Rich Burlew

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Rich Burlew (born September 1, 1974) is an American author, game designer, and graphic designer.

He is best known for his webcomic Order of the Stick, for which he was ranked fifth on ComixTalk's list of the Top 25 People in Webcomics for 2007.

In addition, he has written several pieces for Wizards of the Coast's role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.

Giant, a small press publishing house that he founded to sell his comic books, is owned and operated by him.

Early life and education

Burlew developed the basic elements of his stick figure art style at the age of twelve while drawing a Mr. Demon for his lunchroom acquaintances. In high school, Burlew first started playing Dungeons & Dragons. He often assumed the role of the Game Master, a job he has aspired to writing a webcomic, but his involvement in the game waned before 1997, when Wizards of the Coast issued the third edition ruleset for the game. Burlew discovered that he needed several identical miniatures to represent a group of bandits on his first encounter with the new laws. He created simple stick figure cutouts in the style he had developed as a youth rather than buying lead miniatures. In his D&D sessions, he used stick figure monsters for years.

Burlew obtained a degree in illustration at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. "Everything [I] learned about color use or panel layout [I] learned about it [I] learned at Pratt," he said. Burlew spent several years as a New York freelance graphic designer, primarily working on elementary school textbook layouts and layouts after leaving college.

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Career

Wizards of the Coast's 2002 launch of the Fantasy Setting Search to find a new campaign setting for their D&D game. One of Burlew's four entries was chosen as a finalist from a field of over eleven thousand gamers who sent in one-page descriptions of their worlds. Wizards of the Coast had been asked by Wizards of the Coast to produce a one-page setting bible for his world to compete against two other designers. Keith Baker's Eberron setting took the prize, with Burlew and P. Nathan Toomey as the other two finalists. Although Burlew did not win the game, the experience inspired him to pursue a career in game design. Burlew is forbidden from discussing it by a non-disclosure agreement as his entry in the competition is the unidentified property of Wizards of the Coast. Nonetheless, he was given additional writing from Wizards of the Coast the following year, in which he contributed monsters such as the "battle titan" and the "shade steel golem" to the Monster Manual III rulebook.

Burlew was able to capitalize on the excitement and clout he gained from the Setting Search contest by launching his "Giant in the Playground" website and the comic The Order of the Stick, which he drew. Burlew began GiantIT.com in the hopes of "turning [his] paltry name recognition into something resembling a career" in June 2003. After his screen name on the Wizards.com forums in order to capitalize on his fame as a savvy gamer, he dubbed his new site, Giant in the Playground.

GiantITP.com did not exist for several months before Burlew introduced a webcomic to bring in recurring traffic. In September 2003, he began The Order of the Stick, a stick figure webcomic, by transferring the pictures from the stick figure miniatures he had made for his D&D game into a page-long comic. Order of the Stick stayed in popularity until 2004. When many people in an online D&D game spent an entire session berating him for writing a scene in which a villain impales a main character, Burlew realized he had written a good story. In December 2004, he announced the publication of the first strip collection. He revealed that pre-orders for the book had been so successful that he was willing to leave his job as a graphic designer and dedicate himself entirely to comic and game writing. Since then, he has released five additional compilations and three black-and-white prequels for The Order of the Stick that are not on the website.

In November 2005, new strips of The Order of the Stick began appearing in Dragon Magazine, dramatically expanding the comic's reach. Burlew described the feeling of seeing his work on the same page that once held the comic What's New with Phil & Dixie as "awe-inspiring" and "weird." The comic appeared in the magazine until it was released in its final print issue. These strips were later published in Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales, a compilation book.

Burlew also created a short-lived webcomic for the Role-Playing Game Association (RPGA) website, Five Foot Steps, that featured more realistic cartoon art rather than stick figures. These illustrated a diverse role-playing game group at the fictional Rollmoore College. For reasons that were not revealed, the strip only existed for five years.

Burlew launched a Kickstarter campaign in January 2012 to reprint the entire book series. Up to that point, the campaign was the most supported creative work in Kickstarter, with more than 20 percent beating the original goal of $1,254,120. During the reprint campaign, Burlew promised to write eight new short stories about specific characters or in alternative non-canon settings; the protagonists for three of these tales were chosen by backers as part of the pledge reward.

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