Dune has gathered some renewed pop culture buzz as of late with a film adaptation of the canonical 1965 Frank Herbert novel on its way from director Denis Villenueve with Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, and Oscar Isaac set to star. Now, the classic story is also coming to comics.
Dune is getting a three-part graphic novel adaption from Abrams Books, with the first part set to hit in October 2020, according to Entertainment Weekly, which got the exclusive announcement privilege this week. The script for the new graphic novel will be penned by Brian Herbert (original author Frank’s son) and Kevin J. Anderson, which is the same team that has taken up writing the most recent Dune novels.
Illustrating the book will be the regular art team of Raúl Allén and Patricia Martín, whose most prominent North American comics work of late has been with Valiant (they also teamed on a guest arc of Wonder Woman written by Steve Orlando). Rounding out the team will be Bill Sienkiewicz, who will be doing the three covers for the series.
I’m a huge fan of both the Dune novel and the artists they’ve recruited to draw this. If you’re a Dune neophyte who has avoided reading the book, this is not a bad way to experience at least part of the story before the movie hits in November. If you’ve never so much as considered reading Dune and wonder what the big deal is, for my money Dune was a big part of the pastiche that heavily influenced George Lucas in making a little movie called Star Wars, albeit a part with quite a bit more philosophy aside from good is good and bad is bad.
Herbert’s main question with Dune had to do with environmentalism, but that was just a jumping off point he used to explore so much more, including ruling classes, indigenous populations, religion, psychedelic substances, and the list goes on. It is, in a word, good.
Anyway, enough rambling! Check out the first artwork from the forthcoming book, all of which were also unveiled by EW this week.
