This looks like a comic book, and it is, but it was also a game from Dark Tower Enterprises, an Illinois-based company that wanted to fuse comics and games into a single experience. 1991 was my first full year as an inker and this was my first opportunity apply those skills to a superhero project. The results: not great.

Though the majority of my illustration work for West End Games was in their Star Wars RPG line, they occasionally threw other assignments my way. This was one of them. Before I knew it, I was drawing zombies and swashbucklers and haunted houses for the first time and actually doing pretty well at it. It's kinda nice when you can feel the gap closing between what you aspire to do and what you can actually accomplish.

I'm at a real loss to say anything substantial about this project because, well, I don't know if it ever actually got published. All I can do is step aside and share the work itself. If anyone out there recognizes it or knows something that can help me sleuth out the details, I'd be ever so grateful.

Someone at R. Talsorian games decided this novel by Larry Niven was a good basis for a role-playing game, so they published one in 1992 and hired me to contribute some illustrations. Looking at them now, I can tell it was an assignment that came and went while I was still figuring out how to ink with a brush. Getting better, but there was still some distance to travel.

This was a spinoff of the highly successful Cyberpunk RPG from R Talsorian Games. I was asked to design gadgets, weapons, personal gear, and other trinkets to load out a character for gameplay. What did 2020 look like in 1992? Find out here!

Iron Crown Enterprises (I.C.E.) started out in 1980 with some original game properties, then scored a home run two years later when they became the first company to license a Middle Earth RPG. They added a well-regarded miniatures battle game called Silent Death in 1990. That set the stage for me to cross their path and illustrate this expansion book.

Here's another job that came out of the blue one day. I don't remember how I got it; maybe I contacted Steve Jackson Games, maybe they contacted me. Either way, I got a chance to contribute to one of the most long-lived and enduring role-playing games ever made.

This volume from West End Games had quite a prophetic title. It was the end of a 4-book campaign for them and the end of a career phase for me. I had just gotten my beak wet in the TV animation world, and freelance illustration work was on the way out. This wasn't just my last Star Wars assignment (of 12) for West End, it was my last Star Wars project of any kind.

Getting to contribute to the 2nd Edition of West End's Star Wars RPG was an honor. It was also my first and only color assignment for them, and I tackled it with gusto.

Kathol Outback was part of something called the "DarkStryder Campaign," a series of connected adventures that took players into new and remote regions that didn't necessarily fit into the established Star Wars aesthetic. It's a big galaxy, so anything goes.

This project from West End Games came to me in a time of significant transition in my approach to art production. When I learned what Photoshop could do, I started playing a game of Jenga with my art. What parts of the process could I eliminate before the whole thing came toppling down?

This assignment from West End Games came at the peak of my freelance comics career. Star Wars game illustrations were getting rare, but looking better as a result of all the time I'd spent honing my skills. The concept for this book was for gamers to visit several different spaceports in the Star Wars galaxy and get into all sorts of fun trouble.

When the "Thrawn trilogy" novels came out from '91 to '93, West End did a sourcebook for each one of them. I was lucky enough to land an assignment for the final one. It came to me in the midst of my best years as a comic book artist, when I was regularly inking my own work and feeling good about the results.

My sixth assignment from West End Games was a modest one, but exciting. Once in a while, they'd come out with a sourcebook tie-in to a separate Star Wars project. This one adapted and expanded material from the Han Solo novels by Brian Daley. I finally got to draw everyone's favorite piece'a junk and visualize some of the things that previously existed only as words in those baffling noves.

The illustrations that appeared in this volume were originally drawn for The Politics of Contraband. My guess is that the content for that book was overproduced, and some of it got diverted into this one. The environment is a trader/smuggler route called the Kira Run, and the book contains seven different playable adventures. My work was used for two of them.

This adventure was about smugglers taking jobs that got them in over their head, which apparently happens all the time in the Star Wars galaxy. I was the solo artist on the book (nyuk nyuk), so I got to design a gang of reprobates and put them through their paces.

For my third go-round with West End Games, the scenario for the adventure was quite different. Instead of a backwater planet, this one was set on an industrial and cultural center, a busy city planet that we wouldn’t see on film until the prequels and sequels arrived.

I was the sole artist assigned to this book, so I was entrusted with the task of designing the characters and environment: a race of amphibians, an Imperial Swamp Trooper, a method of docking for TIE fighters, and a pair of female mercenaries who I subconsciously thought of as the Star Wars version of Japan’s Dirty Pair.

In 1991, I figured out how to turn my Star Wars fandom into freelance income. Planets of the Galaxy, Volume 1 was my first West End Games assignment, and it was a good one to start with. The books in this 3-volume series presented gamers with new planets on which to plot their adventures, none of which had been established in the original trilogy.