He was becoming derivative, going through the motions, no more creative spark. 

Jeff Easley became so Easley in style, composition, and genre that the later TSR Pit artist Tony Szczudlo was able to distill Easley exactly, almost like a paint-by-numbers. I think his intention was homage to the master, but still....

Tony Szczudlo getting every element of Jeff Easley just right. I like it. The pieces from Szczudlo that shine through are the details in the hands and face of the warrior, tatters on the cloak. Easley was not one for detailed human anatomy. 

Did I get this wrong? Are the best Jeff Easley paintings later in his career? I think it's a hard argument to make. 

Another Easley favorite of mine graced the cover to the AD&D Dungeoneer's Survival Guide. Again, it looks very little like something from Dungeons and Dragons, and aparently that's because Easley painted this before joining TSR.  Again I think this amplifies the imagination and creativity. 

Here I will stretch beyond Easley's AD&D orange spine covers. Easley painted undead skeletons and magical power better than anyone, ever, at TSR. He combines them both in this painting.

The Magister, a AD&D Forgotten Realms supplement published in 1988. 

Another example of Easley setting magical power to the canvas. This is paint, nothing digital. Very cool. It's just magical. I'd taken oil painting lessons before as a youngster and did some decent landscapes. I simply cannot imagine how he does this. 

Cover to the Dragonlance module New Beginnings, published in 1991

To my mind, Easley's cover painting to the 2nd Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide is simply the best book cover ever for TSR. 

Jeff Easley's Wizard and Dragon, first published as the cover to the AD&D 2nd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide in 1989. 

Last of all, here is a personal favorite. I just love the look on that big guy's face. This is also Easley's best strong female figure, a rarity for him. For compaison, turn to Art of the Genre and Taylor's article When Jeff Easley Had a Girl. 

Jeff Easley's Cutting Things Down to Size, an interior the 1989 AD&D 2nd Edition Players Handbook

Coming across in all of Jeff Easley's paintings is that he makes up for the lack of true skill with human figures and even clothing with his mastery of composition, color, dynamism, and storytelling. Overall he is consistently my favorite of the four greats from TSR's Pit.