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| What's New first collection (1991) |
When we first discovered gaming magazines, in English of course because in 1986 Italy had just fanzines (including one of our own, Rune), we were of course very appreciative of Dragon magazine that at the time ran Larry Elmore's wonderful SnarfQuest strip. But sometimes purchasing older issues, quite a feat in the Italy at the time, we discovered a no more published strip that we liked a lot too: Phil Foglio's What's New. SnarfQuest and What's New are both fine gaming strips but very different from each other: while Larry Elmore's one is the classic 'young hero comes of age' story (from adventurer to King of the Zeetvah), Phil Foglio's had a humourous (sometimes caustic) look to the world of RPGs, It was unique!
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| What's New second collection (1994) |
What's New started being published in Dragon magazine 49 (May 1981) as a black & white (colour would arrive seven issues later), full page comic strip. We are introduced to Phil (an avatar of Phil Foglio), a gamer, with his distinctive hat and to his co host, the lovely Dixie Null (which has a strong temperament, stronger opinions and does not fear physical confrontations) talking about games, genres of games, gamers, conventions, miniatures and so on. In issue 51 a new character arrives, Growf the little (and very disaster prone) dragon who it seems represented TSR, to complete the cast of characters of the strip. What's New would last in Dragon magazine till issue 84 (April 1984). The last strip see our heroes going to TSR itself to ask why they wasn't supposed to deal with the "Sex and D&D" topic after everything the cast has done in the magazine... and gettin fired! This last strip was followed by a letter by Phil emphasizing he had not been fired and by Kim Mohan (Dragon editor at the time) reply that stated "Sure, we've had our differences. (Do you want to write the best-selling expose, or should I?)"leaving many readers to suspect that perhaps something had happened.
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| What's New third collection (2000) |
Anyway, What's New seemed to have disappeared forever until two collections, reprinting all the original Dragon strip plus new material, appeared in 1991 and 1994. In the first collection we have an eight page story about Phil and Dixie's first encounter which we can summarize with: Phil thinks having created Dixie in the same way you create a character in a RPG (a very complex one) so she is fated to meet and love him and ... but in the end seems that Dixie did the very same thing creating him! So who has created whom? Perhaps they are both lunatics... or geniuses. In the second collection instead we have the long awaited "Sex and D&D" strip which however is not perhaps many readers had imagined... or hoped (no love scenes between Phil and Dixie).
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| What's New second collection, second edition (2001) |
Better yet, in Fall 1993 Wizards of the Coast started publishing The Duelist magazine and printed a new series of What's New strips, this time of course Magic and CCGs focused of course. The tone was still humourous and irriverent, sometime caustic and occasionally with some oblique references to (gasp!) sex. This new series of strips lasted from issue 1 to 40 (1999) when The Duelist ceased publication. But again, fate intervened and What's New went back to Dragon magazine from 1999 to 2003 and a final farewell in Dragon's last print issue (359) whose theme was, of course, "Endings". In 2000 Phil Foglio published a tjhird What's New collection, The Magic Years, that besides reprinting all The Duelist strips includes a lot of very interesting 'behind the scenes' footnotes regarding the strips themselves. In 2001 then, perhaps encouraged by sales of the third collection, Phil Foglio published a second edition of the second collection under the title Sex & Gamers...No Really: not owning a second edition, we don't know if this version includes the same intriguing notes of The Mgic Years. Alas, so far, the Dragon magazine new strips have never been printed but perhaps a crowdfunding project could take care of that...
What's New is a great strip and a great nostalgia trip to games and gaming of the first half of the '80s (the first twocollections) and to the 'first wave' of CCGs (the third collection): well drawn and always funny. Alas, at the moment all the What's New collections are out of print and quite pricey both on eBay and Amazon albeit there is always the option to buy the old issues if Dragon magazine and The Duelist that usually are quite cheap.