Jim Butcher's the Dresden files

I just can't get past the narrative bias. I know it's a character trait, but I just can't seem to get past it...

Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden is a great character, he is care-free, witty, hard-boiled and he is a wizard. Storm Front is the first book in the Dresden Files series mixes magic and fantasy elements with my favourite genre; Hard-Boiled. Dresden is hired by the police as a consultant trying to figure out who is using magic to kill people in Chicago. Like most hard-boiled novels, there are a few twists and turns, the femme fatal and even a gangster to challenge the wizards morels. While I don’t seem to enjoy many fantasy novels, I really loved the combination of fantasy and hard-boiled to create a new type of genre; I believe it’s probably called Magic-Noir. These crossover have huge potential and with the classic hard-boiled recipe, Jim Butcher is on a winning formula (considering there is 14 books in the series so far). I’m looking forward to what will happen next, Dresden has great potential and I hope Butcher doesn’t let me down.

I am of course a huge fan of the Dresden Files, and Storm Front, its first installment, holds a special place in my heart. I have not only the original novel, but also the audio version read by James Marsters, and I was particularly interested in seeing how the short-lived TV version of the Dresden Files would adapt that story. So naturally, when I learned that it was being adapted into graphic novel form, I had to check it out.

Volume 1 of the graphic novel version covers somewhere between the first third and the first half of the story, and does a credible job of it. Some of the smaller details are left out, but they're streamlined well to account for the needs of the medium. Happily, Ardian Syaf's art is a little more solid than in the earlier Dresden graphic novel Welcome to the Jungle, although for my money, the gentleman still needs to work on his ability to draw female faces. Most of the women still look strangely masculine in his style, although Murphy looks more like a blonde Dana Scully now and less like a German beermaid, and that's a step in the right direction--which is to say, towards Butcher's description of Murphy as looking like a cute little cheerleader.

Thumbs up though for Syaf's depiction of Harry, which is quite nice and manages to convey Harry as suitably tall without making him particularly bulky. I also very much liked the panels featuring the fairy Toot-Toot, and the fight scene at the end with the demon that tries to attack Harry's apartment is fun (even if it's choregraphed with all sorts of conveniently placed distractions to hide the fact that Harry is stark naked during the whole scene).

So yeah, nothing really new here to anyone who's familiar with the story, but it's a fun read nonetheless and worth looking at for any Dresden Files fan. Three stars.