2011/04/30

D&D comics history part 23 - Dragonlance Chronicles (DDP)

In parallel of the publication of The Legend of Drizzt, DPP started to release in late 2005 the Dragonlance Chronicles. The story, based on the trilogy of the same name by famous writers Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman is adapted here by Andrew Dabb.


An adaptation of the story in comics has been already done in late 80's under the title "The Dragonlance Saga". But when the DC graphic novels covered the 2 first volumes of the trilogy, DDP fully released the whole story in a total of 24 issues. (that went out with 2 different covers according to DDP policy)
DDP will later release 4 TPB for the whole serie :
Dragons of Autumn Twilight (combining 8 issues), Dragons of Winter Night (4 issues), Dragons of Spring Dawning part 1 (6 issues) and part 2 (6 issues also). 

Note that this serie also will be translated into french and published under TPB by Milady.

First volume is mainly done by Steve Kurth (except the 6th issue by Stefano Raffaele), as well as second one. The visual changes in art from a chapter to another come mainly from the inkers' styles imo. 

 by S.Kurth                                             by S.Raffaele

Then S.Kurth abandoned DDP for Marvel and a bunch of artists were recruited to draw the 2 parts-3rd volume of the serie.
Julius M.Gopez will work on issues 1, 2, 5 & 9, Mariano de la Torre on 3rd one, Pere Perez on issues 4, 6, 8, 10, 11 & 12 and Oscar Jimenez on 7th one.

The styles are very different from an issue to another in the last 2 volumes and
the reader could easily get disappointed jumping from a chapter to the next...
This is obviously the result of DDP's catastrophic money management... Kurth was doing a really great job but noone can t bear a grudge against him to have migrated to better horizons...

by M.De La Torre                       by J.M Gopez                       by P.Perez     

But even, imo, the serie in its whole is still a must-to-have.

I personaly just regret that artists Pere Perez and Mariano De La Torre worked on the serie as their styles, bit too simplistic and far too "clean" compared to other ones do not fit the rest of the work... but well... what has been done s been done heh...
At least DDP managed to finish this trilogy and started the following one : Dragonlance Legends.

O_o

No comments:

Post a Comment