Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Varzil the Good


"Varzil the Good" was a heroic lawmaker character in Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Darkover" world. His dramatic and elaborate history is recounted in this fan encyclopedia entry, which astonishes me with its detail. In fact this whole Darkover "wiki" encyclopedia is an astonishing deed of research, and I didn't know about it until just now. This "Varzil" illustration is a piece of my vast and not-so-astonishing deposit of Darkover fan art. II always wanted to do Darkover as a graphic novel in the 1890s storybook style of illustrators like H.J. Ford of the "Colorful Fairy Books" series. But Marion Z. Bradley the author said (in a conversation with me) that she hated comic books and she would never allow anyone to do a graphic presentation of her Darkover works. She's dead now but you still have to honor her wishes.

"Varzil" is ink on illustration board, tinted in acrylic and restored in Photoshop, 3" x 6", summer 1985.

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