Dragonlance: Chronicles #1 is the start of Devil's Due's adaptation of Weis & Hickman's classic novel trilogy to comic book form. Issue #1 was an August release, with #2 due in September.
This review covers some general plot points, but doesn't spoil any surprises.
The Story
Twenty-one years ago TSR, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman revolutionized the roleplaying industry with the release of the first Dragonlance book, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. It was the first attempt to really turn a roleplaying setting into a novelistic world. Though the first Tekumel novel was published the same year, the first Greyhawk novel the next year, and there were already reams of unpublished fiction written about Glorantha, Dragonlance alone had the originality and staying power to actually make its mark. The nearly 100 novels & short story collections that followed that first book speak to its success.
There was a previous Dragonlance comic, published by DC. It ran under DC from 1988-1990 and my rosy-colored glasses say it was good. (I no longer have the issues.) Dragonlance Chronicles, however, is a back-to-the-basics Dragonlance story. It adapts the first part of the aforementioned first Dragonlance novel: Dragons of Autumn Twilight.
This particular comic tells the story of a group of six friends who have been apart for five years and now return to the Inn of the Last Home to share their stories. It's largely an introduction to the six: Tanis Halfelf, Flint, Tasslehoff Burrfoot,Caramon, Raistlin, and Sturm. We also meet two foreigners, Goldmoon and Riverwind, and learn of a mysterious blue staff which may be able to heal, a power lost with the gods.
Dragonlance: Chronicles #1 is solely an introduction to characters, with perhaps enough action mixed in to get you to come back.
The Continuity
As already noted, Dragonlance has quite a bit of continuity, including backstories for all these characters, and a future history that runs for decades. However, this is the starting place. It's the adaptation of the first Dragonlance novel.
The Storytelling
The storytelling in Dragonlance: Chronicles #1 is somewhat staid. The purpose was clearly to introduce all the characters, set up some of the basic ideas of the world, and then to get everyone moving. It accomplishes these goals adequately, but it's not terribly exciting.
Knowing where the saga goes, I expect the comics to pick up from this slow start. But this first issue earns just an average "3" out of "5" for Substance.
The Artwork
Artwork is by Steve Kurth (pencils) and Djoko Santiko (colors). It's a very vivid, realistic style that generally looks quite good and gives color and depth to the saga. Some of the artwork gets a bit muddy, particularly in the dark scenes, but the clearer, daylit scenes are quite vivid and evocative.
Beyond that there's generally a decent amount of attention paid to background details, which nicely increases the realism and depth of the books. In addition, the panel layouts offer some variety with insets occasionally helping keep the pages lively without being distracting.
Overall, I think the artwork looks quite good, but I hope the nighttime scenes will get clearer in the future. (Having now looked at the samples of the comic that Devil's Due has on the 'net, it looks obvious that the comic printed darker than they'd intended.)
The Presentation
The story is presented in 22 pages printed on glossy, white paperstock which shows off the artwork well. Ads are helpfully all grouped at the end of the story so that they don't break the flow of the story.
On the whole the comic thus rates high on Style: a strong "4" out of "5", with a possibility for improvement in the future.
Usage in RPGs
This is the story that really got storytelling into the mainstream of roleplaying games. Roleplayers should thus enjoy it for a number of reasons: because of its background for the Dragonlance world (is anyone still playing there?), because of its verisimilitude as a D&D world setting, and because of its high-fantasy saga-telling.Dragonlance was also the first setting that really tried to make sense of the character class system of D&D. Here, we had red, black, and white wizards. Sturm Brightblade, a fighter, belongs to an order of knight. Correlating classes with real-life professions brings a realism to the sometimes abstract classes of the D&D world, and is a good model for any RPG.
In other words, Weis & Hickman did a lot of things right when they wrote the original stories, and you can see them all again here.
Conclusion
Dragonlance was an epic story, and I'm happy to see it finally adapted to comic-book form, which i think always offers a very different experience from prose novels. Thus far the art on this book looks pretty good, but the story is at too introductory of a stage to measure how good the storytelling is going to be. I'm interested to see what comes next.
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