dungeons & dragons | Through the Shattered Lens

Bill Willingham’s Ironwood is the sort of graphic novel that lives in the uneasy space between bawdy escapism and unexpectedly thoughtful worldbuilding, making it a quintessential guilty pleasure that some readers insist on treating as near–high art. It is at once shamelessly pornographic and surprisingly committed to telling a coherent sword‑and‑sorcery story, which means your mileage will depend heavily on whether you can accept explicit sex as an integral—often dominant—part of the narrative rather than a tacked‑on indulgence.

Published by Eros Comix in the early 1990s, Ironwood ran for eleven issues and was later collected into two trade paperbacks that have acquired a minor cult status among fans of erotic fantasy comics. The premise follows Dave Dragovon, a juvenile dragon who appears entirely human because he has not yet matured into his full draconic form, as he is hired by the beautiful and cursed Pandora Breedlswight to seek out the wizard Gnaric and break the spell on her. It is a familiar quest hook—hero, sorcerer, cursed damsel—but Willingham uses it as a loose scaffold on which to hang an almost nonstop parade of sexual encounters, bawdy gags, and bursts of fantastical incident.

As a narrative, Ironwood is better than its reputation as “porn with plot” might suggest, though that label is not entirely unfair. The story is consciously serialized in the classic fantasy‑adventure mode: Dave and Pandora move from one locale to another, encountering wizards, monsters, political schemes, and rival factions, all while the central quest to undo Pandora’s curse gives a sense of forward momentum. Various readers have pointed out that there is genuine political intrigue and thought given to motivations, and you can see Willingham testing out the sort of layered plotting and character dynamics he would later refine in Fables, even if here they are wrapped around mandatory explicit scenes. There are moments when the story is engaging enough that the sex almost feels like an interruption, a dynamic Willingham himself has reportedly acknowledged when noting that fitting in each issue’s required sex scene could break the flow.

Tonally, the book leans heavily into adult humor, but it is not mean‑spirited. The jokes range from clever wordplay and situational comedy to unabashedly adolescent gags, the sort that make you groan even as you recognize they fit this world of oversexed dragons, lecherous wizards, and magically enhanced perversions. In this regard, Ironwood is very much a product of its era: a 1990s underground/alt sensibility that treats fantasy tropes and sexual taboos with the same irreverent shrug. When the humor lands, it gives the book a disarming charm, but when it doesn’t, the dialogue can feel like an overlong dirty joke that mistakes sheer explicitness for wit. Still, there is a lightness here—especially in Dave’s reactions and the deadpan absurdity of certain magical mishaps—that keeps the series from tipping into grim or exploitative darkness, despite its plentiful kinks.

Visually, Willingham’s art is the most persuasive argument for why some readers champion Ironwood as something more than disposable smut. His linework is clean and expressive, with a confident sense of anatomy, staging, and page composition that gives both the action and the erotic scenes a fluid, readable rhythm. The fantasy settings are detailed without being cluttered; taverns, towers, and mystical landscapes all feel like lived‑in spaces rather than generic backdrops for sex scenes. The character designs, especially Pandora and the various magical oddballs, show a cartoonist relishing the chance to exaggerate physicality and personality in equal measure, which goes a long way toward making these figures feel like characters rather than mere bodies.

That said, the erotic content is not merely frequent—it is foundational, and that is where Ironwood becomes a textbook guilty pleasure. This is an unabashedly hardcore series: explicit sex acts, imaginative uses of magic for sexual purposes, and sequences that leave nothing to implication. Devices like a hydra‑head spell repurposed so a character can pleasure multiple partners at once are emblematic of the book’s gleeful “power perversion potential,” embracing the logic of a sex‑obsessed Dungeons & Dragons campaign. For readers comfortable with that premise, there is an undeniable energy in the way Willingham integrates erotic spectacle into battles, spells, and negotiations; for others, the same material will read as juvenile, repetitive, or simply exhausting.

Reception among those who have sought out the collected volumes tends to be surprisingly positive, with many praising Ironwood as one of the rare “sex comics” where the story can stand on its own, even if stripped of the explicit content. Fans often note the balance between story, humor, and eroticism, arguing that the plot is engaging enough that the sex becomes a bonus rather than the sole reason to read. This is where the “high art” argument creeps in: within certain circles of fantasy and underground comics readers, Ironwood is celebrated as an early sign of Willingham’s strengths as a writer and artist, and as an example of how erotic comics can pursue worldbuilding and character arcs rather than simple vignettes. Yet that enthusiasm coexists with acknowledgment that, without the sex, this would largely be a light, sometimes flimsy adventure—a fun romp, but not a lost masterpiece of the medium.

In a broader context, Ironwood sits at an interesting crossroads in Willingham’s career and in the evolution of adult comics. Knowing his later mainstream success, you can see how this early project let him experiment with long‑form storytelling, recurring cast chemistry, and a blend of mythic and mundane concerns, all while operating in a corner of the market that gave him almost total creative freedom. That creative freedom is both the book’s greatest strength and its biggest barrier to entry: it delivers exactly the kind of unfiltered fantasy‑erotica hybrid it promises, but that same purity of purpose locks it firmly into the realm of niche appetite.

Ultimately, Ironwood is best approached with clear expectations and a sense of humor. As a graphic novel, it is technically accomplished, often funny, and occasionally more narratively ambitious than its reputation suggests, which explains why some fans will defend it as a minor classic of erotic fantasy comics. At the same time, its relentless explicitness, adolescent impulses, and lightweight core plot mark it firmly as a guilty pleasure—one that knows exactly what it is and never pretends otherwise, even as a devoted subset of readers insists on elevating it to the status of “high art.”

Previous Guilty Pleasures

VGM Entry 10: The RPG
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

The music of Super Mario Bros. was also somewhat unique in that it merged flawlessly with a game which had nothing to do with sports or space aliens. The electronic nature of early video game music generated futuristic sounds, and a whole ton of early games being space shooters, the music naturally lent itself to synthesis. Konami’s 1983 space shooter Gyruss is a perfect example of a harmonized audiovisual experience of this sort. But good synthesis also meant stylistic relativity. Not every game on the market involved shooting down space invaders, outrunning enemies through a maze, or bashing in faces with a pixilated club. Many innovative new ideas were in the works which would require a very different sort of soundtrack.

The style of most lasting consequence for video game music was the adventure/role playing game, and it has an extensive history. Link did not spring forth from the head of Shigeru Miyamoto clad in shining armor, and someone somewhere out there still goes around telling people that he was larping as Legolas years before this fancy shmancy new “Dungeons & Dragons” game came along. I think it correct to say that The Legend of Zelda and Dragon Quest, both released in 1986, were respectively the first adventure game and the first RPG to have massive market success, but both distinct styles emerged from long-standing traditions, and their music was a sort of natural consequence of the nature of the games, not a single individual’s revolutionary new idea.

All joking aside, if you want to go all the way back, you really do have to look at D&D. The first computer RPGs were under construction less than a year after the pen and paper game’s initial publication (TSR, 1974), and they were directly inspired by it and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. These were private affairs, designed by programmers in their spare time, and there were quite a few of them. Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood’s dnd, Rusty Rutherford’s pedit5, and Don Daglow’s Dungeon seem to be the most frequently cited surviving 1974-1976 creations, and there are plenty of rumors of slightly earlier lost works.

A lot of the features of “traditional” video RPGs are direct descendents of tabletop games. They evolved fairly linearly, reaching a proto-modern format by the time of Richard Garriott’s Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (California Pacific) and Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead’s Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Sir-tech Software), both released for the Apple II in 1981.

RPG-esque evolutions in Japan were far more diverse, but perhaps a bit less exciting. With no D&D tradition rendering particular game features canonical from the very beginning, developers were more experimental, merging all sorts of features from western RPGs, simulations, strategy games, and standard action types. The earliest examples are quite difficult to find samples of, perhaps in part because of the language barrier, but the tradition does appear to have begun a bit later than in the west. Koji Sumii’s Bokosuka Wars, released by ASCII for the Sharp X1 home computer in 1983, is an interesting example of a strategy game set in a Zelda-esque overworld of forests, mountains, and castle walls.

Yoshio Kiya’s Dragon Slayer, released for the PC-8801 by Nihon Falcom in 1984, is a more obvious inspiration for The Legend of Zelda, with its strong emphasis on puzzle solving, though the graphics are deplorable for its time and the sound a travesty. (Scott Joplin? Really?) But whatever their flaws, these games were the prototypes. They set the stage for great things to come. And at least in the west, RPG music would appear on the stage in fairly perfected form in the first instance.