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The Pit of Doom (The Chasm of Doom)
(From the book "Heroes & Villains")By : Deborah Susan Jones : Editor & Contributing writerOriginally created for
the 1985 Lone Wolf roleplay paperback game book
"Le Gouffre Maudit" (The Chasm of Doom) Loup Solitaire:
Un Livre Dont Vous Etes Le Heros - this was the fourth
of the first four cover art pieces produced over
Christmas 1984. Painted in Oil and Acrylic on card
mounted on wood panel. Following the
commercial success of these works produced for the
Paris-based publisher Editions Gallimard the art was
subsequently licensed by The Solar Wind Picture Library
to Red Fox books in London at which point, after several
more licenses from other primary French editions he
created, the Artist was asked to create
the
English covers from scratch from then on.
The French covers were also used by Edizioni
E. Elle in Triteste as they has a commercial trading
relationship with Gallimard and eventually these cover
paintings spread out across the globe in almost every
country on the planet with the exception of the USA.
where later, due to copyright restrictions, the Artist
created several replacement works for Berkley Books in
New York. It would be impossible to really assess the
number of paperbacks on which these cover illustrations
appeared but certainly it runs into millions.The irony in this is that the Artist did not
initially seek to be involved in Roleplay Games Art and
the requests to create images for both paperback and
software games products came purely as as result of the
work he was already known for producing, primarily in
the Science Fiction genre. Indeed, though later rescinded due to the
impossibility and obsolescence of adopting such a
stance, at the outset The Solar Wind Studio had a
policy of never soliciting for work, relying instead on
reputation of previous works to elicit trade.Eventually the Artist
gave up having any marketing policy because it became
pointless in view of the sheer extent of usage and
exposure, including some infringements of
copyright, that came into being.
Deborah Susan Jones
