While Jim Butcher’s wildly popular DRESDEN FILES series now stands at 10 novels strong — with the 11th, TURN COAT, due next April — he always envisioned comics as the ideal medium for Harry Dresden, the wizard who doubles as Chicago private investigator. Judging from Del Rey’s graphic novel THE DRESDEN FILES: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE, I’m inclined to agree.
I enjoy Dresden’s adventures, but to me, they always hit a point where the narrative hits a dead zone and ceases moving forward, being a little longer than need be, as if a magical, 400-plus page count is trying to be reached. There’s no such problem in a four-issue comic book, where the combined pages total 160. As Goldilocks says, it’s “just right.”
Dresden’s called to Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, the site of a perplexing murder. Signs point to one of the gorillas as the likely culprit (shades of Poe!), but this being a Dresden file, you know it’s not going to be that simple — that something both sinister and supernatural is at work.
As Dresden pokes his nose around, the true killer rears its ugly head and unleashes possessed animals our P.I.’s way. With the help of the usual suspects — including the talking skull Bob, who’s the kind of character who benefits most from being seen in this new format, rather than just being read — our spell-casting hero will succeed, of course … after a slew of magic-laden misadventures.
Butcher himself scripts this comic, rather than come up with a concept and turn it over for someone else to execute, so the transition in media is seamless. This feels like his Dresden because it is his Dresden. I suppose those who had pictured him to look different may find it jarring to see him inked, but Ardian Syaf’s art is well-suited to this material and its characters. (The only real misstep is in the cover, where Dresden looks like some shaggy-haired teen à la Zac Efron.)
The sense of humor in the wisecracking narration is palpable, the action is big and bright, and the outlook for further tales in the graphic novel format is more than rosy. —Rod Lott
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• PROVEN GUILTY by Jim Butcher
• SMALL FAVOR by Jim Butcher
• SPIDER-MAN: THE DARKEST HOURS by Jim Butcher
• WHITE NIGHT by Jim Butcher
Related posts:
- White Night
- Proven Guilty
- The Spellman Files
- Small Favor
- The X-Files: Book of the Unexplained — Volumes I and II
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
The novels are great, and what I love about them is Butcher’s gift for narration and dialogue, but Good GOD, they’re so convoluted that it would make X-Men writers like Chris Claremont blush.
Great books. Started reading them after the show as canceled. There are few things more fun than reading a Dresden novel. And Welcome to the Jungle fits right in (as it should with J. Butcher writing it.)
I hope he sometime soon puts out the collected short stories from the Dresden universe. There are many out there now, but they are spread out all over.
“I enjoy Dresden’s adventures, but to me, they always hit a point where the narrative hits a dead zone and ceases moving forward, being a little longer than need be, as if a magical, 400-plus page count is trying to be reached.”
Short attention span much?