This weekend I was looking at a couple of very old issues of Dragon magazine that I found last summer in my basement and I got to re-read a couple of the Wormy comic strips by David Trampier. Having nothing better to do I did a little digging around on the net and actually discovered that the illustrator/author went MIA for decades and even when found wanted nothing to do with the comic. You can read about it here. Interesting. For those of you not in the know, Trampier is also responsible for the iconic cover you see on the left.
I also found a site with images of most of the existing strips and so, in the interest to bringing what I consider a pretty humorous and entertaining piece of history to a wider audience, I present to you a new, possibly regular feature.*
*at least until someone asks me to stop – I tried to ask the site’s author permission to link to the images but it’s an anonymous angelfire site and David Trampier refuses to even admit he made the strips.
From Sept 1977
loading...
While not the most artistic cover, I cannot think of another that was seared into my memory like that one.
loading...
One of the coolest things about buying the first 250 issues of Dragon on cd (aside from the obvious) was being able to read all of the wormy strips. I thought for sure I would get to find out what happened. That was before I knew about what happened to Trampier and the strip.
loading...
Any idea where I can buy the CD? I need to do some searching around since that’s one item I definitely would like to purchase.
loading...
My favorite strip was the Mysterious Secret Handshake of the Goblins.
loading...
Amazon stores, if you have more money than you really need:
http://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Magazine-Archive-Pc/dp/B00002EIWS/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1239876837&sr=8-4
(Glad I bought it way back when it was new and reasonably priced)
loading...
Uggh….that’s brutal. I guess that’s a deal killer. Time to keep an eye out on Ebay…
loading...
The last print issue of Dragon had an article about his. Scott Rouse (IIRC) bumped into a newspaper article with Trampier in it, and used it to track him down.
“He politely but firmly told me to lose his number.” If this was the response to a job offer to greenlight a compilation…must’ve been born again or something
loading...
You know, it’s really weird when artists do this. Bill Waterston (sp) did the same thing when he stopped drawing Calvin & Hobbes. Basically went totally to ground, rarely (if ever) did interviews, and stopped work altogether.
You gotta wonder what happened in their lives to have them make such a decision.
I loved the Wormy comic growing up. It was my favorite comic to look forward to in every edition of the Dragon.
loading...