Where We Get Dresden in Full Color

Jim Butcher's the Dresden Files Omnibus Volume 1 by Jim Butcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the graphic novel version of the first couple novels in the series, plus some extra bits, and I thought it was well done. All the stars.

I already liked the original books, and while I seldom re-read novels, these aren't quite the same thing. I was glad to try the stories in a new format. The art in the graphic novel versions adds a lot (is a thing that everybody already knew). The stories are faithfully retold in very similar levels of detail, so there are no real surprises, but that's fine; it's still a new experience reading it in this format. I imagined some things here and there a little different, but that didn't put me off. If anything, the artists improved on what I saw in my head.

In case you haven't read any of these books, they're about a guy in Chicago who is a trained wizard and works with the police whenever there are strange cases like werewolves or something. Harry Dresden is capable and well intentioned but can't always sort out the best way to solve a supernatural problem. He's not a screw-up, but he's often in over his head and has to do his best just to survive and keep the bad guys from tearing up the city. Inevitably, he's in trouble with somebody. There's a reason these are very popular stories--Dresden is an amiable everyman who is always stuck in a tough spot but does his best to protect everybody.

I am often out of tune with comics and graphic novels, so much so that I don't turn to them very often. Sometimes, I struggle to make sense of the information conveyed in the images ("Which guy is that?" and "Wait, who's winning that fight?" and "what's happening there?" are my frequent thoughts) and so I stumble into frustration and confusion. The graphic novels I enjoy most, not surprisingly, are the ones that I don't struggle to understand, where I get what's going on in the text and the art, and I would definitely include these in that group. It helps that I've read the source material, of course, but I think new readers would do just about as well.

So--fun stories with good plot and pacing come alive even more in this adaptation. Recommended.

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