Russ Nicholson, fantasy illustrator
The first in a series of occasional pieces on figures who inspired me.
I am a little ashamed that I hadn’t previously brought up my early heroes in my articles. There is no particular reason, other than a surfeit of subjects and commissions that have taken up my time – quite apart from making my own art. Only today I heard of the death of Russ Nicholson (d. May 2023), Scottish fantasy illustrator, whose career began in the 1970s. His line illustrations for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982), the first in the Fighting Fantasy series of books, played a part in me becoming an artist.
When I was nine years old when I was asked what I wanted to be, I replied “To be an author and illustrator and illustrate my own books.” The most I knew of what it must be to be an illustrator was gleaned from Nicholson’s drawings, which I knew solely from Warlock, which I purchased in the year it came out. It was published in 1982 and promoted in Puffin Club, a postal marketing system designed to get children buying books through schools. I saw the listing for Warlock and thought it sounded like Tolkien, which I already knew. When the book arrived, I devoured the choose-your-own-adventure format book, wearing it to the point of disintegration in a few months.
What most fascinated me were the striking drawings. I had never seen anything quite as vital or teeming with invention. In mere black and white, drawn in ink, trembling and pulsating with delicate striations and taut contour-hugging hatching, Nicholson’s drawings brought to life descriptions of dungeons, monsters, traps and grotesque characters. I would spend hours studying the drawings, trying to see how he had managed so much and began to imitate the tight forms and inventive detailing. This extended to tracing, but perhaps my memory leads me astray. Certainly, I copied them, trying to absorb the magic touch, the rugged forms, the confident musculature, too young to really learn the lessons.
What I did not understand then was that Nicholson was a modern exponent of the drawing style of Harry Clarke (1889-1931), itself derived in part from Aubrey Beardsley. As one can see from comparison with a Harry Clarke illustration (Poe’s “Masque of the Read Death”, 1923) how much Nicholson extracted from Clarke, either directly or by indirect osmosis from others. The Black Style of Clarke, with its areas of black, Art Nouveau arabesques, extensive decoration and dense detailing, is perfectly adapted for line illustration in books that do not have particularly fine printing or special paper. In other words, what a Puffin book including line art needed was just such art. Part of the massive success of Fighting Fantasy (with over 50 books, 20 million copies sold, republished in numerous languages) was built on the success of the first book and that was in largely due to the brilliance of Nicholson’s illustration.
There is a peculiar numerical symmetry to Nicholson’s passing. He died forty years after his greatest work inspired a ten-year old boy, who is now an artist who has just turned fifty. Well, that last clause is redundant, but one starts looking at meaningful things in decades, somehow making them more portentous.
I am not in a position to assess Nicholson’s artistic output overall. It is presented (somewhat chaotically) in blog form, updated until 2020, here: https://russnicholson.blogspot.com/ (Someone should really archive the pages before the website goes offline.) Nicholson made drawings for comics, fantasy fanzines and journals, books, board-game systems and album covers, with notable work for Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer and Games Workshop. He also produced sci-fi art. The majority of his work was uncoloured. His illustrations evolved away from the linear Clarke style, which seem his best, to drawings that appear to be more accumulations of figures and motifs, less tightly designed. The character of Warhammer lends itself to profusion and extremity, which works against simpler stronger designs of interiors and single motifs that made his Warlock drawings so good.
Better for Nicholson were assignments to draw single creature for White Dwarf roleplay-gaming magazine. Here he could indulge his capacity for caricature and detail in a restricted format. These drawings were compiled into Fiend Folio (1981), an unofficial monster compendium for Dungeons & Dragons. This work must have contributed to Nicholson securing the commission for Warlock. Warlock was written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, who had been in the tabletop gaming world in the late 1970s and came up with the idea of a choose-your-own-adventure book (a format already developed in 1970s by Edward Packard, Vermont Crossroads Press and Bantam Books) as a serious fantasy adventure (incorporating a gaming mechanic) that would be aimed at teenagers and young adults. It was a smash hit and led to a series of books, increasingly written by other authors under licence. Each was illustrated but none of the illustrations reached the level of accomplishment, invention and artistry of Nicholson. He also illustrated the second book in the Fighting Fantasy series (The Citadel of Chaos (1983)) and no others in the main series, which ended in 1995, although Nicholson did illustrate other Jackson and Livingstone books over the 1980s and 1990s.
With a working career covering half a century, his output was large and the quality varied. Although I recognise the quality in a range of work outside of the two Fighting Fantasy books – indeed, a few pieces that match that quality – I don’t have a case to put regarding the overall corpus, as it is hard to grasp in such an non-sequential format as on the blog. What matters to me is the perfection of Nicholson’s drawing for their task – bringing to life a fantasy gaming book for a child, instilling fear, awe and excitement. The fact that my books on critical and cultural issues are illustrated comes from an unsatiated appetite to see my drawings in books, illuminating the text in the way Nicholson did for me as a boy. Although my future was not in fantasy, I learned a lot about illustration – mostly in an subconscious way – from fantasy illustrators who channelled graphic masters such as Clarke, Beardsley, Rackham, Grunewald, Bosch and Dürer.
There is considerable snobbery regarding art that is regarded as trivial, commercial, debased, made for younger viewers and dwelling on genre subjects such as fantasy, horror, science-fiction, the western and so forth. To a degree, there is (or was) validity in these reservations; the art of these genres can be lazy, derivative and ugly in a way fine art in the past could not be. There were too many articulate and informed people willing to publicly hold fine artists to account. However, now that aesthetic judgement and intellectual probity have vacated the upper reaches of contemporary fine art, snobs have precious little credibility to back up their (formerly reasonable) prejudices. Today, the best comic-book, fantasy and science-fiction artists are comparable in skill and accomplishment to the most successful of today’s fine artists. Nicholson’s drawings are better than most drawings I’ve seen in Bond Street galleries.
My greatest regret is that I did not think to say so directly to Mr Nicholson while he was around to hear it. Perhaps that lesson – not to leave your praise entirely for another’s epitaph – is one that you can learn from this story.
An older cousin of mine, who was massively into Warhammer in his youth, has a copy of David Ferring’s novel ‘Konrad’, the original 1990 edition, with illustrations by Nicholson. I’ve come across later editions in secondhand bookstores but, sadly, these did not include Nicholson’s illustrations. Nicholson’s black and white line work became his trademark in a sense. Notably, Bryan Ansell (director of Games Workshop and co-creator of Warhammer) who commissioned Nicholson a number of times, has also passed away - on 30th December 2023. Nicholson’s work deserved a far wider audience than the gaming and fantasy world.
I enjoyed this. I’m looking for someone to illustrate the cover for a book I’m completing this month. I’ve had a very difficult time. Most options seem to be AI generated or generic figures of knights with a sword. Most cover art in fantasy seemed to take a downward turn in the last two decades. I even prefer some of the rather poor 90’s covers to what is done these days.