Welcome to the jungle / It ain’t all fun and games…

Hello again, everyone! Now that I’m close to finishing my Master’s, I’ll try to go back to posting semi-regularly. To (re)start things off, I’m going to cover something which I promised Farla quite some time ago: the “Dresden Files” comics. I won’t be looking at them as adaptations of a preexisting work, however, but rather, as original works themselves – as if they were an entirely separate franchise. I believe that will allow me to evaluate them in a fairer manner than if I analysed them as part of a book series which I already dislike. That also means I don’t have any plans of covering the comics that are straight adaptations of the novels.

So, without further ado, let me start with Welcome to the Jungle, the first “Dresden” comic book – one that is chronologically set before the first novel, Storm Front, although it was released in 2008 (which means the book series was already up to Small Favor at that point).

Oh, before I forget: there will be spoilers.
First of all, let me say this: I am not a visual artist, and I don’t feel I’m qualified to discuss the comic’s art in any great detail. On the other hand, as someone who has read many, MANY comics since I was a child (and not only super-hero comics, but many other genres as well), I do feel qualified to say the art is… …serviceable. Average, really. It reminds me quite a bit of that distinctive 90’s Image art. There’s a lack of variety with body types for characters (especially women), but in general, there’s not much really noteworthy about it. Thus, I will only focus on the art when it comes into conflict with the writing or serves it particularly well – although, considering comics are a visual medium and should be judged accordingly, I think it’s telling that the art here isn’t anything special.

The trade paperback’s cover is very ugly, though:

Oh, and if you’re curious, this is Harry Dresden:

According to the introduction written by Butcher himself, that is exactly how he always pictured the character in his mind.

As for the writing, it generally isn’t good. I freely admit part of my dislike is just a matter of taste, but there are also many amateurish missteps by the author. Those missteps happen quite frequently, so it’s not as if they can be just shrugged off. Let’s take the opening paragraphs, for instance:

“Welcome to the jungle.
Like any jungle, it is a world of predators and prey.
Some of the most dangerous creatures in the world live here.
Very few of them are in cages. And none of them are what they appear to be.
I’m not the first to call Chicago a jungle.”

Let me go in order to point out why I feel those passages weren’t well-written.

1) “Like any jungle, it is a world of predators and prey. Some of the most dangerous creatures in the world live here.” What “it”? Where is “here”? So far, no setting was established, the only thing we know about it is that it’s a jungle. You could say the narration is only expressing something to the effect of “This is a jungle; like any jungle, it’s full of predators and prey”, which does work as a general (if somewhat trite) statement, but then it runs into the issue of the next paragraph: “Some of the most dangerous creatures in the world live here”. If this jungle is inhabited by creatures more dangerous than the average, can it really be lumped with all other jungles? Or is it saying the jungle is inhabited by animals more dangerous than those of other environments, like the savannah or temperate forests?

The clincher is the abrupt reference to Chicago in the fifth paragraph, though. Those were always meant to be specific statements regarding a specific setting – the city of Chicago -, only they were left vague when that served no purpose. I’m guessing the author wanted to open with a strong, memorable sentence, but really, not only is “Welcome to the jungle” the title of a Guns N’ Roses song (not the most appropriate connection to be made, is what I’m saying), it’s also a rather generic opening, even if it’s not on the level of “It was a dark and stormy night”. At the very least, the establishing panel of the Lincoln Park Zoo should have been used right on the first page with the “Welcome to the jungle” line, instead of left for the second one (accompanied by the “Very few of them are in cages[…]” part).

2) Repetitive usage of “world”. I know, this is a nitpick, but it tends to jump out at the reader when the same word is repeated in quick succession – and in this case, it’s repeated just one panel later, right in the next narration box (each of which consists only of a single sentence).

3) Excessive usage of simple sentences. I know English tends to be more forgiving of that sort of thing than Romance languages (Act and Farla may correct me if I’m wrong about that), but really, this is a comic book, not the Super Dictionary. This one is the most annoying simply because it happens so, SO often. For instance, here’s Dresden’s thoughts at a later panel (oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that earlier, but there’s no third-person narrator. It’s all Harry Dresden’s internal narration):

“I clip on the ID Murphy gave me for when I’m acting in my capacity as a consultant. It has my picture and everything. It makes me look all professional and capable.
It doesn’t help much. But I look better when I fumble around.”

My guess is that the author wanted to go for something in the style of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, who, indeed, often used terse, simple sentences, but theirs didn’t read as if they were written by a child. Compare the above passage to this one from Hammett’s classic, The Maltese Falcon:

“Spade sank into his swivel-chair, made a quarter-turn to face her, smiled politely. He
smiled without separating his lips. All the v’s in his face grew longer. The tappity-tap-tap and the
thin bell and muffled whir of Effie Perine’s typewriting came through the closed door.”

See how it reads much more naturally even though it’s also a sequence of simple sentences? And also how every word serves a purpose, whether it’s to describe an action, a character or the scene? Compare it to Dresden thinking of the ID, how little actual information it gives (obviously IDs have pictures, Dresden, that’s their whole point!). Also, that’s Dresden’s internal narration – his thoughts. Does thinking “acting in my capacity as a consultant” really fit his character? Why didn’t he just word it as “the ID Murphy gave me for when I’m acting as a consultant”, or even “working as a consultant”? If the idea is to mock Legalese, the writer should have used quotation marks (as in, “I clip on the ID Murphy gave me for when I’m ‘acting in my capacity as a consultant’ “).

This isn’t something which can be attributed to Welcome to the Jungle being a comic book, either. Here’s an example of a similar attempt at establishing the setting from issue #1 of one of my favourite comic book series, Martian Manhunter (third volume, written by Jon Ostrander):

“Denver. The mile-high city. Good town but, like most cities, with its dark alleys and lost souls.
Tony Cade was one of those souls.”

Bam! We have a location, a proper comparison, a soon-to-be victim, and a much better prose. And it only took two panels, too, as opposed to Welcome to the Jungle‘s four panels spread over two pages.

I haven’t read anything else by Butcher, so I can’t say if the stilted writing is a reflection of his skills or if it’s a result of him trying too hard to evoke the works of Chandler and Hammett, but without actually understanding them and what made them work (possibly without even having ever read them). All I have to say is, “simple” is not the same thing as “simplistic”.

Now, some of what I just pointed out might be seen as nitpicks – hence why I called them “missteps”, not “mistakes”. But there are actual mistakes with the writing, and one of them is also right there in the opening scene: as Dresden’s narration continues (“I’m not the first to call Chicago a jungle. That was a guy named Upton Sinclair”), it starts quoting Sinclair’s novel The Jungle as an unseen assailant (actually there was a shadow on the wall earlier which I believe spoiled too much about the attacker, but let’s not focus on that right now) kills the zoo’s security guard:

“Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to it— it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life.”

The words seem to fit the scene very well, but that’s only on the surface. See, in the context of the actual novel, those words refer to the whole pig-butchering process – “it” refers to Fate (as in, the fate that awaited all the hogs, to be slaughtered and processed into food, personified), and “he” refers to the pig which is the victim of said Fate (and yes, Sinclair deliberately used “he” instead of “it” to talk about pigs, since “each of [the pigs] had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire”; in essence, each of the pigs was a person). So the quoted passage works as a metaphor for, say, people being ground by the uncaring machinery of modern life, but not as a general observation on inescapable doom and the futility of struggling against it, appropriate though the words may seem to be, unless you completely divorce them from their actual context – at which point I wonder, why are you using them instead of simply coming up with your own?

The issue is only exarcebated with Dresden (Butcher) connecting that segment directly to the “Chicago is a jungle” metaphor, when said metaphor doesn’t really work. For starters, Sinclair called Chicago a jungle because of its manmade social structures, not because of any external threats – and the comic’s antagonist isn’t especially connected to the city; in fact, they have nothing to do with Chicago, they could have chosen literally any other city to enact their plans. And other than the story being set in a zoo, there’s nothing that really links anything in it to the “jungle” theme, either, which makes it really fall flat (come to think of it, even being set in a zoo isn’t enough; there’s a character who goes on that clichéd spiel of how “animals can’t ever really be tamed, they’re still living under the law of the jungle”, but a) that’s not true at all, animals born in captivity can’t really compare to wild animals in terms of ferociousness, and b) none of the animals attack Dresden because they’re “wild”, they do so because of an external influence – magic). This has to be the most simplistic usage of the saying “the city is a jungle” I have ever seen. “Oh, the city is jungle, that’s why Harry Dresden fights zoo animals! Get it, get it?”

Anyway, I’ve talked a bunch, and I haven’t even gotten to the plot yet! Well, the story opens up with the aforementioned security guard – named Maurice Sandbourne, as we later find out – getting gruesomely murdered (though the “camera” draws away from the act itself, of course) even as he attempts to defend himself with his gun.

By the way, this is the panel which I thought gave too much away about the real nature of the comic’s antagonist:

Anyway, Maurice’s murder is being investigated by Murphy and her partner, Carmichael. Carmichael points out how the whole thing seems like an open-and-shut case – the body was found right outside the monkey house, there’s a trail of blood leading from it to said house, and it was mangled by something obviously stronger than a human being – and that Murphy should just give the order to put down the gorilla, Moe. However, Murphy argues that it makes no sense for the gorilla to somehow have escaped its cage, killed the guard without being injured by any of the shots, returned to the cage and locked itself inside, so – in spite of Carmichael telling her the higher-ups won’t like it if she actually pursues the investigation – she tells him to call Harry Dresden.

Plot hole #1: if someone went to the trouble of trying to incriminate the gorilla, why not just bust open the door and let it loose afterwards?

Dresden, meanwhile, is fighting some kind of demonic creature called a rawhead in what seems to be an abandoned train yard. He uses a force shield to block the rawhead’s first attack, but is then kicked several meters back (even though that didn’t happen the first time? I get that the shield doesn’t absorb momentum, but it seems inconsistent the way Dresden is knocked back by one attack but not by the other). He then uses a force blast – the Forzare spell – to break a power pole so the live wires fall on the tracks and… …blow up the rawhead? I’m serious, the thing is immediately reduced to ashes. If it was that fragile, why not just attack it directly? And if it’s just that weak to electricity, that should have been mentioned in the text.

As an introductory action scene, this was a cool concept – it shows how Dresden’s life sucks (he was just hired to find a lost puppy, but it was eaten by some sort of demon who will only continue to eat and grow until it becomes unstoppable), and also that he can handle himself in battle, but still has to fight smart. It’s the details which bring it down, though, such as the inconsistency in the way the force shield works, or the apparent fragility of the rawhead. Plus, how can there be creatures like that running around in broad daylight (even if it is at an abandoned railyard), killing and eating assorted small animals until it’s ready to kill and eat humans, and magic and the supernatural still be unknown to the world at large, as will be established soon after? Even if Dresden kills all of the supernatural creatures that show up in Chicago before they somehow make themselves known, what about the rest of the world? This is basic worldbuilding information which doesn’t show up at all in the comic. Butcher probably figured anyone who picked it up would go on to read the novels (or, more probably, was already a fan), but this is meant as a stand-alone work, it shouldn’t require additional reading for something as important as “how the setting works”. Later, there are mentions to the White Council, only without any explanation as to what it actually is.

Also, let’s ignore how the novels themselves are full of worldbuilding failure.

Oh, and Harry Dresden seems to be a psychopath:

I mean, according to Dresden, it’s a creature which only exists to kill and eat things, including sapient beings, but holy crap, try not to look like Dr. Doom having an orgasm as you use your magic to burn a living creature to cinders, Dresden.

Anyway. Murphy calls him, he confirms what she already knows (this is actually a funny scene: there’s a panel where Harry says the guard was killed by something big, super strong, and probably bulletproof, followed by a beat panel focused on Murphy’s incredulous face, and then her basically saying “Yeah, no shit, Sherlock, I already knew all that just by using basic observation skills, tell me something I don’t know”), and then she officially hires him to solve the murder.

This is an interesting characterisation moment, by the way: Murphy is worried about “shutting down whatever did this before it kills someone else”, while Harry seems to be in it only for the money (“What the hell. My rent was a week overdue. I need the money”, he says. Although he should have said “IS a week overdue”). This isn’t necessarily bad – the morally ambiguous protagonist is a classic in noir stories (Marlowe is a good man who acknowledges that the world is a bad place and often there’s not much he can do, but Spade is a downright bastard [although an honourable one], and Casablanca‘s Rick Blaine starts out as a very unsympathetic character) -, but it’s something to keep in mind when evaluating the story and characters. Now, it’s possible Dresden doesn’t really mean that – maybe he would have helped Murphy even without the promise of payment -, but that was his internal narration, so if he is putting up some kind of front, it’s only for himself.

So Harry starts speculating what kind of creature could have done it. He comes up with a few possibilities, but dismisses them all, and starts working under the theory that Maurice’s murder was an inside job – maybe he had just seen or heard something he shouldn’t have and was killed because of that? He starts asking questions, but the zoo’s staff is very uncooperative. He thinks it’s because he’s not a cop (and manages to sound both whiny and self-aggrandising at the same time: “They wouldn’t react that way to a cop. It’s one of the downsides to being in business for myself. But I’m used to it”), but a visiting researcher, Dr. Dana Watson, tells him it’s actually because they think he only wants to find evidence against the gorilla to have it put down. She also advises him to speak to Dr. Reese, director of the gorilla program. Dresden goes on to do so, and while Reese doesn’t know anything of value, he tells Dresden to talk to his assistant, Will, who might know if there’s anything strange going on around the zoo.

“Reese seems like a decent guy.
But I’ve been wrong before.”

That was Harry’s cue to briefly (VERY briefly) reminisce about the past, how he was raised and taught magic by a man who, out of nowhere, enslaved the girl he loved and tried to kill him. This isn’t nearly enough backstory for the main character, it’s nothing more than a tease. In an ongoing series, it would be forgivable – the reader would assume that would be picked up at a later issue or something -, but not in a limited series.

(By the way, the man who raised him and tried to murder him gets a name – Dumorne. The girl? Well, she’s just “the girl”. And she’s half-naked as well. For reasons.)

While waiting for Will, Harry muses on Moe’s situation and gains some sympathy for it. That’s quite misanthropic, Harry – you don’t care that whatever killed Maurice might endanger other human lives, but you do care about the gorilla? His narration says he has trouble trusting anyone because of the betrayal at his foster father’s hands, and fair enough, I can see how that would engender severe trust issues. Like I said before, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (although his joy at destroying the rawhead is very disturbing), but Harry’s characterisation so far has been of someone very self-serving (he only went up against the rawhead because he wanted to find his client’s lost dog, for instance); so far, his sympathy for Moe has been the only exception to that.

So Will arrives, and Will is actually a woman named Willamena. Harry asks if they can talk, but then they’re attacked by a lion who’s apparently controlled by magic. Then this stupidity happens:

Yes. Harry Dresden knocked away a charging lion not with magic or anything of the sort, but just by hitting it with a box full of documents. That is so, SO dumb.

Anyway, from here on out, there’s not much to say, so I’ll just summarise things. Harry and Will escape the lion, then several big cats are unleashed against them, Harry manages to disrupt the link between the animals and whoever’s controlling them right as he’s about to be eaten, then he takes Will with him to break into Dr. Watson’s office because – get this – she’s the only one of the staff who acted pleasantly towards him, the one who sent him over to the ape house, and the one who works with big cats and could release them to hunt him.

…Where’s the logic there? The cats were controlled with magic, it’s not unreasonable to assume anyone who could do that could also easily release them. Plus, he talked to several people in the zoo, and it would be easy to assume he would have talked to Dr. Reese (or at least investigated Moe’s cage) at some point, so knowing where he was would be no big mystery (even assuming we can’t just answer that with “magic”). I mean, it would be fine if Dresden was suspicious of Watson, but he’s already fully certain she’s the one who tried to kill him!

And because the plotting is just as bad as the writing, he’s right, of course. He finds jars of magically-preserved blood in Watson’s office and takes one of them with him. He also thinks about how Watson, whatever she is, is apparently a magical powerhouse, so sending the cops after her would be dangerous for them. From what we’ve seen of magic so far, that’s possible: Dresden, for example, can shoot magical fire, fire off force blasts, create a force shield and control the wind, and he notes Watson seems to be more powerful than him; besides, we know whatever killed the security guard was super strong and immune to bullets. It seems like Harry might be a better man than he’s shown until now.

That said, here’s where his characterisations hits a bit of a snag: he and Will run into Watson, Dresden and the doctor threaten each other in a “cleverly” veiled conversation, and at some point Dresden tells her he “makes sure everyone gets what’s coming to them”. So, apparently, he feels it’s his job – possibly his responsibility – to punish misdeeds (at least those of supernatural origin). Here’s the thing: why, though? I mean, that’s a classic motivation for heroic characters, but the comic doesn’t delve into why Dresden feels that way. For that matter, how does that fit with the Dresden we’ve seen so far, a borderline misanthrope whose only display of empathy in the story until then was for a gorilla who would be killed for something it didn’t do if Dresden didn’t help? I do think it’s possible to reconcile both “Dresdens” as different facets of a single person, but the “change” from one to the other was too abrupt, the writing was too blunt. The closest Butcher comes to showing how those facets intersect is when Dresden tells Will that “People suck. But persons are worthwhile, Miss Rogers. Always”, but while that does explain why Dresden doesn’t care only about himself and might still help others even though his faith in people was shattered, it doesn’t explain why he feels the need to, as he puts it, “balance the books”. To put it another way: I can see how his motivation is helping people, but I can’t see how it’s also punishing evildoers.

Speaking of characterisation, here’s another weak point of the writing: the characters are very clichéd. I understand that comic books are somewhat limited in length, so you often don’t have enough space to properly develop the characters, but the ones in the story are little more than archetypes: the tough, no-nonsense cop (Murphy), the old professor (Dr. Reese), the naive assistant (Will), the cold and menacing antagonist (Dr. Watson), and so on and so forth. Even Dresden is basically little more than a fusion between certain aspects of Marlowe and Spade (laid over a core of whining. LOTS of whining. This is where Butcher’s lack of finesse when writing hits again: there’s a line between self-deprecating humour and simple “woe is me”, and he constantly jumps over it without looking back).

Moving on. Dresden takes Will to his place so Watson doesn’t kill her, too, and then goes to our favourite rapist skull… No, sorry, I said I wouldn’t take the books into account, and I meant it. *ahem* So, he goes to Bob, a talking skull who makes inappropriate comments about how he hopes the “British chick” (Dr. Watson) is “hot” and “puts the moves” on Dresden as part of her “dastardly plan”. Bob is a “spirit of intellect”, whatever that means. I mean, is he the anthropomorphic personification of the concept of knowledge? That seems like a fair assumption, but it’s only an assumption. See, there’s a huge difference between not spoon-feeding things to readers and actually explaining the setting, but it seems the author doesn’t really understand that.

Speaking of spoon-feeding, Watson’s “dastardly plan” is spoonfed to Dresden. What a letdown. If I had picked this up expecting an actual detective story, I’d be thoroughly disappointed. Dresden is definitely no Poirot, Maigret or Wallander (although, to be fair, Marlowe and Spade occasionally stumbled into things, too – but at least it was always in the course of an investigation!). Anyway, here’s the plot: Watson is actually a hecatean hag, humanoid monsters who were once the inner circle of the cult of Hecate, Greek goddess of sorcery and crossroads; her plan is to collect seven jars of blood from “powerful totemic animals” and use them in an ascension ritual, whereupon she will become a goddess herself.

Plot hole #2: if it’s so easy to perform an ascension ritual, how come “Watson” didn’t do so centuries ago? Even if we assume it needs other ingredients than just the blood of powerful totemic animals – “Watson” does say it took her decades to gather everything she needed -, she certainly had enough time to prepare and cast the ritual many times over. So why didn’t she?

Dresden rushes over with Will to the zoo to speak with Dr. Reese (why? No explanation), but is then attacked by a black dog (not a regular dog with black fur, but a supernatural creature based off the legends about black dogs from all around the British Isles) which was hiding – somehow – in the back of his car. Don’t ask me how neither Dresden nor Will noticed it was there, ask Butcher (I bet the answer is “because the plot said so”). There’s a chase and a fight scene which ends with Dresden blasting the dog with a full-powered Fuego spell (while quoting Jaws, even – “Smile, you son of a bitch!”). This whole sequence is mere padding, it doesn’t add anything to the story other than the moment where Will is afraid of Dresden after witnessing the fire spell being cast and its effects, but that could easily have been moved to earlier, when Dresden was fighting off the mind-controlled big cats. That said, I do have a few things to note regarding it: Dresden is very concerned with traditional notions of masculinity (“You heard me. Skedaddle. […] I run like a big fraidy cat”; “Will screams like a girl […] Really. It was Will. No one can prove otherwise”), and the spell system makes no sense, linguistically speaking. I mean, “Forzare” is a verb (it means “to exert force” in both Italian and Spanish), “Fuego” is a noun (“fire” in Spanish), and “Flickum Bicus” (the spell used to light both his apartment and his fireplace) is a pig Latin translation of an English sentence. How the hell does that work?!

Never mind. Dresden and Will reach the zoo, where Harry finds out “Watson” set fire to her own office, apparently to cover her tracks. While Dresden is berating himself – he thinks there was something there which he could have used against the hag, although we weren’t shown anything of the sort -, Murphy shows up to berate him for breaking and entering earlier, Harry tells her “Watson” is the culprit and that she isn’t human, Murphy tells him she can’t use that, they argue a bit, but since Murphy really doesn’t have any leads, she lets him go on with his investigation. Harry is stumped and decides to go with Will to Dr. Reese’s office to mooch off some beer from him.

Plot hole #3: at the beginning of the issue (this was originally released as a 6-issue limited series), his motivation to go back to the zoo was to speak with Dr. Reese, now he’s only going there as an afterthought.

At Dr. Reese’s office, they find him dead and Moe with blood on its arm – its blood. Seems like “Watson” drew the gorilla’s blood for the seventh and final jar. Luckily for Dresden, Dr. Reese caught some of “Watson” ‘s hair during the struggle, and Harry can use it to track her with a spell. What a great detective! When he’s not getting the plot from Bob the Expositionary Skull, he stumbles onto the magical equivalents of clues!

Plot hole #4: am I really supposed to believe that an old man like Dr. Reese could struggle that much against someone who could tear a strong man like Maurice almost to pieces?

Dresden follows the hag (who doesn’t look human anymore) to an abandoned tunnel, where she’s casting the ritual. Dresden sneak attacks her with a Fuego spell, but she’s so tough he doesn’t kill her. At that moment, Dana Watson shows up behind him, while another shows up from the side, and he realises he’s fighting a coven of three, not a single hecatean hag.

Plot hole #5: Dresden specifically says his tracking spell is keyed to “Watson” ‘s energy, so he really should have known earlier that the hag he was going to attack wasn’t actually “Watson”.

The rest of the story is a fairly standard fight between Dresden and the three hags. According to Bob, hecatean hags have skins as tough as tank armour and poisonous claws, are super strong, and are better sorcerers than Harry, so how can he win? Well, first, by dodging their spells (it seems magical attacks in this setting are solely of the “physical blasts” variety); then, by firing a blast of magical fire which causes huge pieces of the roof to fall on one of the hags, killing her (if his spell is strong enough to break off pieces of solid concrete which are heavy enough to crush the hag, wouldn’t it also be capable of directly harming the hag?); the next hag – the one he had attacked earlier, thinking she was “Watson” -, he kills by shooting her, since he had already burned off her bulletproof skin (something which isn’t reflected at all in the art); and finally, he kills “Watson” (who had returned to Dr. Reese’s office to kill Will to punish Dresden for spoiling her ritual) by releasing Moe from his cage, and the gorilla tears her to pieces. Harry and Will present Murphy with enough evidence – flimsy though it is – to convict “Watson” and acquit Moe. Case closed, happy ending, yay!

Plot hole #6: …ok, I can accept “Watson” being unable to magically control an angry gorilla who’s already pounding at her, but are you telling me a gorilla is strong enough to kill a being whose skin is directly compared to tank armour and who is also super strong, in addition to being a better magician than Dresden (who handles himself pretty well in close combat with physically stronger animals)? I mean, I actually liked that Moe got to finish her off, I just think it doesn’t make much sense – maybe if it had been powered by Dresden’s magic or something?

The fight as a whole isn’t bad, but considering it’s the climax of the story, it’s a bit underwhelming. Butcher really should have taken out the scenes with the black dog and focused on improving this sequence.

So, that was Welcome to the Jungle, the first “Dresden Files” comic. The writing is weak, the characters aren’t interesting (even Murphy, who’s usually awesome in the novels, is only a bit character here), the plot is even weaker than the writing, and the art isn’t anything special, so I can’t really recommend it to anyone who isn’t already a fan of the series. That said, it was still much better than both Storm Front and Fool Moon, with Harry even being an interesting character occasionally (he’s actually proactive here, for instance, even if all the explanations fall into his lap) – though I suspect that’s more because of there being less room for Butcher’s prose to mangle everything than any actual improvement on his part. So, yeah; guess I’ll review the other “DF” comics as well.

Until next time, Draconeers! And remember: the power is yours!