Fool Moon (graphic novel) By: Jim Butcher, Chase Conley, Mark Powers Series: The Dresden Files Book Number: 2.1 Star Rating: Sensuality Rating:

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Synopsis

Harry Dresden, private investigator and professional wizard, is tapped by Karrin Murphy, head of Chicago PD's Special Investigations unit to look into a grisly murder that is the latest in a string of similar killings around the city. Harry almost immediately recognizes the act as the handiwork of a supernatural being and the victim as a henchman of local mobster, Johnny Marcone. As Harry and Murphy try to investigate the crime scene, a group of FBI agents arrive, taking over before they can find out much. But little do they know that Harry managed to snag a shard of bloody glass from the scene and uses a magical spell to track the owner of the blood. It leads him to a woman who appears to be leading a gang of teenage werewolves and, as he soon learns, is also engaged to a particularly vicious wolf-shifter known as a loup-garou. She asks for Harry's help to reconstruct the magic circles needed to contain her fiancé during the full moon, but before he can do that, the loup-garou goes on a killing spree. Even still, the evidence simply isn't adding up to him being the killer of the other recent victims. Soon Harry has his hands full keeping every conceivable breed of werewolf at bay, while trying to keep Marcone alive, and win back Murphy's trust.

Review

Fool Moon is the graphic novel adaptation of the second full-length novel of the same name in the Dresden Files series. Much like with my review of Storm Front, I'm not going to critique the story too much, because I've already written a review of the novel. Overall the story was adapted to this shorter format pretty well, hitting all the important points. Since it's been a couple of years since I read the novel, I didn't remember a whole lot of the story, so this was a great refresher. My only complaint in this regard is that there were a few places where the narrative felt a little choppy to me, like something was missing, and I was having a hard time following it. This made me wonder if I wasn't already familiar with the story if I would have been able to figure things out at all, but it wasn't too bad.

The artist for this graphic novel, Chase Conley, is a new one to me, who hasn't done the artwork for any of the comics up to this point in the series. His illustrations were OK, but I'd have to say they're my least favorite in the Dresden Files graphic novels I've read to date. For the most part, his renderings weren't as spot on with how I've imagined the characters, and I was also somewhat annoyed by the fact that he created most of the female characters with impossibly huge breasts. This didn't seem to be the case with any of the previous graphic novels I've read in the series, or at least, if it was, the artwork overall was so good I didn't notice. I was also somewhat confused at times by his framing techniques and occasionally it was difficult to discern who was speaking in dialogue. All of this somewhat distracted from the story for me, hence the reason I gave this graphic novelization a lower rating than the novel.

As with the Storm Front graphic novel, Fool Moon is IMHO firmly in the adult category. There is one brief moment that implies sex. There are also numerous frames depicting nudity, both male and female, but mostly it's one female character who is almost constantly running around naked. At these times, the characters are either only seen from the back and/or with sensitive parts strategically covered, but I thought it worth mentioning since teens often read graphic novels and some sensitive readers, teen or adult, could be offended by it. Overall, Fool Moon was a pretty good adaptation, but I felt there were a few things that could have been better, mainly the illustrations. If one of the other artists whose work I previously enjoyed had done the illustrations for this one it probably would have earned keeper status from me. The Fool Moon graphic novelization was originally released as Fool Moon: Volume 1 and Fool Moon: Volume 2, a two volume stand-alone set, but was later combined with three other graphic novels in the series and re-released as Jim Butcher's Dresden Files: Omnibus Volume One.

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