Art & Arcana: A Visual History by Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, and Sam Witwer
433 pages
Published 2018
Read from June 14 to June 15
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
This is the first book I've managed to read in its entirety since January. First I got stuck in a book that I didn't feel like finishing, then I developed anxiety about COVID-19, then came lockdown and panic attacks and depression and having no time to myself, then came the massive protests and uprisings against white violence and police brutality. This has been a turbulent year, and it's led to my longest reading drought since 2012.
This volume was an easy avenue back into reading. It's an art book—well over half its length is filled with art, tracing the visual development of Dungeons & Dragons from its roots in wargaming to its popular current iteration. I first got into D&D back in 2016. During this age of quarantine, unable to attend even an online session, I've spent lots of time downloading and browsing through PDFs of volumes from older editions. The primitive artwork and DIY fanzine vibe of the earliest days of D&D in the 1970s is something I appreciate, and who doesn't love the bizarre perms sported by half-naked rangers all through the '80s and '90s? I loved lingering over the art collected here, and recommend it on that basis alone.
The text, by contrast, is mostly a fluff piece, reading at times like a glowing end-of-year report to shareholders. Deep-dive exposé this is not. Four white dudes collaborated on the text, which suggests why certain vital topics—such as how the artwork of the current edition has shifted markedly toward a more diverse cast of characters, and how this shift has occurred in tandem with growing diversity within the hobby itself, which might be illuminating material for a visual history—aren't mentioned even in passing. I love D&D, but I'm no shareholder, so the text failed to excite my interest.
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