New Format, Old Story

I've reviewed a lot of books written by Terry Brooks here before. At one time, he was my favorite writer, and is still certainly in the top five or ten, even if my tastes have changed a bit. He recently experimented with a new medium for his stories, which meant an experiment for me too: graphic novels.

Dark Wraith of Shannara is a recent 170-ish page black-and-white graphic novel set after the events of The Wishsong of Shannara. This sort of "manga-esque" entertainment usually isn't my cup of tea, but I figured for Terry Brooks, I'd give it a try.

The first thing I should have known is that it's not Terry Brooks, not really, even though his name appears large above the title. He created the story idea, but then handed off to a writer of the field to actual tell the tale and craft the actual dialogue. Arguably, this was a smart thing to do, since he's not a graphic novel writer, but I was looking to read a Terry Brooks story, not something ghost-written.

Worse, the contribution that it seems Terry Brooks actually did make was not a very good one. This story is no good. A few years back, he contibuted a novella called Indomitable to the fantasy collection Legends II. That tale followed Jair Ohmsford, a character from The Wishsong of Shannara, as he had to go back out on one more adventure to vanquish a lingering trace of the evil from the original book. In the novella, his relationship with a character who died in the book is explored, and a strange new facet to his latent magic is unearthed. It was by no means the strongest of Terry Brooks' stories, but the writing itself was very good, and I found it all pretty satisfying for a shorter-than-a-novel form.

This graphic novel is in turn a sequel to Indomitable, referencing events from that novella in the opening pages. But in actuality, it comes across as a virtual carbon copy of Indomitable. Jair once again must destroy one more lingering evil left over from the Wishsong book that hasn't been vanquished, again wonders at the impact on his life by his dead friend, and again tries to understand this strange twist in his magic from the novella. And by the end of it, nothing really new has been added, either. It's truly derivative, and really quite awful.

Oddly, the saving grace here was the aspect I was completely disregarding in buying Dark Wraith of Shannara in the first place -- the art. On those few rare occasions in my life where I've read a comic book or graphic novel, I've almost always found myself ignoring the pictures entirely and just skipping along from word bubble to word bubble to get the story.

Here, the art really made me take notice. It's not like I want to get something enlarged and framed for my wall now or anything, but there were some very compelling images that managed to rip me from the story. Or maybe I was just disliking the story so much that my eyes wandered to the art. Whatever the case, I actually enjoyed this aspect of the book that I expected not to really consider at all.

But was it enough to save what basically amounted to a rerun in my mind? Hardly. I'd rate Dark Wraith of Shannara a D at best, and advise even the Terry Brooks fans out there to skip it. Just go read Indomitable instead, if you haven't, and you'll have everything from these Wishsong of Shannara "post-scripts" that you'll want/need.