Playing the Role of a Beer-swilling Heavy Metal Wizard!

Here's a picture from the very first Lone Wolf book "Fire on the Water" by Joe Dever, illustrated by Gary Chalk. I used to be a big fan of Gary Chalk's work, but must admit I preferred the work of John Blanche (Illustrator of the Sorcery Series), going as far as to buy a White Dwarf magazine on one occasion, becuase the cover had a wonderful piece of work by him, on it!

I would say that my mates and I made fairly strange teens, back in the late 1980's. We used to play MERP (Middle-Earth Role Playing), which a lot of people would have called nerdy, but we didn't really play it in the traditional style, we would have a piss-up, and listen to heavy metal at the same time. That added an extra dimension to game-play, because you would start killing your mates game characters systematically after several beers. Characters which they had fostered for months, and which had gathered lots of goodies over that time. That was just a bonus, you could kill their character, really pissing them off in the process, and then take all their characters possessions too. Yes, it did come to blows on several occasions!

The connection is, I guess, that my mates and I, we mainly got together in our Higher Art class, we had similar tastes in music, books etc. About half-a-dozen of us, and all great guys, although globally dispersed now. The most hilarious thing about the class, revolved around a guy who failed the exam badly (no names mentioned). So we all left school, got jobs and so on. I heard that this guy had gone to college in Dundee to do his Art Higher again, and ended up working as a graphic artist, on huge money. Such irony, the one guy who truly demonstrated no artistic talent, became an artist. Life can be so odd sometimes can't it?