“T,” and Sword and Sorcery

This one will require a bit of explain­ing. Per­haps I say that more often than I should here, but it’s def­i­nite­ly jus­ti­fied this time.

It’s a fun­ny thing; you can know some­one for years, and still learn new things about them. That hap­pened to me recent­ly with my friend Vic Dal Chele. Vic (like most of us work­ing in ani­ma­tion) may not be a house­hold name to you, but most like­ly you’ve seen some­thing he worked on at some point. I met Vic ear­ly in my ani­ma­tion career, but we did­n’t actu­al­ly get to work togeth­er on the same project until a few years lat­er. We end­ed up col­lab­o­rat­ing on a num­ber of projects in the years since, and got to be good friends.

Recent­ly, I had the chance to meet up with Vic at a local restau­rant for lunch. Spur of the moment, I asked him a ques­tion which had nev­er occurred to me to ask before. Both of us knew that our mutu­al friend Lar­ry Hous­ton (of X‑Men: The Ani­mat­ed Series fame) had pub­lished his own comics pri­or to get­ting into ani­ma­tion. Remind­ing Vic of that, I asked whether he’d ever done any comics of his own before. He con­fessed that he had!

Back in the mid-’70s (well before his ani­ma­tion days), Vic pub­lished an issue of a com­ic he did called The Leg­end of Tau­ran. He was a bit embar­rassed to admit it though, because of the lev­el of the work. I became a lit­tle intrigued to look it up, and dis­cov­ered some­one actu­al­ly had a good qual­i­ty copy avail­able for pur­chase (at a rea­son­able price) on eBay, which I bought. When Vic found out I’d done that, he told me, “You’re a nut!”

The com­ic con­tained three strips: “The Leg­end of Tau­ran,” “Tom­mie Gunne” and “F.O.R.C.E.” It leans towards being an under­ground com­ic in spots (most­ly the Tom­mie strip), hence a “Sug­gest­ed for Mature Read­ers” advi­so­ry on the back cov­er. I can under­stand why Vic was a bit embar­rassed by the lev­el of his work. It shows a young artist still fig­ur­ing out how to draw, and grap­pling with how to get his ink­ing tools to do what he wants them to.

But under the rough sur­face, you could see he was try­ing. Hard. He had some inter­est­ing ideas in the sto­ry he was telling, and it made sense in ret­ro­spect that he man­aged to find his way into enter­tain­ment, and ani­ma­tion specifically.

I got inspired to take a crack at doing a cov­er for a sec­ond issue of The Leg­end of Tau­ran, just for fun. And as I often do, I put a bit of a spin on it, mak­ing it look more like a main­stream com­ic that might have come out around that time.

There are many who get into ani­ma­tion who were always aim­ing them­selves in that direc­tion from the very begin­ning. How­ev­er, it’s also true that there are a num­ber of us who orig­i­nal­ly aspired to work in comics, but end­ed up in ani­ma­tion instead as our day job. Vic and I are def­i­nite­ly mem­bers of the lat­ter tribe.

So this is my trib­ute to my friend Vic. And to all those oth­er fans and aspir­ing artists who are dri­ven to cre­ate their own comics and put them out there, warts and all. Get­ting some­thing done and pub­lished puts you miles ahead of oth­er artists who are always talk­ing about the great com­ic they’re going to do one day, but they nev­er actu­al­ly get around to doing it.

The Leg­end of Tau­ran, Tom­mie Gunne and F.O.R.C.E are ™ & © Vic Dal Chele.