Built On Sand

Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson are bringing Dune back to comics

- Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson

EVER SINCE RALPH MACCHIO and Bill Sienkiewicz turned David Lynch’s 1984 film of Frank Herbert’s acclaimed novel into a Marvel mini-series, Dune has been absent from the comic book page. But with Denis Villeneuve’s new big-screen adaptation due next year, Frank’s son Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson have not only scripted a 12-issue mini-series of their 1999 prequel novel House Atreides for Boom! Studios, but have transformed Dune itself into a graphic novel for Abrams Books.

“Comics and the Dune canon went in different directions for decades after the 1984 film,” says Herbert. “To me, it always felt like something was missing. I wanted to see how the stories in the Dune universe – especially my father’s great classic – would look in comic book form. Since Frank Herbert wrote visually – he worked as a professional photographer at one time – it was only natural that his books, and the new ones I’m writing with Kevin, should be published as comic books.”

“I’ve been a comics fan most of my life, and Brian and I always think visually when we write our novels, so it seems a natural move to adapt our first Dune novel to comic format,” adds Anderson. “It’s been a lot of fun to reinterpret the story we wrote over 20 years ago.”

Set 35 years before the events of Dune, House Atreides introduces readers to younger versions of key characters like Duke Leto, Lady Jessica, and Baron Harkonnen. “As