Monday, June 21, 2021

Breaking Free

When I was a younger person, Dave Trampier's Dragon magazine comic, Wormy, regularly confused me. This was partly a consequence of the fact that, by the time I first encountered it, there have been more than fifty previous installments. Another source of my confusion were the multiple narratives, not just with different groups of characters, but also with different settings. I can't quite recall how long it took me to understand that Wormy and his cylcops pal, Ace, were giants and, therefore, much bigger than, say, the ogres or trolls – or indeed the wizard Grimorly and Solomoriah.

Speaking of which: I was always most fond of the strips that featured the wizard and the shadow cat. Grimorly was single-minded in pursuit of his goals and compellingly sinister. He was also the primary window through which readers got to learn about the nature of magic in the world of Wormy. Or should I say worlds? Throughout the comic's run, there were hints from time to time of a bigger, more cosmic picture, one that was never fully explored. 

An example of this can be seen in issue #70 of Dragon (February 1983), when Solomoriah, in order to escape from a battle with Wormy, breaks through the skin of reality into a weird, otherworldly dimension filled with floating spheres. The unstated implication is that each of these spheres is another world, but Trampier never elaborated upon this. There are other strips that touch on these topics and I loved them all, because they presented, albeit in a highly mysterious fashion, a view of other dimensions/worlds/planes that continues to appeal to me to this day.

9 comments:

  1. Spelljammer came out years after this was published and I always wondered if that particular strip had been an inspiration for whole "crystal spheres floating in the phlogiston" thing. I know they're probably "just" planar access points (maybe to different planes, maybe to other locales on the same one) rather than whole star systems and you'd better hope you never see that many spheres in such close proximity to one another but the similarity still rings out to me.

    Grimorly and Solomoriah's spellcasting with the "verbal component" represented as unreadable exotic characters in the word balloon still come to mind whenever I think about what D&D spellcasting would sound like. No "ala kazam" stuff, just sounds most mortal minds can't comprehend or even recall past the moment of casting. You'd know something weird had happened, but without spellcraft or arcana or whatever you'd have no idea what beyond any obvious physical effect like giant flaming explosions or whatever.

    Truly a tragedy this was never finished, both for Trampier's sake and his readers.

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  2. You think you were confused? For a while I thought Gremorly was Wormy, because when I started reading the comic, it focused mostly on him and no one ever mentioned his name. Boy, did I feel silly later...

    I think the sphere-filled space that Solomoriah breaks into is meant to be the ethereal plane, because when Gremorly is escaping into it with the demon-spheres/dwarven bowling balls he says, "The Obyls of Odium, by ethermn forged, to the ether doth return!"

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  3. I wish Trampier had at least written story notes on what he wanted the tale's end shape to be.

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  4. I found this link ages ago. All of Wormy. https://sites.google.com/site/wormycollected/Home

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    1. Who has the rights to this? WotC?

      It’s a shame no anthology of DAT’s work has been published, but maybe those looking after his estate are honoring his wishes?

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  5. Single greatest FRPG artist. And to think that Wormy is just out there on the interwebs and moldering Dragon issues: gorgeous, funny, atmospheric, and one of the best graphic novels that almost no one will read.

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  6. The strips quality seems to rise above The Dragon itself.

    ...but I too wasn't loyal enough to not be confused by the plot. A Wormy graphic novel would be swell.

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    1. It was often the best feature of any given issue IME, although What's New gave it stiff competition, Buck Godot and Girl Genius show that WN wasn't a fluke, the Foglios are damn talented too. Hell, even XXXenophile's the funniest porn comic ever produced, narrowly edging out Willingham's Ironwood in that small category.

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