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Obituary here. A pity, this. I knew he'd been sick and expected to die—I saw an article on BoingBoing a few months back that he was actually auctioning off huge quantities of his original art to pay his medical bills—but it's sad nonetheless.
Sutherland was never a fan favorite artist: he wasn't as masterfully weird as Dave Trampier, nor as slick as Jeff Dee or Bill Willingham, nor as expressionistically bizarre as Erol Otus. His work was never more than competent, and sometimes barely that. His linework was scratchy, his modelling often stiff, and his eye for perspective shaky.
But by its sheer ubiqity, his work came to define the look of the early AD&D products. The iconic picture of the various PC races—indeed, the vast majority of the original Player's Handbook—that was his. That full-page illo of a paladin in Hell—his. Most of the illos in the 1E Monster Manual—his (along with the hideous cover, which Sutherland hated so much that he legendarily burgled the original from the TSR offices and burned it). Covers and interior art for dozens of modules, his. And even when he wasn't providing artwork as such, Sutherland had a hand in the maps for nearly every module during his tenure.
The art in the D&D books is much prettier now than it used to be. All the books are full color, for one thing, and the standard for draftsmanship has risen considerably. Orcs no longer look like pigs, and owlbears actually look scary. But there's a very different sensibility to the new art, a pop-culture flash that partakes of the world of Hollywood, the pulps, anime, and comic books. Geek is the new mainstream, so I hear, and fantasy has largely conquered the outside world.
But Dave Sutherland was scrawling out his first portrait of a mind flayer, he was an obsessive creating for a tiny auience of other obsessives, his pen stitching together the patchwork scraps of a subculture that did not yet have a name. His art was often poorly-executed, and often downright ugly—but then, he was always a mapmaker at heart; and simply by being there from the start, by being firstest with the mostest, he charted a map of the new, unknown continent called RPG's, and it will bear his stamp ever after.
Respect, if you will, for the long, looming, shoddily-inked shadow of David C. Sutherland. |
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