Comics in D&D by James Maliszewski After years of closer examination, I think it’s pretty widely known that Original Dungeons & Dragons artist, Greg Bell “borrowed” a lot of his illustrations from Marvel comics from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. While I understand that the practice of “swiping” (as it is known) is controversial in comics circles, I’m not much bothered by it in the case of Bell’s OD&D pieces, in part because it only further emphasizes just how amateurish the 1974 game and its initial supplements were. Rather than finding these swipes worthy of condemnation, I find them strangely charming. Perhaps Bell’s most famous swipe is the “Fight On!” image that appears almost at the very end of The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, the third and final volume of OD&D. Compare this illustration to this panel from issue #167 (April 1968) of Marvel’s Strange Tales, featuring Nick Fury, as drawn by Jim Steranko (above). As we’ll see, this issue was the inspiration for quite a few illustrations that appear in Original Dungeons & Dragons and its early supplements. Take, for example, this barbarian who appears in Men & Magic. Elsewhere in the aforementioned issue of Strange Tales, we find another panel featuring Nick Fury (above), whose pose is almost identical to that of the barbarian. Strange Tales was an anthology comic that featured a variety of different characters and stories over the course of its seventeen-year existence. In its later years, its mainstays were Nick Fury and Doctor Strange. Unsurprisingly, panels from Doctor Strange also figure in Greg Bell’s artwork. The most obvious one is the box cover of the first through third printings of Dungeons & Dragons (which also served as the cover to Volume 1 in those same printings). Issue #167 features a mounted Viking warrior (above) that looks nearly identical. Early printings of Monsters & Treasure, the second volume of OD&D, includes the following piece of art, depicting a sorcerer in his lair: Take a look at this panel from the Doctor Strange story (drawn by Dan Adkins, above) in the same issue of Strange Tales. Interestingly, both of the pieces inspired by Doctor Strange were removed and replaced in later printings of OD&D. Why this happened is anyone’s guess at this point, but I think it unlikely that it was done because anyone...