Comic World News | Pull List

April 22, 2008:
CWN and the Grand Finale! -

February 4, 2008:
In Conclusion - David ends his CWN run with Tezuka's MW from Vertical

February 2, 2008:
Acting Like You Have Nothing to Prove -

February 2, 2008:
The Shoegazer Returns - A New Year Begins, And Our Narrator Makes A Pledge

January 30, 2008:
Tim's Reviews -

September 13, 2007:
Wizard World Chicago Loot, Part One - Stykman, Empty Chamber, the Ztarian Saga, and yes, Little Bunny Foo Foo

February 15, 2007:
I Come Not to Bury Nick Cage... - But to mourn the death of my punchline

November 20, 2006:
The End - Rich's last Chicks & Romance

November 8, 2006:
Joann Sfar's Klezmer - And a Front Racks Hiatus

October 4, 2006:
This Month's Guest: Dave Gibbons - From the pages of Elephantmen!

September 18, 2006:
Back in Berlin - or How I spent my summer

July 29, 2006:
KICKING UP A STORM - An interview with David Lloyd

June 19, 2006:
You Ain't Never Had A Friend Like Me. - Graeme looks at Spidey's "genies"

December 18, 2005:
Disappointed - Sad news for fans of Busiek's CONAN, Stephen King, and others

December 13, 2004:
JUSTICE UNPLUGGED 2 at last !!! - By Fabrice Sapolsky & Xavier Fournier

December 2, 2004:
THE TWELFTH AND FINAL STEP - Say it ain't so, Dan.

November 23, 2004:
The importance of editing -

September 29, 2004:
Mystery and Conundrum indeed! - Where in the world is Jason Pomerantz?

September 13, 2004:
Hello and Goodbye and Hello Again - Change is in the air at CWN and it smells sweet.

August 12, 2004:
The Rise of the Web Toon - New Business Model or Dumb Luck?

July 30, 2004:
The Name Says it All... - Spin Doctors revamp Boomerang.

July 27, 2004:
Bigger Isn't Always Better -

June 8, 2004:
Pre-emptive Strike: MoCCA Arts Festival - Looking forward to the con, rather than looking back at it

The Layer Method
Our top Secret time-saving technique for creating and merging balloons and tails in Illustrator.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

The Legend of Drizzt

Homeland through Sojourn, anyway

Forgotten Realms: Exile #1-3 and Forgotten Realms: Sojourn #1-2 (Devil�s Due)

Written by R.A. Salvatore and Andrew Dabb; Illustrated by Tim Seeley

I�ve been a gaming geek for a long time and like most gaming geeks, Dungeons & Dragons was my baby food. So, I�ve got a fond spot in my heart for D&D role-playing, but I�ve never seen it translate well into other mediums. That Thora Birch movie was horrid and the one set of novels I tried to read, The Dragonlance Chronicles, was tragically flawed by an attempt to let part of the story be played out in tie-in adventure modules rather than in the books themselves. The Saturday morning cartoon was okay for what it was � cheesy, nostalgic fun � but no one�s ever accused it of being actually good. I hear mixed reviews about previous tries to adapt D&D into comics, but none have been glowing enough to make me think they�re worth tracking down.

I kept hearing good things about R.A. Salvatore�s Forgotten Realms novels though, especially the ones featuring Drizzt the Dark Elf. My novel reading pile is big enough to prevent me from ever trying them, but Devil�s Due was nice and sent copies of their comics adaptations, so it was with some optimism that I dug into them.

I started with the trade collection of The Legend of Drizzt: Homeland and followed it up with the single issues of The Legend of Drizzt: Exile and the first couple of issue of The Legend of Drizzt: Sojourn. If I got the last issue of Sojourn, I�ve misplaced it now, but I�ve got a good enough feel for the series to tell you what I think about it. I�ve got the next part of the series, The Legend of Drizzt: The Crystal Shard on my reading pile, so I�ll review that separately another time.

I was initially impressed with the Drizzt series� boldness in choosing not to tell a standard D&D adventure tale about an eclectic group of heroes questing after some treasure or another. Instead, Homeland confines itself to the underground city of Menzoberranzan and its Dark Elf inhabitants, focusing primarily on Machiavellian politics and the role that Drizzt, a young prince in a matriarchal society, might play in them.

I was disappointed though that the entire Homeland series (except for one, important scene) took place underground. Flipping through the collection, all the pages looked the same with similarly colored elves (they all have charcoal skin and white hair) talking and/or fighting against uniformly stone-gray backgrounds. This probably isn�t a problem in Salvatore�s original novels, but it makes for a visually dull comic.

Once Drizzt leaves Menzoberranzan in Exile, he�s still underground, but at least he begins to encounter enough other life forms that the pages are broken up and become more interesting to look at. I was still impatient for him to get outdoors though, and there were some story problems that I�ll get to in a second.

He finally goes aboveground in Sojourn, but the flaws in that story are even greater than the ones in Exile. R.A. Salvatore really wants us to know that poor Drizzt is a tragic figure, exiled from his own people, yet mistrusted by all the racist folks he comes in contact with throughout his travels. And there�s nothing wrong with that per se, but Salvatore uses it less as a theme than as a convenient plot device. When Drizzt can�t progress in the story without some help, people tend to welcome him, whether it�s a ranger who teaches Drizzt to survive in the surface world or a whole city of gnomes who give him shelter for a while when he�s being chased by the other Dark Elves. Most of the time though, Drizzt is hounded and persecuted by whomever he comes in contact with for no other reason than people hating him is an easy source of badly needed conflict.

Every time Drizzt shows up somewhere, all the bad guys in the region automatically want to take him down. Orcs, demons, whatever. People who really shouldn�t be threatened by a lone Dark Elf, but as soon as he hits their territory�BAM! They make it their life�s mission to get rid of him.

A particularly silly example is when Drizzt defeats some demons who�ve been harassing him, but their little Faerie minion gets away. Later, we learn that the minion has allied himself with a powerful, giant wolf. When the minion learns that Drizzt is nearby, he tells the wolf that Drizzt was responsible for killing the demon, and for no other reason than Drizzt�s having killed the last guy who wouldn�t leave him alone, the wolf decides he better start trying to kill Drizzt too.

And, oh yeah, as soon as Drizzt hits the aboveground, out come the clich�, eclectic group of heroes, questing this time after the dangerous Dark Elf, naturally.

I don�t know. Maybe Salvatore fleshes it out better in the novels and makes it more believable, but it becomes a predictable, tiresome pattern in the comics. If it�s adapter Andrew Dabb�s fault, it�s not the only problem he has with translating the novels into comics form. I accept and even sort of like his technique of using third person caption boxes to give the comic a novel-like feel, but he goes too far and describes things with narration that are made perfectly clear by the art. He slows the story down and lessens dramatic impact by having us read things like, �The six viper heads of Briza�s snake whip whirled and twisted, searching for the best angle of attack,� when the picture accompanying the caption plainly shows a bunch of snakes zipping around; attacking Drizzt.

Tim Seeley�s art is often praised and he does have a great knack for rendering the various beasts and monsters that inhabit Drizzt�s world. But he tends to draw the same face over and over so that the only things distinguishing one character from another are their hairstyle and clothing. This becomes an even bigger problem when all the Dark Elves have charcoal skin and white hair.

Seeley�s also not a great visual storyteller. The action isn�t dynamic and sometimes it�s just plain hard to tell what�s going on. Unfortunately, it�s when I�m struggling to interpret a drawing that Dabb decides we don�t need an accompanying caption box.

For example, there�s a climactic battle scene between Drizzt and his father that�s suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a stone slab between them. In one panel, Drizzt is lying on the ground, about to be killed by his dad, then we cut to a panel of a couple of onlookers, then we see Drizzt�s dad clanging his sword on the big rock. There are no speed lines on the rock to indicate where it might have come from. Did it just appear? Did it spring out of the ground? Fall from the ceiling? We don�t know. We�re told what happened two pages later, but it�s a jarring panel when you get to it and have to stop and try to figure out just what the hell happened.

The Legend of Drizzt started off on the right foot. It began with a truly unique plot for a fantasy role-playing setting and if it had been executed differently, it might have been something very cool. Unfortunately, at least in the part I�ve read so far, its flaws are numerous and serious enough that it doesn�t rise very high above previous efforts to adapt D&D to other formats.