World of Warcraft Comics

Comic: World of Warcraft
Writer: Walt and Lousie Simonson
Artist: Mike Bowden and Pop Mhan

What was the comic about?

I decided to write a little bit about this comic series because it was one I read a long time ago and revisited more recently. It was a monthly comic for a while, and I followed it for a year or two. It is hard for me to disassociate myself from the lore of the world because I’ve been a big of Warcraft for a long time, so I don’t know how much of my enjoyment stemmed from my love of the the games and how much of it was purely just because the comic was good. I played the old Warcraft Games and then World of Warcraft on and off since I was 13 till about 18, so I know the whole IP incredibly well, the world is so immersive and has such amazing and thorough lore that it really was an amazing thing to be a part of in its heyday. I think the new trailer for the Warcraft movie helps me identify why I liked this comic so much and why I’m not really very excited about the movie. In the game, each location has a feel - it has a certain color pallette, shape language, art direction and I think I could probably identify any of them with a screenshot even so many years after I stopped playing. The comic definitely stuck to this and some of that nostalgic feeling would come back when I read it, I think this was a great success on the part of the writers. (On the flip side, I couldn’t tell any of the locations in the trailer by these same criteria, which to me is a massive failing considering its really meant to be pandering to its fan base.)

What did you like about it?

I actually really enjoyed the main first arc of the story, but it definitely lost a lot of its appeal after that. The original arc had a nice amount of characters and told a story that revolved around the human character Varian Wrynn. He soul split in two, he wakes up to with amnesia and is immediately captured and taken a slave, forced to fight in the arena. He and his team becomes renowned for their skills before they manage to flee. His memory begins to return and he must return home to save his city and his people from the clutches of the Dragon Onyxia. This was an awesome ark and a great story, however - after this they started introducing a number of other characters and flooded the story with new people and introduced a number of elements that were foreign to the original. Steve Hickner was at our school the other day and did a talk about story and how if we present something to our audience that they think they know and are excited to see then you break that without giving them a satisfying alternative then they are going to dislike it. So when they introduced all these new elements it really began to feel further and further detached from the original games. I also think it suffered from what I am calling ‘Heroes’ syndrome. Where they began to introduce so many characters that all the storylines began to get weaker and weaker and there were too many threads to keep hold of at once.