Review – Dungeons and Dragons: Legends of Baldur’s Gate #2 & #3 (IDW)

D&D_BaldursGate03-cover - Copy Publisher: IDW Publishing
Writer: Jim Zub
Artists: Max Dunbar, John Paul Bove, Joana Lafuente
Released: #3 is released on 10th December, 2014

Take heart fellow adventurers! For we have curried the favor of Boo, the only miniature giant space hamster in the Realm!

God, I love quoting Minsc. And what with that relatively contrived start back in issue one – seemingly existing primary to crowbar in Minsc to a brand new story – out of the way, that’s now not the only appear of this series, with the story managing to engage and excite, leaving me feeling more than a little bad for being rather mean to the writing of the first issue.

Now that he’s allowed to get to the meat of his story, Zub appears to be having a whale of a time, both in terms of the actual plotting, and in the dialogue, producing lines of precisely equal quotability to the games of yore – ‘I must deal with STINKING EVIL by the sweets table!’. That he gets to end issue 3 with a pretty well structured chase-and-reveal is the icing on the cake.

Max Dunbar retains his rather pleasing stylings that so well sold the first issue throughout these two issues – it’s strangely comforting, with the affable grins of the characters and the dynamism of the action giving it the air of a terrifically well-made Saturday-morning cartoon.

All in all, despite a slow-ish start, it’s built up a pretty excellent pace over the course of these issues, with some cracking action sequences, and Zub’s writing of the main players has become something of a joy. Whether you’re an aficionado of one namesake or t’other, or, y’know, both, this’ll certainly float your jib (I think I got that saying right…). As for those coming in cold in those terms, you’ll be left a little cold by the required familiarity with said source materials, but it gets you up to speed by the end of issue 2, and issue 3 is an absolute blast as Zub bounces through an exciting, albeit fairly traditional, adventure romp.

Rating: 3/5.

The Writer of this piece was: Ross Sweeney
Ross tweets from @Rostopher24