Bane of Kings writes a short review of the second volume of the graphic novel adaption of the second novel in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, Fool Moon, adapted by Mark Powers. 

“An interesting graphic novel that brings the world of Dresden to life, but ultimately suffers from the fact that it is not Butcher who is doing the adaption.” ~The Founding Fields

Original Writer: Jim Butcher | Adaptor: Mark Powers | Art: Chase Conley | Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment | Collects: Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files: Fool Moon Volume 2 #1-4.

 The star of Jim Butcher’s New York Times bestselling novel series, The Dresden Files, Harry Dresden is a private investigator whose clients require a detective with supernatural expertise – in other words, he’s a wizard for hire. The Windy City has been hit with an outbreak of savage werewolf attacks – a case made even more chaotic and challenging by the fact that Harry’s uncovered no less than three lycanthropic groups, each seemingly in conflict with one another. On top of that, Harry’s lost the faith of his one friend and ally among the Chicago Police Department, Karrin Murphy. Now she, along with werewolves and hostile FBI Agents, hunts Harry while he races against the rise of the next full moon to discover who – or what – is behind the string of murders!

I’m a huge fan of the Dresden Files and although I am not yet up to date with the behemoth of a series that contains the best urban fantasy novels on the market to date, I leapt at the chance to revisit some of Harry’s older adventures in graphic novel format, particularly as I had read Fool Moon already and even though this book is only half of the story, to see how a graphic novel series of The Dresden Files would fare.

And as it turned out, better than I expected. Harry looks like I’d expect him to, and the art is very Dresden Files-y. Whilst of course, like the majority of adaptions, the book is better, Fool Moon Vol. 2 was still very entertaining. It’s nice to see a comic series of everybody’s favourite Wizarding PI and as a result found this book very entertaining.

This is going to be a shorter than normal review mainly due to the fact that I have already reviewed the book here, and there isn’t much I can add to it. Mark Powers has done the best he could to make the graphic novel feel as good as it can be, but I felt that not only this is too short, collecting only four issues in a single graphic novel – it would have been much easier for Dynamite to have collected the issues in the first volume of Fool Moon with those in the first volume of this one, and that would have also made it a better value for money as well. I received this book of NetGalley so pricing isn’t an issue for me, but I can see that unless Fool Moon Vol. 2 is priced cheaper than the standard 6-7 issue graphic novel then some fans may steer clear of it.

The graphic novel itself stays true to the novel and Powers, with the aid of Conley, has created a great atmospheric adaption that you can tell is certainly a Dresden Files graphic novel and not just a ripoff looking to exploit the franchise’s popularity. I was going to talk about the plot here, but I’ve already covered it not only in my review but also if anyone’s got this far in the graphic novel series then chances are they’ll have read the main bulk of The Dresden Files already so it’d just be me re-hashing information that you already know. However, if you’re looking for a book with some nice artwork (nothing too spectacular) and something that brings The Dresden Files to life on the comic format, then you can’t really go wrong with Mark Powers here.

It’s nowhere near the quality of the original book, but it’s a far cry from something that was knocked together in the space of ten minutes.

VERDICT: 3/5