Graphic Novel ARC review: Dune by Lilah Sturges

*I was given a copy of Dune in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Legendary Comics and everyone involved in creating this graphic novel*

Synopsis:

A mythic and emotionally charged hero’s journey, Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides, a brilliant and gifted young man born into a great destiny beyond his understanding, who must travel to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure the future of his family and his people. As malevolent forces explode into conflict over the planet’s exclusive supply of the most precious resource in existence—a commodity capable of unlocking humanity’s greatest potential—only those who can conquer their fear will survive.

Review:

When this popped up I was really excited to check it out. I watched the film not too long ago and I wanted to gain further insight into the story as honestly, I was confused. Turns out this was not the media to help with this issue, if anything I’m now even more confused.

The graphic novel had the opposite problem to the film – it was way too fast-paced. A lot of important details seem missing and if you haven’t read the book series or watched the film you will be completely lost. I still feel lost with the story and I watched the film not long ago.

I’m now left wondering why this has been created. It’s a complete replica of the film, but with scenes cut out to make it shorter, and it offers no new insight or stories. It’s nice to have a companion novel, but the original series already exists for that reason. No hate to anyone involved in making this, but it seems a bit redundant to me.

I enjoy how realistic the art style looks, it must be really cool seeing yourself in a graphic novel, but as the colour scheme throughout was just brown and grey the finer details got lost very easily.

One thing I will say about the art, and please don’t take this as me stating the illustrator, but a lot of the time it looked like a painted filter put over shots of the film. Now I’m not sure if I mean this as a bad thing or not. Either this has been done and it’s very lazy, or the illustrator is just insanely talented. I wish I knew more about it to be honest.

I’m also not sure how much of the prose was written purposely for this, or what was taken straight from the film script. Which begs me to ask again, why has this been made? I get that it’s the quickest way to consume the story but if you have no prior knowledge of this world or story, you will probably have no idea what is going on.