Reviews: The Dresden Files

You may or may not know this, but Changes, the newest book in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, comes out on April 6^th.  In honor of this momentous event, I’m reviewing a pair of Dresden-related products this week, Butcher’s own original graphic novel (OGN) Welcome to the Jungle and the Sci Fi Channel original series The Dresden Files. 

In many ways, this week’s reviews are all about expectations.  This is to say that I was super-excited when I saw Welcome to the Jungle at the Westport library, but despite—or perhaps because of—my anticipation, the book itself was disappointing.  Meanwhile, I didn’t expect much from the TV show, but y’know, so far that’s been excellent.  But let’s start with the book:

Look, I really like Butcher’s prose.  He has an amazing grasp of Scene and Sequel structure that keeps his stories moving, and his work is terse, witty, and evocative in spots without ever being overwritten.  Plus, the man has a solid sense of humor and an utter reluctance to take himself seriously that I find both appealing and entertaining, a fact that’s doubly impressive considering that it never undermines his story’s inherent tension or drama.  If anything, the fact that our Hero is a little guy in a big world heightens the suspense.  After all, the world is rarely on the line, so that means that pretty much anything can happen.  Often, it does.

With that said, the witty prose just didn’t translate in Welcome to the Jungle.  Instead, I thought it was often redundant with the images in the book and generally lacking in the kind of cynical self-reflection that makes the Dresden novels so damned entertaining.  On top of that, the artist didn’t do my man any favors.  If you’re gonna write a book about a down-on-his-luck PI, then you have to make him look like he’s down on his luck.  You can’t simply draw him straight out of the superhero playbook and then surround him with beautiful and sexy role-players who look like they might start grooving on him at any moment.  That’s not the way the world works, nor is it the way the base novels portray their protagonist.  Because look: people hate the guy who gets the girls.  And in any event, our Hero Harry is definitely not that guy.  That’s not even how the story’s written.  But that’s the way it’s drawn, leading to all manner of unfortunate chaos, confusion, thematic dissonance.

Eh.  To tell the truth, I’ve seen this problem with a lot of the art out of the various Dabel Brothers’ adaptations.  With the Dabels, the story always looks like it came out of what I call the Top Cow House Style, a storytelling mode entirely dependent on fanboy lingerie fantasies and their occasional fangirl equivalents.  And again, that style can suit—sometimes.  For example, it worked wonders with the Anita Blake adaptations.  But it’s rarely appropriate to the subtler world of losers-made-good who tend to inhabit so many sci fi and fantasy genre stories. 

Case in point: the pic on the left is from Top Cow’s Aphrodite IX.  On the right is from the Dabels’ adaptation of Patricia Briggs Cry Wolf:

Oddly, where the graphic novel went wrong—and this despite Butcher’s personal involvement—the TV show got it right.  Why?  I think it’s because the TV show succeeds in making Harry Dresden look like Harry Dresden.  He’s a broke, down-on-his-luck working stiff, and the show goes to pains to show this.  For example, my man can’t afford a real magic staff, so he uses an old hockey stick.  Brilliant!  Different from the books but entirely appropriate given the character they’re trying to create.  Plus, Harry is a guy with a sordid past but a heart-of-gold.  Again, this is something that the show takes pains to show.  That, plus a heapin’ helpin’ of narrative wit and a smattering of plot drawn from the various early novels are more than enough to keep the TV show entertaining.

“So,” you’re thinking, “where I can I find this TV show?”  Well, it’s available for live-streaming on Netflix, which is where I found it.  Alternately, you can go to Blockbuster and rent the DVDs.  Sadly, there’s only a single season’s worth of watching, but it’ll at least keep you going through the first half of this summer’s ocean of summertime reality television.  The graphic novel, on the other hand, seems to have been pretty successful.  It’s out in hardcover, and I’ve seen it in a variety of local libraries and bookstores.