This is hard for me to review, because I've read Dune more times than any other book, so it's difficult for me to imagine what it's like to read this not having read the book at all. Maybe only seen the movie(s) or whatever. So I'm mostly not going to do that and just review this for people who have read the novel and know it well. People who are me.

Dune is super dense, there are a lot of words and he says the same shit over and over again -- which is part of the appeal! -- but there's no room for that in here, so they're just mostly hitting the important beats of the story. And the introduction makes clear that they wanted to stick closely to the original text of the novel, no funny business. Which is admirable I guess, but makes it pretty boring for those of us who know the novel backwards and forwards. (They did make Duncan Idaho a Black dude, and there were a handful of women on the Duke's war council, so that was at least a little bit interesting.) I did like the design of the ornithopters -- I always have a hard time picturing those satisfactorily in my head, and these seemed like they would fly, and also looked like birds, so they were good. I didn't like Jessica's gowns, they were boring and not crazy enough. They looked like they were from the '80s -- not the '80s version of the future, just . . . the '80s. Yawn. Everything else was just . . . similar to the David Lynch movie, kinda? Oh and they didn't make the heighliner look massive enough. Technically if you pay attention you can tell that it's big, but it's SO BIG you guys, and they didn't really get that across. I'm always awed by how enormous that ship is described to be, but I guess the artists didn't find it as interesting.

Near the beginning, the Reverend Mother says "for your father, nothing," which is incorrect, it's supposed to be "for the father, nothing." And then a few pages later, Paul recalls it correctly, even though that's not what was said to him! So that was messy, come on guys. Also at least twice there were speech bubbles that split a word over two lines that cannot be split like that. Like "HO" on one line and the next line started with "T." Messy, messy.

Aside from that though, the book itself is gorgeous. I borrowed this from the library so it's a hardcover, and the pages are so thick, I kept thinking they were stuck together! The colors are nice and the art is fine but there's nothing very distinctive about it. I'll probably borrow the next two from the library if they get them and if I remember. (This one covers the first "book" of Dune, to where Jessica and Paul are in the stilltent.) But there's no way in hell I'd spend money on this.

Oh, that reminds me of one more nit to pick: in this version, when they're in the stilltent and Paul is starting to freak out about seeing his future and whatnot (because he's been eating spicy food for all of two weeks, don't even get me started) he's like "they're going to call me Muad'Dib, the kangaroo mouse" but that's not how it happens in the novel. In the novel he sees that they are going to call him Muad'Dib, but he doesn't know why, and then a little later when they meet up with Fremen, the Fremen are like "okay you're cool, your secret name is Usul which means the base of the pillar, but you also need a non-secret name to use with people not in our seitch, what do you want it to be?" and he goes "oh I don't know, what's the name of that clever kangaroo mouse?" and they're like "we call that little guy Muad'Dib" and it's like DUN DUN DUNNNNN TERRIBLE PURPOSE etc etc which I think is more interesting than the way they did it here. But what do Frank Herbert and I know. One of us only wrote what is proclaimed in this volume to be "the most beloved novel in science fiction."

P.S. I guess if you haven't read Dune, and you see this at your library, check it out? I think you will get the gist and the feeling of the novel? But honestly just go read Dune, it's flawed but fantastic. I think. It's honestly hard for me to tell anymore.