Graphic Novel Reviews: Shadows of Ice (The Sunwell Trilogy Book 2)

*Special 3-day posting*

Warcraft: Shadows of Ice (Book 2 of The Sunwell Trilogy)

by Richard A. Knaak

art by Jae-Hwan Kem

The first book of this series was a nice introduction to the main story involving the bad guy of Dar'Khan, but this one suddenly veers off path. As a result of the authors veering off path this book becomes just a stand-alone flop. It does not seem cohesive to the first book in the franchise. The main reason that it gets three points instead of two is because this adheres to what can occur while playing the video game. While in-game you may suddenly have to veer off path of your main mission to take care of something that occurs in that area. In the game you may suddenly discover that a bad guy for another quest is nearby, so you go out to quickly take care of that quest. Here it does not lend itself to the story. It takes away from what could have been a pretty decent manga.

While Dar'Khan does appear in this volume as the villain near the end, the main villain turns out to be someone else. I will not spoil who it is since they are made out to be a good guy for a vast majority of the book. This sudden side villain detracts from the overarching story of the book and takes our heroes on an adventure between two warring factions: the scourge and dwarves. The leader of the scourge having obtained an orb to call the dead to life is attacking the dwarves and others. The heroes feel that they have to help them out, since they are called there trying to take off some collars placed on them. They believe there is a dwarf that will be able to help them remove them in the area. Little do they know about the fighting. 

Overall this book could have been signficantly better if Knaak had simply focused on telling more about the heroes and trying to reach Dar'Khan, but instead he does not cement a main story instead he decides to create a book that makes the series seem like it is poorly written. While I mentioned that the game does veer off this does not mean that the books/comics published in this world should do the same. Manga stories need to be somewhat cohesive, especially when I am pretty sure that the author and publisher always knew that it was going to be three volumes since they gave it the name of the Sunwell Trilogy. The author could have tightened this up a lot more and had a truly epic fantasy set in Azeroth, but instead we have a volume that falls flat on its face because it tries to be something it should not have. It is not a video game. It is a manga series explaining one aspect of the video game.

I have seen that other manga/comics have been released and I will try to read some of them to see if they are just as horrible as this second volume or if they are as interesting as the first volume was. I can only pray and hope that volume 3 wraps this up nicely, if not I do not know how I am going to stay optimistic about this series. 

Until next time... Stay Optimistic!!!