The Knights of the Dinner Table

Okay, so I promised a writeup of my epic re-read of my entire collection of Knights of the Dinner Table magazine. (The collected comics from vols. 1-86 in softcover compilations, plus my collected run of Vols. 130-151 of the magazine, since I started picking up the strip at my local comic shop.) The strip was created by Jolly Blackburn and is still drawn and mostly written by him, with some additional writing from a fairly small team of contributors.

Here's the important thing that I want you to take away from this entry. After re-reading nearly 20 years worth of these comics in order, I'm convinced that this semi-obscure niche comic is humor of the highest order, on a par with my some of my other all-time favorites, names like Mark Twain, Douglas Adams, Monty Python, and Terry Pratchett. No kidding. It's that good.

Instead of the truly epic writeup I had considered, you're going to get a midsize, slightly rambling, and entirely unproofread entry from a tired blogger. But that's okay. Truth be told, you'll have more fun reading KODT than reading my blog entry about reading KODT. I'll provide some handy links to a few good, quick KODT web-comics below. Also, there's a pretty good Introduction to KODT on the site of its publisher, Kenzer & Co., as well as a good Wikipedia entry on KODT. So if you want to read the full background and more about the cast of characters, I see no need to recreate them here.

The first thing a new reader notices about KODT is that it is possibly the geekiest thing ever created: a comic book about playing Dungeons & Dragons. But it is also laugh-out-loud funny, driven by characters and context, and endlessly addictive. Worry not, you really don't need to know much at all about D&D to appreciate the comic. The comic isn't about Dungeons & Dragons; it's about characters playing Dungeons & Dragons and therein lies a world of difference.

Like many fine inventions, Knights of the Dinner Table started as an accident. KODT creator Jolly Blackburn published a small role-playing-games fanzine called Shadis while he was in the military, and he had planned to run a comic page in the back of the magazine. When no comics came to him, he drew a little two-character comic of his own. The strip struck a chord with his readers, was eventually picked up by Dragon magazine for a while, and finally led to a standalone KODT magazine that launched in 1996 and has now run more than 150 issues: a truly remarkable accomplishment in a shrinking comic and magazine market. In that time the cast has grown from a core of four or five regulars to include dozens and dozens of characters ... and character is at the heart of KODT's appeal.

The cast of characters began with a single group of gamers in the comics early years. It soon expanded to include other gaming groups, the local gaming shop, and eventually the publishing company that creates the role-playing games that obsess them. The Knights and their fellow gaming groups venture into a wide variety role-playing genres -- westerns, spy thrillers, superheroes, space wars -- often to hilarious effect. But most of their time is spent with their first love, Hackmaster, which is their version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Here are three pages from a very early story called "Lair of the Gazebo." You'll have to click on the individual images to make them large enough to read.

(I'll post these three panels for ease of access, but will just link through to the KODT Web Comics site for most of the citations. Unlike my larcenous beagle-haiku business model, my point here is not to swipe their content, but to get you interested enough to buy somebody else's content.)

Knights of the Dinner Table, "Lair of the Gazebo", page 1, page 2, page 3.

This early story provides a pretty good example of the space in which KODT's humor works: the gap between the world of the characters that we see on the page and the imaginary worlds that they explore through role-playing games. The humor comes from the contradictions and conflicts that ensue. There's also a real sense of cameraderie and fun that carries the story cheerfully through its detour into a back-alley of absurdity.

As the comic has continued through the years the characters and stories have grown consideribly in depth and complexity, but I think the heart of what makes this comic work can be found right here.

You might also have noticed that the drawing style of this early story is ... well, um, shall we say "simple?" Though the artistry has improved a bit over the years, this basic style hasn't changed much at all. In truth, the comic often reads much more like a script with the world balloons serving merely to show which character is speaking. Let's face it, as fantasy comic artists go we have Frank Frazetta and John Buscema holding down one end of the scale and Jolly Blackburn holding down the far other end of that scale. (Sorry, Jolly.)

What's really interesting to me is that this has turned out to be a real strength of the comic, another fortuitous unplanned accident. The real action usually takes place in the imaginations of the characters as they play. But by keeping the visual aspects of the comic firmly in the real world, that gap between the real world and the game world is emphasized. And as I said above, that gap is what fuels this comic. I've read a lot of other fantasy and role-playing-based comics that featured artists with far more technical skill. But none of them have ever come close to capturing fantasy's sense of sheer unleashed imagination in the way that KODT does. Even the fiercest of dragons drawn by the best of artists can't compete with the dragons of our own imaginations.

(I digress a bit, but this is a storytelling truth once exploited effectively by filmmakers with limited special-effects budgets and technology, and the ability to show nearly anything onscreen has proven to be a weakness in the age of films filled with relatively inexpensive computer-generated special effects. Two of the most notable horror/monster flicks of the last ten years -- "Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield" -- generated their thrills by bucking this trend and relying on the fear of the unseen. It's a good lesson for storytellers of all genres and mediums.)

A few standard role-playing props do appear occasionally: dungeon blueprints, miniature figures, and hex-grid boards. But I don't recall so much as a thought bubble with a monster or a character. Those things can only be seen in the imaginations of the characters and the imaginations of the readers.

I came across an editorial comment in one of my various readings that indicated that Jolly Blackburn looked pretty seriously for a replacement artist in the comic magazine's early days. Remember, his goal was to publish a games magazine, not to create a comic, much less become a commercial artist. Fortunately, he was eventually talked out of it. This was a good decision for the long-term development of the strip because in really forced an emphasis on the sort of things that don't take much artistic skill, but are vital for the success of any long storytelling effort: character development, pacing, plotting, etc. Jolly has become a much more effective artist over the years, but the stripped-down style remains, and it's all to the good.

Here are a few more good stories that have been posted as web comics:

"Brian's Challenge" page 1, page 2, page 3. The Untouchable Trio Plus One take on Ol' Rotgut the Swack Iron Dragon.

"Baiting the Hook" page 1, page 2, page 3. The Untouchable Trio Plus One settle down in the homey village of Fyron.

"I Heard the News Today ... " page 1, page 2, page 3. A very nice strip run a few weeks after the death of Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax.

"Movie Night" page 1, page 2. Bob & Sheila at home.

And finally, since the intersection of the Internet with the Halls of Commerce has been a bit of a theme here lately, this strikes me as a good single-panel to close on, "Anything for a Customer."

So check it out and let me know what you think. There are about a dozen or so pages posted above. If you like them, there are another 3,500 or so out there, waiting to be enjoyed.