Dune (Graphic Novel)

The Marvel Super Special series were graphic novel adaptations, by and large, of popular Eighties genre films—I’ve also read the Blade Runner adaptation.

They featured dark, impressive art that captured the essence of the cinematic experience, sometimes reproducing easily recognizable film clips.

The Blade Runner adaptation has stood out in my mind lo these many years—and I got a chance to reread it recently, although I have yet to really write about it.

I found that one walking around Redbeard’s Books, which was located in a house off the Marion bypass in those long-ago days. The place was a claustrophobic old two-story whose bottom half had been transformed with piles of cheap, sensational true crime paperbacks, such as Deviant by Harold Schechter, which I first discovered there, as well as shelves stuffed with science fiction, fantasy, sword and sorcery, and Eighties horror titles that have been relegated to the dustbin of nostalgia and long forgotten.

And groaning on the aching shelves, along with D&D rulebooks and monster manuals, were comics; most specifically, the Marvel Super Special of Blade Runner I just alluded to. That was a defining moment for me, and so it is with some sense of the sheer heaviness of such prophetic, weighty events (as it says in the movie JFK, “What is past is prologue”), I acquired, by hook or by crook, the Marvel Super Special adaptation of David Lynch’s near-universally panned but undeniably cult adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction master-class epic saga, Dune. And I felt as if another little piece of the jigsaw of existence was placed for me, so that I might get a fuller picture of my sojourn upon this unforgiving, godless sphere.

Dune, the comic, begins with a haunting depiction of Princess Irulan (played in the film by the beautiful actress Virginia Madsen), the chronicler or historian of the overthrow of Empire (her father is the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, played in the film by José Ferrer) by the rebel upstart Fremen leader, Paul Mu’Dib (Kyle McLachlan), the Fremen Mahdi, leading the Jihad against the infidel dogs, the Harkonnens, whom, one suspects, are “just animals,” by the uneasy categorization provided in the film.

They are certainly biomechanical, grotesque, hyper-violent wretches. They are exemplified by the floating fat Baron, portrayed in the film version of Dune by the late actor Kenneth McMillan, whose facial features are festooned with boils, the outward evidence of his perverse tastes (which include pulling the “heart plug” of doomed slave boys that cater in terror to his every sickening whim). Their entire world of Geidi Prime is a study in industrial decay and harsh, gruesome, sadistic, and punishing excess—sadism and masochism intertwined. The Baron’s nephew, Feyd-Rautha (portrayed by singer Sting), for example, wears a heavy metal (literally) jockstrap and what appears to be thick, plastic armor. Small creatures are crushed in glass boxes, their blood sipped through a straw. Cows hang from meat hooks, while Harkonites like the Beast Rabban pull their lolling tongues out to devour them raw. It’s that sort of intergalactic horror show, cum dive bar, on a grand scale.

A Very Delicate Time

The adaptation is by Ralph Macchio, with artwork by Bill Sienkiewicz. The first image—Irulan’s face—is arresting. What follows is a dark, near-psychedelic tour-de-force, condensing Dune into a single, though undeniably thick, comic reading experience.

The comic expands on dialogue and meaning. Paul, the son of Duke Leto (Jurgen Prochnow in the film), who is doomed, is “tested” by the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (portrayed by Sian Phillips) with the pain-inducing “Box” (which was later borrowed by Don Coscarelli for his surrealistic horror masterstroke Phantasm), a psychic test to see if he is, indeed, the “Kwisatz Haderach,” the “Universal Super Being,” promised as a messiah-like figure that will be the male culmination of Bene Gesserit manipulation of bloodlines. Paul’s mother, Jessica (Francesca Annis), the concubine of Duke Leto, disobeyed the orders of her order (which apparently does not demand celibacy) to “bear only daughters,” but rebelled and gave birth to Paul. Thus, the stage is set, and Paul is introduced to us as someone unusual.

The feuding “Houses of the Landsraad”—House Atreides, which is Paul’s house, and House Harkonnen—have been appointed by the Galactic Emperor to switch positions, the Harkonnens ordered by Shaddam IV to vacate their fiefdom of Arrakis, a dry, inospitable desert world, and give it over to House Atreides.

And then, “at the appointed time,” the Harkonnens will launch a sneak attack, with the help of the Emperor’s Sardaukar terror troops. The attack goes off, but Paul and his mother, Lady Jessica, escape into the desert. And that is where Paul escapes the gigantic sandworms and meets the tribe of Fremen, the dispossessed people of the spice-producing world (spice being the mystical substance of sandworms that allows for space travel, psychic visions, longevity extension, etc.).

“Their minds are so… they move in strange directions.”

The dialogue is expanded and somewhat improved upon from the film. We get, via the dialogue, explanations and expansions of plot points that may leave casual viewers, or those who haven’t read the novel, a bit in the dust.

Just as an example:

“Listen to me, Shaddam IV. The spice must flow. It has given us accelerated evolution for generations. It has enabled you to live two hundred years. The spice helps make the Sapho juice, which stains the Mentats’ lips red and enables them to be human computers… the secret side of spice… the Water of Life.”

None of this dialogue is in the film, but it is exposition that gives background on the world created by the novel. Whether an audience or reader is able to easily follow is another story.

For another time.

Paul becomes a Fremen and then begins the pathway to his messianic destiny as the Kwisatz Haderach, “Mahdi,” the Universal Super-Being, who shakes the Galactic Empire of Shaddam IV to its foundation.

This graphic novel is a dark tribute to the film, the flashes of images drawn directly from the film swimming to the fore of anyone who has viewed it multiple times and appreciates the baroque, strange visual tapestry drawn by Lynch, Carlo Rambaldi, Kit West, and the other filmmakers. The sights and sounds of Dune, the 1984 failed epic that is actually close to being a masterpiece of the era, if truth be told, will swim to the forefront of the reader, much like the Third Stage Guild Navigator—a weirdly aquatic mutant form of life swimming in a gas tank—swims forward to address his de facto underling, Shaddam IV.

It’s a film of wonder, in “a handful of dust,” to borrow a line from an ancient magazine article that announced the release of Dune in 1984. From the eerie Irulan image at the front of the book to the visual depiction of hallucinations of immortality brought on by the spice mélange, you will feel wonder as something at which to Marvel.

Excelsior!

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