Jim Butcher's Dresden Files: Down Town by Jim Butcher, Mark Powers

Rating: WARTY!

I've read some of the Dresden Files graphic novels before and couldn't get into them. Unlike with his Codex Alera series, which I loved, the Dresden files never got me interested. I tried watching the short-lived TV show and that was a bust, too. So why pick this one? Well, this story gave him an assistant, which I'd never encountered before in this series, so I thought that might be interesting - adding a dynamic that was never there before.

I was particularly intrigued, given what an impoverished situation he was in (your standard clichéd, struggling private dick kind of a deal), how he had even taken on an assistant, but this was adequately explained. The problem is that this is about all I remembered of this story when I came to write this review several days after reading it. That's not always a bad sign, but it's typically not a good one!

In this story, Harry Dresden, a Chicago-based wizard-for-hire, has taken on an apprentice, Molly Carpenter. The blurb describes her as a "new" apprentice", and this is actually the case, I'm informed, because he had another assistant prior to this one, so this is indeed his new assistant. He only took her on to spare her from being slaughtered by the white council. Dresden is apparently planning on bringing down a villain described as a mad sorcerer who wants to take over the city. My question is: why not just run for mayor? Or magic himself into that job?! It made no sense!

The sorcerer is in league with gangster Johnnie Marcone. Will Harry be able to hold his own or will Molly have to hold it for him? I don't know. I got to about 80% in and lost patience with this one. The story wasn't that great to begin with, and I was finding pages missing text - they had empty speech balloons throughout. This was on Bluefire reader on the iPad. Even one such page is bad for a review copy in this day and age, but many such pages? Not acceptable. I had no idea what the characters were saying or thinking, and pretty soon I realized that I really didn't care. It was time to move on to something more engaging - and wordy! I can't recommend this.

Dresden Files: War Cry graphic novel by Jim Butcher & Mark Powers

Title: Dresden Files: War Cry
Author: Jim Butcher & Mark Powers
Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment
Rating: WARTY!
Pencils by Carlos Gomez
Colors by Mohan
Letters by BillTortolini
Cover by Stjepan Sejic

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is reward aplenty!

I have to say up front that while I am a huge fan of Jim Butcher's Codex Alera hexalogy, I've never been a fan of his Dresden Files series. I've heard bits and pieces of it in the car as my wife listened to it on trips, but it never appealed to me. It’s not that it’s bad writing per se, it’s just that this kind of thing in general doesn’t appeal to me because it's so larded with trope and cliché that it bores the pants off me, and you know the main character is never really going to get into deadly danger because that's the series over.

I decided to give this one a go for two reasons: firstly, because it's often a lot easier for me to like a graphic novel or comic book than it is to like a novel on the same topic, especially when the novel is written in first person PoV. I can't stand 1PoV because it’s all ME! all the time and that just sucks majorly unless it’s very well done, and it rarely is. So the second reason was that this isn't 1PoV.

Unfortunately, I began running into problems on page two where we're told that there's a war being waged between humans and vampires which has been going on for "nigh on a century", which only tells me that we’re losing, and that our side sucks. How this is even a secret war when it’s fought in the streets between a loan swordsman (or a paltry handful of such) and a literal hoard of vampire animals, is a mystery!

What, in "nigh on a century" no one has noticed the clashing of swords, the masses of spilled blood, the snarling vampires, and the damage to property? And if this is the 21st century, why are we still fighting with swords? The vampires are using Sarin gas and we’re fighting with swords? Seriously? No wonder we’re losing. It’s this kind of thing which makes this truly suck for me, so I was really having doubts about this and I was only on page two! I don’t know Mark Powers, but I expect much better writing than this from Jim Butcher.

The next thing that happens is that Dresden's old VW bug car breaks down. This guy is a wizard and he can’t fix a car? So they're walking through the snow in Iowa, and even though we're shown the setting sun, their shadows make it look like it’s about ten am or two pm. At least in Iowa, unlike in the primitive backwater town Palermo, they have automatic weapons, which seem to do the trick, but this just reinforces my point from earlier, and it makes a more powerful one: if this is all it takes, then why isn't the military involved? Why do we need wizards?

Well I figured out why we need the wizards - it’s so we can have someone make really dumb-ass puns while they're out-numbered and being attacked. Seriously? It’s hard enough to make a novel sound realistic when you have fantasy creatures in it as it is. Does it really make it sound more authentic when you have some moron making cheap and lousy wise-cracks while the team is fighting for its life? Not for me it doesn’t.

And what’s with the women all wearing skimpy skirts the size of large belts, with two of them having slits up the thigh (one of which is almost to her hip). Seriously? And of course the males all wear the pants? There is one exception - a female who wears pants, but then she has a saber and cloak, so she's still a fantasy object. I know that comic book graphics are traditionally biased towards objectifying women, but I live in hopes that we can get a measure or two past that in 2014. I guess those hopes are not much of a place to live yet, huh?

And what are they protecting in this house in the middle of Iowa? A shoggoth - a fantasy beast that looks remarkably like a dragon, and which consumes sentient beings. The vamps (who also wise-crack) want to to unleash it and create carnage on Earth - thereby wiping out their own food supply. Yep. These vampires are suicidal. Seriously?

It was at this point that I decided that this comic book was too stupid to live. The one thing I can say in its favor is that the images (which are standard comic book art) use the whole page as opposed to being a tiny image in the middle of a vast white space which would be a sad waste of trees in the print version. That aside, though, I found no redeeming features in this novel. It's not so much Dynamite Entertainment as Squib Scribblings.