Comic Review: Dungeons and Dragons: A Darkened Wish #4

Dungeons and Dragons: A Darkened Wish #4

IDW Publishing

Writer: B. Dave Walters

Artist: Tess Fowler

I’m a late bloomer when it comes to nerddom. I didn’t begin reading comics on a regular basis until 2017–at the age of…30. Similarly, I didn’t start playing D&D until 2019; age 32. Sure I picked up some classics, like Watchmen, Blackhole, and Sandman, but I’d never considered myself a comic reader. And yeah, I’d played D&D half a dozen times with DMs who didn’t really know what they were doing, or with other players who were lukewarm on taking the prospect of inhabiting their characters with any nuance or seriousness.

What better way to bring the thing full circle, than to read up on D&D comics–seeing as I am, at this time, DMing for 3 of my friends.

Like everything D&D, action and magic are at the forefront of this story. The past and present timelines have finally converged, and we’re finally getting the actions of the characters as they happen, rather than how they happened. It’s one of those, “Let’s get the band back together,” issues, in which characters meet back up again as adults and try to write the wrongs of the past. You know the tale. They have to finish what they started.

Like other D&D comics, there are clearly identifiable character “classes.” Some of the variant covers are even character state sheets. While a little familiarity with the types of characters in this comic would be fine, the ones in this issue, even as a “get the band back together,” issue, fall flat. There just isn’t enough setting these characters apart. There’s no. . . character to the characters–does that make sense? Sadly, compared to the character in the Baldur’s Gate comics, A Darkened Wish feels slim and rushed, often trying to draw readers into emotional moments that aren’t set up beforehand. Sadly, I’d say much of this falls at the feet of the convoluted timeline of the plot.

Tess Fowler’s art is a welcome bright spot in this comic. While it’s nothing groundbreaking, world-shaking, or mind-blowing, it certainly has a D&D sort of feel to it. Fowler excels most when the panel is close up on characters so that she can get into the nitty-gritty details of their wrinkles and scars. However, the more characters there are in any given panel the less detailed the art is. This is natural for any artist, but in this issue, I noticed. The flow of panels didn’t feel seamless in art continuity.