I was never a role-playing geek. There was one time, in my early teens, that a group of friends got together to play the Marvel Comic’s Superheroes role-playing game; but we got into an argument over some aspect of the game and we never got started. Beyond that, I wouldn’t role a d10 until college. I’ve always been somewhat surprised that I didn’t find my way into the gaming world as much I have with comics and sci-fi. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I was a solitary kid and comics gave me the chance to escape into fantasy alone without having to socialize if I didn’t want to.
I mention all this to preface the fact that when Advanced Dungeons & Dragons hit the stands, my knowledge of D&D was limited to the advertisements I saw in comics. These ads for D&D were ubiquitous in comics in the 80’s. Painted images of menacing dragons staring intently at the reader, or a band of adventurers fighting sorcerers or monsters in a cave or on a castle parapet were as common as letter pages. Again, I was more a sci-fi geek than a sword-and-sorcery geek, but I knew a dwarf from a dragon. Escapist fantasy is escapist fantasy regardless of the setting. So when DC Comics put out a line of comics based on TSR Inc.’s role-playing games, of course I wanted to take a look.
