This was a surprisingly good read. I have to admit that this is first time that entire setting is presented as a feudal high technology world (1980's movie was good but had weird scenography and outfits, little bit too artsy, good but too artsy for me; on the other hand TV show had some very low end CGI), society placed in the setting that is mix of future and past. Vibe coming from the pages shows us worlds in space ruled by feudal lords not unlike those from middle ages.

Finally, Harkonnen's are portrayed as a sinister but not degenerative force. They are sick but not look-my-pus-streaming-down sick. Baron was great and so was his crazy Mentat Piter de Vries.

Art is gorgeous and very detailed. It reminds me very much of the Belgian school, especially authors of stories like XIII and Largo Winch. Art might look a little bit stiff at moments but is very realistic.

Only issue I had is basically main difficulty with any Dune adaptation. Book is very introspective, every character trying to win the mental game of chess with everyone around them, in real life it would be whole bunch of weird staring contests. This constant internal dialogue is very difficult for presentation in visual media. In this adaptation they managed to do it justice but it does have a little bit awkward effect.

All in all excellent adaptations. Book stops at the end of the first third of the story and second volume comes next year (which is saaaad but OK, I hope they continue with the same quality).

Recommended to all fans of good epic space opera SF, newcomers and readers already familiar with the story and lore. ( )

Excellent adaptation of the first part of Frank Herbert's epic space opera. The art is stunning. Muad'dib in spring 2022 can't come fast enough!

reread: Jan. 2022 ( )

Si has leido Dune ya:
- Como fan de Dune me ha hecho recordar tantas sensaciones, me ha encantado.

Si no has leido Dune ya:
- NO LO HAGAS. No leas esto. Es como leer un resumen de un libro, la trama esta ahi pero todo lo que hace a Dune interesante no! ( )

I don't know why I keep doing this to myself. Okay, well, I know, but I kinda don't know, either.

Here's the thing: I love the Dune series. I mean, after the first trilogy, it's definitely diminishing returns, but those first three books? Damn. I've read those first three at least four times, and each time, I get something new out of them.

Then, after Frank Herbert passed, his supremely untalented son Brian hooked up with Kevin J. Anderson, supreme hack, and then proceeded to crap all over Frank Herbert's legacy. Where Frank's writing was lyrical, philosophical, subtle, and carried various shades that hid layers of depth, Brian and Kevin just spit out on-the-nose dialogue, bland plots, with no depth. It's like getting Terry Brooks to add to Tolkien's Middle Earth saga. It's like getting James Patterson to write the sequel to any Cormac McCarthy novel. They'd both likely say yes, but the results would be ass.

So, now the dreadful duo take on distilling Frank's greatest novel down to a comic book script and find an art team that can do creative justice to all the wonderful things involved in building out the Dune universe.

And the results are, as per Brian and Kevin's standards, underwhelming.

The writing—and trust me, I understand what a daunting task it must be to turn this novel...even roughly a third of it...into a workable graphic novel—is stilted, with no subtlety. In short, standard
junior Herbert and Anderson fare. It's mostly banal.

As for the art, it's a bit better, but it feels like Raúl Allén is trying to ape Gabriel Rodriguez's style (likely most famous for his art in Locke & Key), while trying to be a bit less cartoony. But the static nine-panel page layout he favours does little to break the monotony.

Let's face it, Dune is a lot of talking, or a lot of explaining. I mean, Frank wasn't your typical action-sequence writer, and the bigass battle he leads to at the end of the book spans...what? one or two paragraphs? My point is, this graphic novel requires an artist that can create dynamic interest out of a fair amount of talking heads, through various camera angles, close ups and long shots, and interesting backgrounds and actions, while make all those talking heads fascinating.

Raúl Allén ain't that guy. Hell, if they had gotten Bill Sienkiewicz to do the insides instead of just the cover, he may have managed to overcome the crap writing and give us something approaching special.

Why do I keep doing this to myself? Picking up something that is inspired by Frank Herbert, hoping against hope that it'll be better than what they've done before, but ultimately realizing that, once again, a good idea was butchered by Brian and Kevin.

Why do I do it? Because I love Dune. I've loved it since I first read it at 14, and 44 years later, I still do. So yeah, I'll help line Brian and Kevin's pockets with more undeserved wealth and pick up the next couple of installments of this, but I don't expect to be anything but underwhelmed again and again. ( )

derson, Raúl Allén & Patricia Martín (2020, USA). Despite repeated attempts to find further means of cashing in on the Dune corpus, by 2010 interest had clearly begun to wane and two planned Dune books by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson were quietly cancelled (although another trilogy was completed and published). With, it must be said, good reason: their additions to the Dune universe have been uniformly shit. But then the Dune film – its second movie adaptation – was greenlighted, with no less than semi-auteur box-office darling Denis Villeneuve at the helm, and the Dune universe suddenly got a shot in the arm. I’d thought this graphic novel adaptation was, like the earlier Marvel one, tied in to the new movie adaptation. But now I’m not so sure. The artwork in the graphic novel doesn’t appear to match the production design from the Dune movie trailer. Which suggests it’s yet another cash-in. On the one hand, the graphic novel is faithful to the novel. But it fluffs some scenes – the banquet scene especially – and puts too much emphasis on others, such as the gom jabbar scene. But, worse than that, everything looks disappointingly generic. Lynch’s film had its problems, but it looked absolutely gorgeous. It had exactly that level of over-elaborate design you’d expect of Frank Herbert’s universe. I doubt Villeneuve’s production design will match it. The graphic novel art looks, well, boring. The characters appear far too ordinary and similar and, disappointingly, there’s no intricate detail in the backgrounds. This is the blandest version of Dune that has been produced yet. I will, of course, be buying books two and three. ( )