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A review by madmooney
White Sand, Volume 3 by Brandon Sanderson
3.0
A pretty-much spoiler-free review of all 3 Volumes (three out of five):
"It began with a single idea. A group crossing a field of white, featureless sand - to their shock - a hand peeking out of the sands. Digging down, they found a person buried in the dune, still alive."
Thus begins Sanderson's description of the world and the original concept he was putting together during his missionary work, twenty years past. A story that would be 'one part Dune, one part The Wheel of Time and one part Les Miserables"
I would have loved to see that work realized.
When I find an author I enjoy, I typically purposefully leave a portion of their work unengaged (in the case they croak and I need something to break open in the case of a reading emergency). White Sand was one of Sanderson's titles I was happy to leave unread - until recently. Recently, I had completed something else and my curiosity overcame my hesitance, and I decided to crack open White Sand for some answers.
And that something else came in the form of 2 frames, 2 lines of dialogue, and 2 words in bold.
A conspiratorial winkie to those before and after me on the same path of reading White Sand at this point in the Cosmere. ;)
I feel that the biggest stumbling block with my experience here is that you are taking something that is meant to be a book and expressing it in the graphic novel form. It feels rushed and not elegantly shaped, like inking an image on the rubber of a balloon, and then stretching that rubber over the bones of a drum. In White Sand, the stakes are immediate and the clock is tick-tick-ticking pretty much from issue 1 (of 18 total for the entire run).
When Marvel produced Stephen King's The Dark Tower series - [b:Dark Tower: The Long Road Home BGI Variant|20543729|Dark Tower The Long Road Home BGI Variant|Marvel Comics|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389717156l/20543729._SY75_.jpg|37843933]- you at least had the novel source material available, so when they decided to cut book stuff to suit the format (or to add new material) it did not feel to be at the sacrifice of the pace of the storytelling.
I lament that this was not a book first, and the only follow up we will get is in the form of short stories featuring Worldhoppers from Taldain.
"The most important words a man can say are, "I will do better."
Everyone sucks at the beginning of the book - even Kenton. Kenton may be the moral focus in the book, trying be better than his father (and his Diem), but he slips a number of times and falls into old Masterel ways. It is important to be with him on these 1st steps of the journey as he resolves the relationships of his clan with the rest of Lossand, as well as his own with his father.
Final considerations is to reiterate that I wish that the medium wasnt the message here and we had a graphic novel adaptation, rather than an original graphic novel plotting.
A few random thoughts:
"It began with a single idea. A group crossing a field of white, featureless sand - to their shock - a hand peeking out of the sands. Digging down, they found a person buried in the dune, still alive."
Thus begins Sanderson's description of the world and the original concept he was putting together during his missionary work, twenty years past. A story that would be 'one part Dune, one part The Wheel of Time and one part Les Miserables"
I would have loved to see that work realized.
When I find an author I enjoy, I typically purposefully leave a portion of their work unengaged (in the case they croak and I need something to break open in the case of a reading emergency). White Sand was one of Sanderson's titles I was happy to leave unread - until recently. Recently, I had completed something else and my curiosity overcame my hesitance, and I decided to crack open White Sand for some answers.
And that something else came in the form of 2 frames, 2 lines of dialogue, and 2 words in bold.
A conspiratorial winkie to those before and after me on the same path of reading White Sand at this point in the Cosmere. ;)
I feel that the biggest stumbling block with my experience here is that you are taking something that is meant to be a book and expressing it in the graphic novel form. It feels rushed and not elegantly shaped, like inking an image on the rubber of a balloon, and then stretching that rubber over the bones of a drum. In White Sand, the stakes are immediate and the clock is tick-tick-ticking pretty much from issue 1 (of 18 total for the entire run).
When Marvel produced Stephen King's The Dark Tower series - [b:Dark Tower: The Long Road Home BGI Variant|20543729|Dark Tower The Long Road Home BGI Variant|Marvel Comics|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389717156l/20543729._SY75_.jpg|37843933]- you at least had the novel source material available, so when they decided to cut book stuff to suit the format (or to add new material) it did not feel to be at the sacrifice of the pace of the storytelling.
I lament that this was not a book first, and the only follow up we will get is in the form of short stories featuring Worldhoppers from Taldain.
"The most important words a man can say are, "I will do better."
Everyone sucks at the beginning of the book - even Kenton. Kenton may be the moral focus in the book, trying be better than his father (and his Diem), but he slips a number of times and falls into old Masterel ways. It is important to be with him on these 1st steps of the journey as he resolves the relationships of his clan with the rest of Lossand, as well as his own with his father.
Final considerations is to reiterate that I wish that the medium wasnt the message here and we had a graphic novel adaptation, rather than an original graphic novel plotting.
A few random thoughts:
- --Sanderson continues setting his stories on worlds with unique planetary features (to give rise to unique magic systems). Here, the cosmology is unique, as it is a planet tidally locked between two suns.
--Issue 12 (of 18) takes on a very different tracing/inking quality than the rest of the book. While the lines are more sharper and the colours are more brighter, its starkness was offputting and I was happy to see the remainder of the series revert back to the previous art style.
--I do not know if these 3 volumes conclude what was intended for the graphic novel, or if it was cancelled prematurely, or if there is more to come (the last issue was released 2019), but I feel cheated that we do not see much of the Darkside of Taldain.