Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Ooo..

Kalinara found news on the Dresden Files comic book.

Butcher's writing the adaptation. (Which could be good or bad -- I like that the author of the books is adding a new plot to the series, but novelists don't always translate well to comics.)

I'm with her that I'm a bit disappointed Morgan's white in the comic. I got the impression somewhere in the first book he was black and was actually surprised when people pointed the casting out as a change. And Murphy's back to blonde.

The series is awfully whitewashed to begin with, and its pretty bad in the early books. Like Butcher didn't notice the only character who wasn't white was Susan for several novels and so started to filter in the Knights, the Council, Rawlins and Carlos when he got the off chance. All relatively minor characters.

4 comments:

  1. I think Carlos is slowly moving into a bigger role though. His part in the last book was pretty big anyway...

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  2. Yeah - I think Butcher is gearing Carlos up for a bigger role too. I hope so, I like Carlos.

    And I never got the impression that Morgan was black myself. I always figured he was "stodgy European semi-immortal" like most of the rest of the Council. But then, I read the books out of order and that might have a bit to do with it I suppose.

    As far as Karen going back to blonde - as long as Susan Rodriguez isn't a petite blonde like they cast her in the TV show I can live with Murphy being blonde again.

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  3. Nothing about Morgan's appearance has ever said he should be black. His first appearance (in Storm Front) notes him being tall, broad and heavy chested, fifty-ish with graying brown hair and gray eyes surrounded by crow's feet. In later books he gets longer hair. That was part of the reason I was always confused by them casting him as a youngish black man in the show. Then again, every single aspect of the show confused and irritated me ("Ancient" Mai being a young Asian woman? Are you joking? The "Ancient" part means something, people!).

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  4. Y'know, I never thought about it, but it is an awfully white Universe. I always thought of Morgan as white, for instance. He's from Europe a century ago, of course he's white. His magic's in German, for instance.

    I'm not particularly worried about it though. I know that when I write, I generally don't think about race unless it's a central point of the story. And being a white guy, I imagine most of the characters like me. Which I suppose makes me a crappy writer, but that's it. And I think that's what happened with the Dresden Files. I figure it wasn't an issue that was on Butcher's mind when he started writing, and so it was a few books in before he started getting mail along the lines of "Hey! Where are all the colored folks at?" (to use what reads as a horribly racist sentence, now that I look at it.
    People of color? Non-whites?) Anyway, it might make him a bit absent-minded, but it doesn't make him a bad guy, or a particularly bad writer.

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