D&D Comic

I'm not exactly a comic book fan. Yeah, I've got the entire run of Hellboy, BPRD, Bone, and a smattering of other titles, but those are exceptional cases as I prefer web comics to their dead-tree counterparts. Also, I don't like most D&D novels because too often I find the plot, characters, and/or writing to be too simplistic and/or annoying to care. So, when Shazbot and I were leaving Guardian Games over a month ago and saw the Issue #0 freebies, I was skeptical despite the price tag.

Boy, was I surprised.

In a good way, no less.

It's really two comics in one, with the second half grounded in Athas, delivering a Conan-esque flavor. Though it has promise, I was more impressed with the first half, which depicts a party of adventurers literally kicking in a door, fighting gnolls, accidentally killing a dragon, rescuing slaves, and picking up a new recruit. The party composition isn't interesting unto itself, consisting of a dwarf, human, halfing, elf, and tiefling all with classes to match. Basically, much of what you'd expect in your "typical" party.

Despite this traditional spread, in the span of a half-comic the author managed to hook me through a combination of witty dialogue, quality art, and characters that simultaneously evoked racial tropes--such as dwarven proclamations to Moradin, and both a backstabbing and paranoid halfling--and didn't piss me off, or groan and roll my eyes. It's also very action-packed and delivers, to me, the core D&D experience. This is something that I could confidently recommend to fans of both D&D and fantasy comics in general.

I pre-ordered a five issue set from IDW, and was pleased that as good as the promo issue was, Issue #1 was a lot better; orphan zombies, heh, no one'll miss them.