News — Jim Holloway

It is said the cover artist Michael Weaver began this painting at the start of the initial Gulf War [I remember watching CNN at midnight on my little TV in the dorm at I.U. when this went down] and completed it the day the war was over.  So, roughly the 17th of January 1991 to the 28th of February 1991.  Not bad for a months worth of work, and although I could never fully figure out what the deal was with floating two-handed sword, I did love it.  The magazine itself is are rather dull issue with a short story,...

Today I'd like to take a look at a single piece of artwork that was done by artist Jim Holloway for TSR's Gamma World 2nd Edition in roughly 1983.  Now Holloway only spent two years at TSR, and to his recollection those weren't 'great times' considering how the company was changing from 1982 to 1984.  It was transitional, with Gary in L.A. and the company beginning to sag under its own weight of production, mismanagement, and the cooling of the fad that D&D had become circa 1979.  Still, in that period, under the art direction of Jim Roslof, the art...

October 1982 saw the release of Dragon Vol. VII, No. 5, Issue #66 with Editor-in-Chief Kim Mohan at the helm. It’s another strong issue from the ‘Below 100’ club, with great content for D&D [like Gary saying gun powder doesn’t work in AD&D], a counterargument piece by authors John Sapienza & Bruce Murphy where they debate the use of weapon restrictions by class, a look at Elfquest if the characters were from D&D, Gary’s take on the Jann, Dao, and Marid. New illusionist spells [later put into Unearthed Arcana], useful ways to employ Phantasmal Force, Speaking Thieves’ Cant, and a...

Today I’m going to give a little ‘love’ to Gamma World 2nd Edition. Although you’d be hard pressed to find a player out there to calls 2nd Edition their favorite iteration of the game, it still has some cool work done for it so I’ll take a look at the art of The Cleansing War of Garik Blackhand [which BTW wins the TSR award for longest title of a product]This is a strange little bit of work as there are two credited artists in it, Jim Holloway and David ‘Deisel’ LaForce. As the first printing was in 1983, this seems...

Dragon Magazine #112 shows some great promise with an incredible Daniel Horne cover, but there is an absence inside that the editors were not really ready to fill. Now remember, this issue is from August 1986, a full year after Gygax was ousted from TSR, and I think the magazine is feeling those ‘growing pains’, or more correctly, the evidence of shrinking sales and budget cuts looming overhead like storm clouds.As stated, Daniel Horne [‘saving the best for last’ October #126] is a paragon of Dragon artwork, and it would be hard to compose a Top 10 list of...