Written by: Gordon Rennie
Art by: Andrea Olimpieri & Marcelo Maiolo
Publisher: Titan Comics
Dishonored is one of my favorite video games of all time. Straight up. I absolutely adore nearly everything that it does, including the world building and story telling. Despite being a truly dour setting, the game did a really good job of making Dunwall an interesting place. Honestly, I can’t wait to see what Dishonored 2 does in terms of fleshing out an entirely new setting.
But in the meantime, there’s a Dishonored comic book series to hold me over. Honestly, when I chose to review it, I didn’t even make the connection to the video game. I’m not sure how I missed the announcement, but I thought this was just a new series that happened to share a name with the video game. As soon as I opened the file and saw the cover, I made the connection, and got pretty excited. I couldn’t wait to dive into the world of Dishonored again.
However, there was a nagging thought in the back of my head. What if it isn’t good? Licensed comics so rarely are, why would this be any different? Fortunately, it is. Aside from some bits that are overwritten (presumably so people who didn’t play the game can get into it), I really enjoyed my time with the book. Obviously some of this comes down to already having knowledge about the world, but honestly, the creative team should lean into that audience as much as possible.
It does suffer from problems that commonly plague debut issues – it spends way too much time on set up, rather than just letting the book breathe a little bit. Regardless, the creative team does a really good job of capturing the city of Dunwall, and fleshing out Corvo’s character. It definitely helps that the set up is actually a plot that I’m interested in following. For now, that’s more than enough to convince me to come back for the next issue.
Honestly, I’m excited to read more of this book. A lot of its issues I can see going away with the next installment, since the amount of exposition in this issue will no longer be necessary. There’s a lot of directions this book could take, but even if it just tells a neat story in the Dishonored universe, I’m going to love it.
