Dave Sutherland and the Birth of the D&D Esthetic

The three little brown books of original Dungeons & Dragons have notoriously amateurish artwork, most of it by the teenaged Greg Bell. Bell provided artwork for many early TSR products, not simply OD&D, much of which consists of swipes of Marvel comics from the late '60s and early '70s. He is also responsible for TSR's lizard man colophon depicted on the right. 

In a very real sense, D&D's earliest stab at an esthetic was established by Bell, who was the first artist to illustrate such iconic monsters as the beholder, the owlbear, and the black pudding (as well as pumpkin-headed bugbears). For the first year and a half of D&D's existence, Bell's artwork was the primary means by which players and referees imagined what the world of Dungeons & Dragons was supposed to look like.

Despite this, I don't think I'm doing a disservice to Bell when I say that his illustrations had very little lasting impact on D&D's evolving esthetic. Some of this is no doubt due to the broadly generic nature of his artwork. With very few exceptions, there's nothing distinctive about it, either in terms of its subject matter or its style. Furthermore, his stint as a D&D illustrator was quite short; his work disappears entirely after the publication of Supplement II, Blackmoor.

Not coincidentally, Blackmoor was the first appearance of the work of David C. Sutherland III. Sutherland's art stands head and shoulders above the work of Bell and Tracy Lesch, another teenager whom Gygax tapped in the early days. Take a look, for example, at Sutherland's rendition of another iconic D&D monster, the umber hulk, which made its debut in Supplement II.

Sutherland was a Minneapolis native who was introduced to M.A.R. Barker by Mike Mornard and, through Barker, to TSR. He very quickly impressed Gary Gygax, who hired him as one of the company's first staff artists. He remained with TSR until its acquisition by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. 

OD&D's Supplement III, Eldritch Wizardry, featured a great deal of Sutherland's artwork. I'd argue that many of his pieces in it proved extremely influential on D&D's growing sense of what it was and, more importantly, what it looked like. Take, for instance, this lovely illustration.

I know it's fashionable in some quarters to belittle Sutherland as a "talented amateur" and maybe that's true. I can only say that pieces like this one, appearing in 1976, give me a better idea of what D&D is supposed to be than most of the supposedly "professional" illustrations produced for the brand in the last two decades. What I notice about a piece like this one is a groundedness that, in the past, I referred to as "the extraordinary ordinary." This groundedness is rooted in history, with arms and armor, to cite just two things, resembling those found in the real world. Even the swords of the Type V demon aren't purely fantastical, despite being wielded by a six-armed snake-woman. 

Ultimately, this esthetic derived from wargaming. OD&D was, after all, subtitled "rules for fantastic medieval wargames campaigns," but another bit of evidence for this can be seen in Sutherland's Eldritch Wizardry artwork, like this depiction of the demon lord Orcus.

The miniatures base beneath the cloven feet of Orcus is unmistakable. Many of the other demons in Supplement III are drawn in a similar manner. This suggests to me that Sutherland was drawing on his experiences as a miniatures wargamer in conceiving the look of D&D. His "extraordinary ordinary" style rested on the idea of men in historical armor fighting beasts from myth and legend, a theme to which he returned again and again his artwork.

Of course, Sutherland's role in shaping the esthetics of Dungeons & Dragons achieved its greatest impact through the AD&D hardbacks, two of whose covers were done by him. The Monster Manual – arguably the single most influential book in the history of RPGs and, by extension, on fantasy in general – contains several examples of what I've been describing, like this battle against kobolds.

Maybe even more significant is that Sutherland was the first illustrator of many of D&D's monsters, establishing their distinctive appearances. Consider the following list of some of the notable monsters Sutherland contributed to the MM:

• Bugbear (of the non-pumpkin head variety)
• Carrion Crawler
• Demons (all but Juiblex)
• Dragons
• Gnoll
• Hobgoblin
• Kobold
• Mimic 
• Mind Flayer
• Orcs
• Owlbear
• Purple Worm
• Roper
• Troll
• Umber Hulk
• Xorn

That's a selective list; Sutherland contributed even more monsters than those listed above. His imaginative and idiosyncratic conceptions have exercised a potent influence over subsequent artists, not to mention generations of players. Consider the way that, for instance, mimics are still almost always drawn in the form of a chest attacking an unwary adventurer. That's the power of Sutherland's art and proof, I think, that he is the father of the D&D esthetic.