Dungeons & Dragons Saturday Morning Adventures—A Preview
Dungeons & Dragons comic book fans are spoiled with at least three new books announced so far this year.
IDW released a preview on March 1st featuring excerpts from the three books: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves—The Feast of the Moon, a one-shot prequel to the upcoming movie; Dungeons & Dragons: Saturday Morning Adventures, a 4-part mini-series featuring the heroes from the ’80s animated series; and Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft—Orphan of Agony, a horror story based in the Ravenloft setting.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves—The Feast of the Moon was released on March 8, and you can read my review here. Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft—Orphan of Agony was released March 14. The first issue of Dungeons & Dragons: Saturday Morning Adventures will be released on March 29.
I was elated to read that IDW would be publishing new adventures based on the heroes from the D&D Saturday morning animated show. The show was a big hit with D&D fans when it came out in 1983. The series lasted for 3 seasons with a total of 27 episodes.
The show follows the adventures of a group of friends and D&D players who are transported into the world of Dungeons & Dragons while on an amusement park ride. Unfortunately, it was cancelled before we could find out if the heroes eventually found their way back home. TSR eventually release a one-shot comic book based on the series in 1996, The Grand Tour, featuring older versions of the adventurers in a story where they seek to convince the great mage Elminster to take on Presto (the magic-user of the group) as an apprentice. The script to a final unproduced episode was eventually turned into an audio drama. A fan-made finale, Requiem, was also produced and is available on YouTube. But all these “sequels” did not provide as much of a satisfactory conclusion as the 2019 car commercials from Brazil featuring live-action versions of the animated adventurers. Following the success of these ads, many fans called for a live action D&D movie based on the characters depicted in these ads. Even though WoTC has not announced a movie based on the animated series, characters that bear a striking resembles to those six heroes make a cameo in the upcoming D&D movie.
The fans have obviously not forgotten the show that celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. On top of the comic book series, the anniversary is also being celebrated with the launch of a series of figurines of the heroes and villains of the series.
The preview released March 1st is short but more than enough to get D&D fans excited. The situation also seems edgier, more tense, which is good—this is after all, no longer a Saturday morning cartoon. It feels like the story will appeal to new readers and to its original fan base that has aged.
The art by George Kambadais looks absolutely phenomenal—cartoonist yet sufficiently edgy to give it that D&D action adventure feeling. It captures the essence of the original Saturday morning cartoon while lending it the magical mood and characteristic dynamics we’ve come to expect with high adventure D&D comic books.
The book will provide an amazing bit of nostalgia for the original fans and will also serve to introduce new readers to D&D comic books.
Each issue will feature three covers by George Kambadais, Brenda Hickey and Tim Levins. The first issue will be released on March 29.
About the Author
Jules-Pierre Malartre Jules-Pierre Malartre currently lives in L’Île-Perrot, a small island west of Montreal (Quebec), which is as close to the Great White North that he will ever dare go, but still cold enough to save him from big-ass spiders, alien abductions, undead dinosaurs and tourists who find his French accent charming. In 2005, he quit a promising aerospace engineering career to go into freelance writing, which was a very, very bad idea according to his mother. Since then, he has become considerably poorer, but he has grown much happier. Along the way, he adopted cats—lots of cats! When he is not writing technical manuals, newspaper articles, press releases or blogs on anything from comic books to yoga, he is busy working on his first novel, a semi-autobiographical fictional account of his life that dares to ask the question, “where did God go wrong with me anyway?” His first short story, “The Rest Was Easy,” was published by the online literary magazine Amarillo Bay in 2013. The five people who read it liked it. He’s well aware that it took him over a decade to publish another one, so he’d really appreciate it if you'd cut him some slack about it! He loves coffee, cats and reading, mostly because those three things go very well together.
Related Posts
Review: Dungeons & Dragons Saturday Morning Adventures II Trade Paperback →
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves—The Feast of the Moon Official Movie Prequel Comic →
Previews: Bettie Page: The Alien Agenda #1 + Draculina #2 + Elvira Meets Vincent Price #5 + Red Sonja: Black, White, Red #8 →
