Jumping from link to link, I recently discovered this article and this article, mainly about comics, which also have some interesting notes about the WotC buyout of TSR.
Here's the relevant sections:
[size=+1]HERE BE DRAGONS[/size]
With Roaring studios set to revive "DragonLance" in comic book form, one source was prompted to share some memories of how it went down the first time with TSR Comics.
"Back in 1987-88, Steven Grant, Steve Gerber, Frank Miller and Brad Munson got together and publish a newsletter for comics professionals (a paper one in '88 -- the Internet itself had yet to really exist). They called it WAP! (Words and Pictures), and published, what about a dozen issues over the next couple of years. Logo by Bill Sienkiewicz, political cartoons by Dave Sim, articles by just about everybody active in the biz at the time. Great fun and much shouting ensued.
"The major theme of WAP! was creator rights and self-determination. They even did a whole issue on self-publishing, with major pieces written by the few folks successful in that field at the time -- Dave Sim, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, etc. Grant and I got to be friends; WAP! eventually folded for lack of time (Miller was moving into screenwriting and going all Martha Washington, Gerber was moving into TV, Munson into the music industry, etc. etc.), but the bug was planted: Grant and Munson started speculating about the 'ideal comics company' -- an independent company that could use the direct sales market, but allow for creator's rights.
"Enter Flint Dille. Flint had been peripherally involved in the (then dying) animation and (then moribund) comics industry for years, primarily because of his connection to TSR. Flint was the brother of Lorraine Williams, the woman who owned and ran TSR in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin at the time, and had much clout with her. He was living in L.A. and trying to get a variety of media projects involving TSR properties off the ground: D&D cartoons and movies, interactive games (at the time SSI was doing a successful line of combat-sim games for the PC; Flint was involved in those). Lorraine considered him a Young Genius, the scion of the family who just hadn't quite found his niche yet.
"Grant and Munson had planned how to get a company off the ground by buying into some existing properties. TSR had them. They submitted a modified business plan to them, through Flint, that suggested they produce four comics a month- some based on TSR properties, some newly developed material, in 4-6-issue arcs; to then be repackaged and republished as graphic novels (a novel idea in 1990). Munson (not Grant) wished to include text pages with battle stats for comics characters so gamers could use them as characters while playing RPGs. And there'd be plenty of cross-advertising out of TSR product. Munson met with Lorraine and others; and went through the plan, the Board approved it, and suddenly ... there was a company. Munson was publisher; Grant was Creative Director... and Flint was General Manager. You can see where this is going can't you?
"Flint's various other-media projects would run out of the same Sepulveda offices, collectively the operation was known as TSR/West. Dark Horse was just getting off the ground at the time, building its rep and stability on 'Predator' and 'Alien' adaptations and showing how well graphic novels could do. Frank Miller and Brad Munson were pushing hard at Orion to let him do the 'Robocop II' comics adaptation that he had written -- but they wanted more up-front money than they could find; so it went to Marvel without Miller. The direct sales market was, as it turned out, at its height ... and TSR had a healthy relationship with Simon and Schuster and various distributors because of its successful paperback book series, edited by Mary Kirchoff. The whole thing seemed like a good idea at the time...
"... Except for two things.
"One: TSR's major, best-known licenses -- 'Dungeons & Dragons,' 'Dragonlance,' 'Forgotten Realms' and all connected worlds -- were under the control of DC at the time, where they were producing a series of three or four half-successful comics. After much back-and-forth and mumbled assurances, it became clear that TSR wasn't going to pull those back: they would only get the remaining licenses, the less-successful or long-dead products: 'Buck Rogers' (which had and still is owned by the Dille Family Trust since it was, ahem, acquired by Flint's ancestors, and for which they were preparing a new RPG launch), 'Sniper,' 'Agent 13' (a 1930's pulp-homage spy thing), like that. None of the sword-and-sorcery stuff.
"Two: Flint. They thought Flint was going to simply share offices and support staff and serve as the prime liaison with TSR/Central. Instead, Flint was to be the Boss of Bosses -- he would decide what books were published, who were hired, where the offices were, etc. etc. And as became clear even as they were recruiting artists and writers, his ideas about everything from creator's rights to page rates to content were entirely different than Grant and Munson's. He proceeded to load the staff with friends - the one assistant Grant and Munson brought in fled in a matter of weeks. They spent hours and even days discussing abortive movie, TV, and game projects, and dickering over the standard contract they would offer to writers and artists. They spent weeks setting up a print production process running through their offices, only to be told that TSR/Central would handle all that, on their own schedule (even though it was longer and more convoluted; even though they'd never printed comics in their lives). And it became clear: if there was a Flint vs. Anyone decision to be made, the decision would be made in Flint's favor.
"It was a very rough year. There was so little to choose from in the TSR leftovers that they created new concepts for the TSR line: 'Intruder,' a "wanderer in multiple dimensions" story, 'Warhawks,' about a platoon of time-traveling mercenaries, 'R.I.P.,' a horror anthology, .. and were told that comic #4 would be 'Buck Rogers.' No arguments. There were 'B' stories there as well, but the salvaged notion was that they wouldn't do superheroes -- they'd appeal to the genres that gamers respond to: SF/fantasy, war/combat, horror/fantasy, and ... well, 'Buck Rogers,' like it or not.
"It wasn't long before the four-story arc concept was forgotten. There were no assurances that any of the storylines would be turned into GNs anymore. S&S had originally been willing to distribute into (the then dying) bookstore market; they backed away when it came time to solicit, and TSR let them (though they had tremendous clout with them at the time) -- so they were back to an all-direct-sales product.
"Finally, months away from launch, and on the verge of soliciting the first issues, the next bomb fell: DC was grumbling about TSR 'competing' with them ... so they could no longer call our products 'comics.' They didn't want to offend DC. Instead, they would now be called 'Comics Modules.' The covers would be altered to make the look more like games than comics (including a horrible hexagon-grid logo-frame-thing that was supposed to look like a gaming grid-map), and the gaming content would be beefed up. Of course the comics shops hated this idea -- they didn't sell gaming product, damn it (remember -- this is 1991, way before 'Magic: the Gathering' and the collectible/gaming crossover market.) They were confused as to whether it was a comic (based on a whole bunch of new, non-superhero concepts) or a game (which they weren't interested in), and they ended up under-ordering until they could see them. A sampling campaign was suggested -- sending out black-and-white issues to all the shop-buyers -- but never got off the ground (they didn't want to spend the money back at central; their new Marketing Manager, signed on by Flint, didn't think it was necessary).
"Stephen Grant saw the hand-writing on the wall. He cut a deal to continue writing 'Intruder' and something else -- I forget what -- as well as be 'Editorial Coordinator' for a couple of the other books, but worked from home. Munson resigned within the year. Flint wanted even more of his own people, and he got them.
"The first few issues of 'Intruder,' 'Warhawks,' 'R.I.P.' and 'Buck Rogers' were published a few months later, without Munson's name and with Grant's only on the books he specifically wrote. When the 'Agent 13' came out, TSR Production standards were peculiar enough to that the 'Is it game? Is it comic?' debate continued and the books were shelved all over stores, depending on whether it was seen as a comic or a TSR game product. Sales were pretty abysmal; the reorders after issue #3 guaranteed the silent death of the line, one of the early deaths in a decade where everybody from First Comics to Eclipse to blah blah blah also came and went.
"At the time, TSR was the Big Dog in gaming -- something like 70% of the market, a huge line of books, and full ownership of GENCON, the large gaming convention in America. Wizards of the Coast was this tiny little Pacific Northwest company doing card/combat games. But it was only three or four years later that WotC's 'Magic: The Gathering' came along, and the long-predicted slide in RPG's finally began. After years of trying to build their properties into a DC-like Properties Machine, Lorraine Williams ending up selling TSR to upstart WotC for $25 million. Only a very few folks followed the sale from Wisconsin to Washington State ... and Lorriane Williams and Flint Dille weren't among them.
"Flint is still in Hollywood now, married with a couple of kids. He seems to have done some game design here and there; He wrote the screenplay for the animated feature 'Fievel Goes West' and some video-inserts for Playstation games. Just this month a novelization of the Playstation game based on 'Batman: The Animated Series' was published; Dille is the co-author with Devin Grayson, and authored the 'Game Story.'
"Lorraine Williams moved to Germany shortly after the sale of TSR in 1997. Her whereabouts are unknown.
"Marketing Manager Justin McCormack was a marketing director for Marvel for quite a while, and is now with EMAP Petersen.
"Some time after Peter Adkison's WotC bought TSR, Hasbro bought Adkison's WotC. He left the company a couple of years ago, an extremely rich man. He still hangs around the industry, and seems to be enjoying himself.
"Brad Munson went back into 'regular publishing', wrote 'Inside Men In Black 2' for Sony and Del Rey last year, and consults in publishing and marketing.
"Steven Grant writes comics and a fun Internet column."
My source "took a glance at the Roaring Studios and Devil's Due Web sites; I see that 'Dragonlance' #1 and #2 are comin' in early '04. Good on 'em. 'Dragonlance' was one of the licenses held away from TSR/West 13 years ago; DC gave it up shortly after TSR/West folded ... but that was then and this is now. Though the rep and recognizability of the D&D name has dwindled tremendously, Sword & Sorcery in general has become a standard and rather robust sub-genre of its own, and plenty of non-superhero comics sell regularly now, while in 1991-2 virtually nothing north of Will Eisner reprints was selling if there wasn't a superhero on the front. And 'Dragonlance' as a name is pretty cool; the product looks decent. It may attract Sword and Sorcery fans apart from gamers based on its concept alone. I wonder what other moribund TSR properties might rear their ugly heads?"
[size=+1]TSRETALIATION[/size]
One of the things I love about going over old ground in LITG, like last week's article on TSR's comic book line, is the amount of people who crawl up from the drains, waving their own versions of history, expecting me to publish them.
Which I'm always happy to do.
Dan Mishkin writes, "One historical note worth mentioning: the idea of doing 4-issue story arcs that would be collected into trade paperbacks was very much on the minds of the people involved in putting out the DC comics based on TSR properties, though I wouldn't be surprised if Steven Grant and Brad Munson conceived of doing the same thing at virtually the same time. I'm not sure who at DC came up with the idea, but it may well have been Barbara Kesel, who was the original editor of the DC/TSR line.
"I know that when I started writing 'DragonLance' in 1988, and later wrote 'Advanced Dungeons & Dragons,' Barbara was very clear about the intention of repackaging the stories in single volumes.
"Unfortunately, these collections never came to be, and why not is a mystery to me. But I wouldn't have a hard time believing that TSR that made it impossible to pull off. Except for the delightful Jeff Grubb, who also wrote the 'Forgotten Realms' comic, the TSR folks were impossible to deal with - quite a prickly bunch.
"Luckily, I had good editors who ran interference most of the time, so I mostly had a terrific experience working with artists like Jan Duursema and Ron Randall and Tom Mandrake on stories that ended up being very successful creatively and somewhat successful financially. I was sad that they had to go, and that their existence had gone more or less undetected by a lot of superhero fans who would have enjoyed them if they'd given them a chance.
"I'd sure love to have copies of my stories in perfect-bound trades, though. But since that will never happen, I'll devote my energies to convincing DC to release a trade of my 'Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld' maxi-series."
James Lowder, currently a freelance writer and editor, with current comics work from Moonstone, added "I was a line editor in TSR's fiction division at 'TSR Central' at the time, working on the 'Forgotten Realms' and various other book lines, as well as one of the continuity people for the DC licensed books.
"TSR was distributed to the book trade by Random House at the time of the TSR West 'comic-modules,' not Simon & Schuster, and the comic-modules were pitched to RH-and heavily-as part of the standard company line. Flint Dille was the one who did the hardsell at the big intercompany meeting. Random House clearly wasn't interested, no matter how much pressure was applied, and I got the impression at that meeting that they were never interested-and that they had made their disinterest clear to Flint and everyone involved from Day One. (Mary Kirchoff was the managing editor of the TSR book division at the time, not the only one editing the several book lines that were active, as the note suggests. Also, she was out on maternity leave at the time the comic modules were pitched to RH; I was the one who represented the book division at the Random House sales conference when Flint did the pitch for the comic-modules.)
"It's interesting that anyone on the West Coast thought that the sword & sorcery licenses-'Dragonlance,' 'the Forgotten Realms,' 'Dungeons & Dragons,' and so on-would have been available at the start of the operation. The contracts with DC were still in effect, and the various books had been far better than 'half-successful.' They'd been doing well enough, in fact, for DC to have been in the early stages of developing at least two more licensed titles at the time they learned of the TSR West comics. (One of these new books would have been 'Ravenloft'; I was set to write the thing and had worked with editor Elliot Maggin and later Kim Yale on developing the material.) Though the folks on the West Coast might have been told otherwise, no effort I ever saw was made to 'take back' these licenses; everyone at TSR Central was quite happy with the DC books being done and the money they were generating.
"What the mgmt. of TSR Central (in other words, the Dille family) seemed unhappy about was the fact that DC was not interested in doing a Buck Rogers comic, a property even TSR was licensing from the Dille Family Trust. It's my understanding that getting out new Buck comics was the main reason TSR Central (and then Flint, who was not then an employee of TSR, just the owner's brother) became involved in the West Coast operation. And in doing so, even with the addition of the game material to make them 'comic modules' and the tinkering with cover design and such to make them appear different from 'typical' comics, they cheesed off DC enough that the West Coast dabbling led to the cancellation of the existing DC comics. I heard the words 'breach of contract' muttered more than once by DC employees at that time. But before that, I'd heard nothing but positive things from both the non-Dille TSR mgmt. and DC about the success and projected lifespan of those comics.
"Your correspondent also had it wrong that 'Only a very few folks' went with TSR when it was bought by WotC. Actually many, many staffers went, just not upper mgmt., which is pretty standard for those types of buy-outs.
"As for the problems dealing with Flint Dille and Lorraine Williams-well, anyone who worked for TSR at any time during those years is unlikely to dispute just about any story you will hear about the difficulties there...."
Then Dave Eckleberry, a software designer jumped in with:
"Back in 1997, the point of the WotC acquisition, I was a game designer working for TSR (or what you would call TSR/Central) in scenic Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Back then, I worked on D&D (or what was then, AD&D). You observe, as M:tG rose into prominence, the long-forecast decline of RPGs hit. Mostly true. The greater truth is that, outside of AD&D Player's Handbooks, the decline had hit a while ago and was continuing. Many years had passed since the height of the craze in the early 80s when more than a million copies of the boxed D&D sets were sold in a year. Moreover, TSR's own business plans were causing them a lot of headache. After the success of 'Dragonlance' and 'Forgotten Realms' (which were only modest successes in terms of games, not books), Lorraine drove the company to create world after world, brand after brand. Names like 'Planescape,' 'Birthright,' 'Dark Sun,' 'Al Qadim,' and 'Spelljammer' rose up. Leaving aside how creative and interesting some of those creations may have been, they mostly lead to market fragmentation and customer confusion. But they did provide shelf space in the local hobby store was fought for and claimed against the threats of 'Vampire,' 'Shadowrun,' and other competition. Meanwhile, money was hopelessly lost in one countless misadventure and boondoggle after another (of which Buck Rogers games, CD-based games, soundtracks, and other tie-ins with LA were some of the products).
"By 1997, things were in pretty dire shape. The company which I had joined years early had lost nearly half its workforce, and then numbered just under 100. (Down far from the heights of nearly 400 when it was a darling if Inc. as a small business on the rise). Lorraine had sold the very building TSR was based out of in order to pay debts to printers. For a period of several months, TSR printed not a single product and the company seemed about to declare bankruptcy. Only a mortgage on her fine house assured that payroll be assured from month to month. So when a little card company that made the 'Legends of the Five Rings' talked about buying TSR, Williams jumped. Originally, WotC and Adkinson were supposed to be a third party to the deal. But when Adkinson found out the disastrous shape TSR was in, WotC stepped in to buy TSR directly… just as he had promised Williams two years previously when he finally managed to meet TSR's owner briefly at a Gencon. And almost all-according to some sources, every penny-of what Adkinson paid for TSR went directly to cover the debt hole it was buried in.
"'Only a very few folks followed the sale from Wisconsin to Washington State ... and Lorriane Williams and Flint Dille weren't among them.' - actually, almost every member of the game design staff at TSR was offered a position with Wizards, and in the coming year, several of those laid off would be rehired. I remember the move, the excitement of new opportunities, the shining hope of working for a CEO who played the games and understood the product. A total of about 50 people made the journey from Lake Geneva to Renton.
"Of course, years later many of those coworkers would be laid off again as Wizards downsized after its 'Pokemon' binge, but that's another story…"
And Jerry Ordway even pitched in, telling me "Around the time DC was doing the TSR books, I was asked to do a cover re-imagining Buck Rogers for a proposed DC produced Buck comic. Here is one I did full art on, and another exists somewhere, that Ed Barreto completed from a design of mine. I remember them as an audition for DC to get the license. Maybe DC was just trying to convince Dille NOT to let it be part of their (TSR's) separate line? I can't say. I seem to remember Barbara Kesel and Mike Gold were DC's editors."
Here's the relevant sections:
[size=+1]HERE BE DRAGONS[/size]
With Roaring studios set to revive "DragonLance" in comic book form, one source was prompted to share some memories of how it went down the first time with TSR Comics.
"Back in 1987-88, Steven Grant, Steve Gerber, Frank Miller and Brad Munson got together and publish a newsletter for comics professionals (a paper one in '88 -- the Internet itself had yet to really exist). They called it WAP! (Words and Pictures), and published, what about a dozen issues over the next couple of years. Logo by Bill Sienkiewicz, political cartoons by Dave Sim, articles by just about everybody active in the biz at the time. Great fun and much shouting ensued.
"The major theme of WAP! was creator rights and self-determination. They even did a whole issue on self-publishing, with major pieces written by the few folks successful in that field at the time -- Dave Sim, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, etc. Grant and I got to be friends; WAP! eventually folded for lack of time (Miller was moving into screenwriting and going all Martha Washington, Gerber was moving into TV, Munson into the music industry, etc. etc.), but the bug was planted: Grant and Munson started speculating about the 'ideal comics company' -- an independent company that could use the direct sales market, but allow for creator's rights.
"Enter Flint Dille. Flint had been peripherally involved in the (then dying) animation and (then moribund) comics industry for years, primarily because of his connection to TSR. Flint was the brother of Lorraine Williams, the woman who owned and ran TSR in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin at the time, and had much clout with her. He was living in L.A. and trying to get a variety of media projects involving TSR properties off the ground: D&D cartoons and movies, interactive games (at the time SSI was doing a successful line of combat-sim games for the PC; Flint was involved in those). Lorraine considered him a Young Genius, the scion of the family who just hadn't quite found his niche yet.
"Grant and Munson had planned how to get a company off the ground by buying into some existing properties. TSR had them. They submitted a modified business plan to them, through Flint, that suggested they produce four comics a month- some based on TSR properties, some newly developed material, in 4-6-issue arcs; to then be repackaged and republished as graphic novels (a novel idea in 1990). Munson (not Grant) wished to include text pages with battle stats for comics characters so gamers could use them as characters while playing RPGs. And there'd be plenty of cross-advertising out of TSR product. Munson met with Lorraine and others; and went through the plan, the Board approved it, and suddenly ... there was a company. Munson was publisher; Grant was Creative Director... and Flint was General Manager. You can see where this is going can't you?
"Flint's various other-media projects would run out of the same Sepulveda offices, collectively the operation was known as TSR/West. Dark Horse was just getting off the ground at the time, building its rep and stability on 'Predator' and 'Alien' adaptations and showing how well graphic novels could do. Frank Miller and Brad Munson were pushing hard at Orion to let him do the 'Robocop II' comics adaptation that he had written -- but they wanted more up-front money than they could find; so it went to Marvel without Miller. The direct sales market was, as it turned out, at its height ... and TSR had a healthy relationship with Simon and Schuster and various distributors because of its successful paperback book series, edited by Mary Kirchoff. The whole thing seemed like a good idea at the time...
"... Except for two things.
"One: TSR's major, best-known licenses -- 'Dungeons & Dragons,' 'Dragonlance,' 'Forgotten Realms' and all connected worlds -- were under the control of DC at the time, where they were producing a series of three or four half-successful comics. After much back-and-forth and mumbled assurances, it became clear that TSR wasn't going to pull those back: they would only get the remaining licenses, the less-successful or long-dead products: 'Buck Rogers' (which had and still is owned by the Dille Family Trust since it was, ahem, acquired by Flint's ancestors, and for which they were preparing a new RPG launch), 'Sniper,' 'Agent 13' (a 1930's pulp-homage spy thing), like that. None of the sword-and-sorcery stuff.
"Two: Flint. They thought Flint was going to simply share offices and support staff and serve as the prime liaison with TSR/Central. Instead, Flint was to be the Boss of Bosses -- he would decide what books were published, who were hired, where the offices were, etc. etc. And as became clear even as they were recruiting artists and writers, his ideas about everything from creator's rights to page rates to content were entirely different than Grant and Munson's. He proceeded to load the staff with friends - the one assistant Grant and Munson brought in fled in a matter of weeks. They spent hours and even days discussing abortive movie, TV, and game projects, and dickering over the standard contract they would offer to writers and artists. They spent weeks setting up a print production process running through their offices, only to be told that TSR/Central would handle all that, on their own schedule (even though it was longer and more convoluted; even though they'd never printed comics in their lives). And it became clear: if there was a Flint vs. Anyone decision to be made, the decision would be made in Flint's favor.
"It was a very rough year. There was so little to choose from in the TSR leftovers that they created new concepts for the TSR line: 'Intruder,' a "wanderer in multiple dimensions" story, 'Warhawks,' about a platoon of time-traveling mercenaries, 'R.I.P.,' a horror anthology, .. and were told that comic #4 would be 'Buck Rogers.' No arguments. There were 'B' stories there as well, but the salvaged notion was that they wouldn't do superheroes -- they'd appeal to the genres that gamers respond to: SF/fantasy, war/combat, horror/fantasy, and ... well, 'Buck Rogers,' like it or not.
"It wasn't long before the four-story arc concept was forgotten. There were no assurances that any of the storylines would be turned into GNs anymore. S&S had originally been willing to distribute into (the then dying) bookstore market; they backed away when it came time to solicit, and TSR let them (though they had tremendous clout with them at the time) -- so they were back to an all-direct-sales product.
"Finally, months away from launch, and on the verge of soliciting the first issues, the next bomb fell: DC was grumbling about TSR 'competing' with them ... so they could no longer call our products 'comics.' They didn't want to offend DC. Instead, they would now be called 'Comics Modules.' The covers would be altered to make the look more like games than comics (including a horrible hexagon-grid logo-frame-thing that was supposed to look like a gaming grid-map), and the gaming content would be beefed up. Of course the comics shops hated this idea -- they didn't sell gaming product, damn it (remember -- this is 1991, way before 'Magic: the Gathering' and the collectible/gaming crossover market.) They were confused as to whether it was a comic (based on a whole bunch of new, non-superhero concepts) or a game (which they weren't interested in), and they ended up under-ordering until they could see them. A sampling campaign was suggested -- sending out black-and-white issues to all the shop-buyers -- but never got off the ground (they didn't want to spend the money back at central; their new Marketing Manager, signed on by Flint, didn't think it was necessary).
"Stephen Grant saw the hand-writing on the wall. He cut a deal to continue writing 'Intruder' and something else -- I forget what -- as well as be 'Editorial Coordinator' for a couple of the other books, but worked from home. Munson resigned within the year. Flint wanted even more of his own people, and he got them.
"The first few issues of 'Intruder,' 'Warhawks,' 'R.I.P.' and 'Buck Rogers' were published a few months later, without Munson's name and with Grant's only on the books he specifically wrote. When the 'Agent 13' came out, TSR Production standards were peculiar enough to that the 'Is it game? Is it comic?' debate continued and the books were shelved all over stores, depending on whether it was seen as a comic or a TSR game product. Sales were pretty abysmal; the reorders after issue #3 guaranteed the silent death of the line, one of the early deaths in a decade where everybody from First Comics to Eclipse to blah blah blah also came and went.
"At the time, TSR was the Big Dog in gaming -- something like 70% of the market, a huge line of books, and full ownership of GENCON, the large gaming convention in America. Wizards of the Coast was this tiny little Pacific Northwest company doing card/combat games. But it was only three or four years later that WotC's 'Magic: The Gathering' came along, and the long-predicted slide in RPG's finally began. After years of trying to build their properties into a DC-like Properties Machine, Lorraine Williams ending up selling TSR to upstart WotC for $25 million. Only a very few folks followed the sale from Wisconsin to Washington State ... and Lorriane Williams and Flint Dille weren't among them.
"Flint is still in Hollywood now, married with a couple of kids. He seems to have done some game design here and there; He wrote the screenplay for the animated feature 'Fievel Goes West' and some video-inserts for Playstation games. Just this month a novelization of the Playstation game based on 'Batman: The Animated Series' was published; Dille is the co-author with Devin Grayson, and authored the 'Game Story.'
"Lorraine Williams moved to Germany shortly after the sale of TSR in 1997. Her whereabouts are unknown.
"Marketing Manager Justin McCormack was a marketing director for Marvel for quite a while, and is now with EMAP Petersen.
"Some time after Peter Adkison's WotC bought TSR, Hasbro bought Adkison's WotC. He left the company a couple of years ago, an extremely rich man. He still hangs around the industry, and seems to be enjoying himself.
"Brad Munson went back into 'regular publishing', wrote 'Inside Men In Black 2' for Sony and Del Rey last year, and consults in publishing and marketing.
"Steven Grant writes comics and a fun Internet column."
My source "took a glance at the Roaring Studios and Devil's Due Web sites; I see that 'Dragonlance' #1 and #2 are comin' in early '04. Good on 'em. 'Dragonlance' was one of the licenses held away from TSR/West 13 years ago; DC gave it up shortly after TSR/West folded ... but that was then and this is now. Though the rep and recognizability of the D&D name has dwindled tremendously, Sword & Sorcery in general has become a standard and rather robust sub-genre of its own, and plenty of non-superhero comics sell regularly now, while in 1991-2 virtually nothing north of Will Eisner reprints was selling if there wasn't a superhero on the front. And 'Dragonlance' as a name is pretty cool; the product looks decent. It may attract Sword and Sorcery fans apart from gamers based on its concept alone. I wonder what other moribund TSR properties might rear their ugly heads?"
[size=+1]TSRETALIATION[/size]
One of the things I love about going over old ground in LITG, like last week's article on TSR's comic book line, is the amount of people who crawl up from the drains, waving their own versions of history, expecting me to publish them.
Which I'm always happy to do.
Dan Mishkin writes, "One historical note worth mentioning: the idea of doing 4-issue story arcs that would be collected into trade paperbacks was very much on the minds of the people involved in putting out the DC comics based on TSR properties, though I wouldn't be surprised if Steven Grant and Brad Munson conceived of doing the same thing at virtually the same time. I'm not sure who at DC came up with the idea, but it may well have been Barbara Kesel, who was the original editor of the DC/TSR line.
"I know that when I started writing 'DragonLance' in 1988, and later wrote 'Advanced Dungeons & Dragons,' Barbara was very clear about the intention of repackaging the stories in single volumes.
"Unfortunately, these collections never came to be, and why not is a mystery to me. But I wouldn't have a hard time believing that TSR that made it impossible to pull off. Except for the delightful Jeff Grubb, who also wrote the 'Forgotten Realms' comic, the TSR folks were impossible to deal with - quite a prickly bunch.
"Luckily, I had good editors who ran interference most of the time, so I mostly had a terrific experience working with artists like Jan Duursema and Ron Randall and Tom Mandrake on stories that ended up being very successful creatively and somewhat successful financially. I was sad that they had to go, and that their existence had gone more or less undetected by a lot of superhero fans who would have enjoyed them if they'd given them a chance.
"I'd sure love to have copies of my stories in perfect-bound trades, though. But since that will never happen, I'll devote my energies to convincing DC to release a trade of my 'Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld' maxi-series."
James Lowder, currently a freelance writer and editor, with current comics work from Moonstone, added "I was a line editor in TSR's fiction division at 'TSR Central' at the time, working on the 'Forgotten Realms' and various other book lines, as well as one of the continuity people for the DC licensed books.
"TSR was distributed to the book trade by Random House at the time of the TSR West 'comic-modules,' not Simon & Schuster, and the comic-modules were pitched to RH-and heavily-as part of the standard company line. Flint Dille was the one who did the hardsell at the big intercompany meeting. Random House clearly wasn't interested, no matter how much pressure was applied, and I got the impression at that meeting that they were never interested-and that they had made their disinterest clear to Flint and everyone involved from Day One. (Mary Kirchoff was the managing editor of the TSR book division at the time, not the only one editing the several book lines that were active, as the note suggests. Also, she was out on maternity leave at the time the comic modules were pitched to RH; I was the one who represented the book division at the Random House sales conference when Flint did the pitch for the comic-modules.)
"It's interesting that anyone on the West Coast thought that the sword & sorcery licenses-'Dragonlance,' 'the Forgotten Realms,' 'Dungeons & Dragons,' and so on-would have been available at the start of the operation. The contracts with DC were still in effect, and the various books had been far better than 'half-successful.' They'd been doing well enough, in fact, for DC to have been in the early stages of developing at least two more licensed titles at the time they learned of the TSR West comics. (One of these new books would have been 'Ravenloft'; I was set to write the thing and had worked with editor Elliot Maggin and later Kim Yale on developing the material.) Though the folks on the West Coast might have been told otherwise, no effort I ever saw was made to 'take back' these licenses; everyone at TSR Central was quite happy with the DC books being done and the money they were generating.
"What the mgmt. of TSR Central (in other words, the Dille family) seemed unhappy about was the fact that DC was not interested in doing a Buck Rogers comic, a property even TSR was licensing from the Dille Family Trust. It's my understanding that getting out new Buck comics was the main reason TSR Central (and then Flint, who was not then an employee of TSR, just the owner's brother) became involved in the West Coast operation. And in doing so, even with the addition of the game material to make them 'comic modules' and the tinkering with cover design and such to make them appear different from 'typical' comics, they cheesed off DC enough that the West Coast dabbling led to the cancellation of the existing DC comics. I heard the words 'breach of contract' muttered more than once by DC employees at that time. But before that, I'd heard nothing but positive things from both the non-Dille TSR mgmt. and DC about the success and projected lifespan of those comics.
"Your correspondent also had it wrong that 'Only a very few folks' went with TSR when it was bought by WotC. Actually many, many staffers went, just not upper mgmt., which is pretty standard for those types of buy-outs.
"As for the problems dealing with Flint Dille and Lorraine Williams-well, anyone who worked for TSR at any time during those years is unlikely to dispute just about any story you will hear about the difficulties there...."
Then Dave Eckleberry, a software designer jumped in with:
"Back in 1997, the point of the WotC acquisition, I was a game designer working for TSR (or what you would call TSR/Central) in scenic Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Back then, I worked on D&D (or what was then, AD&D). You observe, as M:tG rose into prominence, the long-forecast decline of RPGs hit. Mostly true. The greater truth is that, outside of AD&D Player's Handbooks, the decline had hit a while ago and was continuing. Many years had passed since the height of the craze in the early 80s when more than a million copies of the boxed D&D sets were sold in a year. Moreover, TSR's own business plans were causing them a lot of headache. After the success of 'Dragonlance' and 'Forgotten Realms' (which were only modest successes in terms of games, not books), Lorraine drove the company to create world after world, brand after brand. Names like 'Planescape,' 'Birthright,' 'Dark Sun,' 'Al Qadim,' and 'Spelljammer' rose up. Leaving aside how creative and interesting some of those creations may have been, they mostly lead to market fragmentation and customer confusion. But they did provide shelf space in the local hobby store was fought for and claimed against the threats of 'Vampire,' 'Shadowrun,' and other competition. Meanwhile, money was hopelessly lost in one countless misadventure and boondoggle after another (of which Buck Rogers games, CD-based games, soundtracks, and other tie-ins with LA were some of the products).
"By 1997, things were in pretty dire shape. The company which I had joined years early had lost nearly half its workforce, and then numbered just under 100. (Down far from the heights of nearly 400 when it was a darling if Inc. as a small business on the rise). Lorraine had sold the very building TSR was based out of in order to pay debts to printers. For a period of several months, TSR printed not a single product and the company seemed about to declare bankruptcy. Only a mortgage on her fine house assured that payroll be assured from month to month. So when a little card company that made the 'Legends of the Five Rings' talked about buying TSR, Williams jumped. Originally, WotC and Adkinson were supposed to be a third party to the deal. But when Adkinson found out the disastrous shape TSR was in, WotC stepped in to buy TSR directly… just as he had promised Williams two years previously when he finally managed to meet TSR's owner briefly at a Gencon. And almost all-according to some sources, every penny-of what Adkinson paid for TSR went directly to cover the debt hole it was buried in.
"'Only a very few folks followed the sale from Wisconsin to Washington State ... and Lorriane Williams and Flint Dille weren't among them.' - actually, almost every member of the game design staff at TSR was offered a position with Wizards, and in the coming year, several of those laid off would be rehired. I remember the move, the excitement of new opportunities, the shining hope of working for a CEO who played the games and understood the product. A total of about 50 people made the journey from Lake Geneva to Renton.
"Of course, years later many of those coworkers would be laid off again as Wizards downsized after its 'Pokemon' binge, but that's another story…"
And Jerry Ordway even pitched in, telling me "Around the time DC was doing the TSR books, I was asked to do a cover re-imagining Buck Rogers for a proposed DC produced Buck comic. Here is one I did full art on, and another exists somewhere, that Ed Barreto completed from a design of mine. I remember them as an audition for DC to get the license. Maybe DC was just trying to convince Dille NOT to let it be part of their (TSR's) separate line? I can't say. I seem to remember Barbara Kesel and Mike Gold were DC's editors."
