The fantasy genre has seen a resurgence of sorts in recent years, as more writers move away from traditional fantasy tropes seen in series like Lord of the Rings or The Wheel of Time and discover new ways to present magic, warfare, and danger. While everyone has heard of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series, there are a ton of other amazing book series that comic book fans will probably love.
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These fantasy series have the same sort of colorful characters and compelling stories as your favorite comics, just set in a different kind of strange world. Each series is also ongoing, which means that you can dive in and get caught up before the next book comes out sometime in 2017.
The Stormlight Archive
Brandon Sanderson is a rising star among fantasy fans, thanks to his insane yearly output and his use of a shared universe for many of his books. Most of Sanderson’s fantasy series, including the IDW graphic novel White Sand, are set in the Cosmere, a solar system filled with planets with different magic systems. Although there’s little overlap between most of Sanderson’s novels, characters will occasionally cameo in other series and there’s a sense that a larger story is building behind the scenes.
The most ambitious of Sanderson’s series is The Stormlight Archive, a planned 10 volume (and I do mean volume here, these books are huge) series set on the planet of storm-buffeted world of Roshar, where warriors do battle using massive Shardswords and Shardsplate armor. The first book focuses mainly on Kaladin, a surgeon’s son turned slave who discovers he has the magical abilities of an ancient order of knights dedicated to stopping cataclysmic Devastations from ripping apart the planet.ย
The Stormlight Archive combines two of Sanderson’s greatest strengths: worldbuilding and foreshadowing. Roshar is a complex world with an alien ecosystem and complex politics, but Sanderson never lets the world overshadow the story he’s trying to tell. Shocking twists become obvious in hindsight, including how the books tie to the greater world of the Cosmere. If you want to try a “traditional” fantasy series, give the first two books of the Stormlight Archive a try.
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The Gentlemen Bastards
Modern fantasy series have largely moved away from the stereotypical brooding protagonist with a talent for fighting and an unflinching moral compass. A great example of this is The Gentlemen Bastards Sequence, a series of novels by Scott Lynch.
The Gentlemen Bastards areย a group of con men and thieves led by Locke Lamora, an unscrupulous smooth talker who’s much better at talking his way out of a tight spot than fight. Each book follows one of Locke’s schemes, while delving into his childhood and teenage years learning the art of the con from his mentors and friends.
Comic fans should enjoy The Gentlemen Bastards books for a few reasons. Locke is a delightful character, a fantasy version of Gambit or the Shade without the fighting skills. His best friend, Jean Tannen, is the muscle of the group, armed with a deadly pair of hatchets, but surprisingly well-spoken and polite.ย And the cons are delightfully complex, fantasy versions of the schemes you’d see in one of theย Ocean’s Elevenย movies. If you enjoy antiheroes and heists, you’ll love The Gentlemen Bastards.ย
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The Dresden Files
Harry Dresden, the star of Jim Butcher’s longrunning Dresden Files series,ย would be right at home in the Marvel Universe. With a string of bad luck that rivals Peter Parker’s and a tendency of biting off more than he can chew, Dresden is the quintessential flawed Marvel character…only living in a magical world.
Dresden is a “consulting wizard” based out of Chicago, assisting the police with supernatural crimes and taking on the occasional odd job for clients. Although he’s largely estranged from the magical community at the onset of the series, Dresden meets and fights vampires, werewolfs, and Faeries as he gets slowly drawn into their world.ย
To date, there’s been 16 Dresden Files books, with a 17th due out this year. Each book is fast-paced, with plenty of action and twists. It’s pretty obvious that Jim Butcher is a comic fan as well. In addition to adapting several Dresden stories for comics, Butcher also named Dresden’s car the “Blue Beetle”, a nod to his comic book fandom.
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The Broken Earth
If you’re looking for a fantasy series in the vein ofย DC’s Kamandi, you might want to give N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth series a try. Civilization as we know it has been wiped out by a series of natural cataclysms, referred to as “Seasons” by its survivors. Humanity has endured through several Seasons by forming tightknit communities and adopting strict roles and rules whenever a Season hits.
While the Earth itself is highly unstable, a subclass of humans called orogenes have the ability to control seismic activity, similar to DC’s Geoforce. However, orogenes are despised by most communities and are either killed or sent away for training when their abilities emerge.
The first novel in the series,ย The Fifth Season, follows a secret orogene at the very start of a Season. After her husband flees their community after killing their child, Essun ventures out into the slowly decaying world looking for revenge. The rest of the first book follows two other orogenes and their connection to the most recent Season threatening humanity.
The Broken Earth isn’t a “fun” fantasy series, but it’s compelling and will keep you hooked from beginning to end. The second book in the series was just released, so now is a good time to get caught up before the finale comes out later this year.
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Mistborn
The Mistborn series is one of Brandon Sanderson’s earlier works, written before Sanderson “broke out” because of his work finishing The Wheel of Time series. The first trilogy follows Vin, a young girl who discovers that she’s an allomancer, a type of magic user that gains abilities by consuming small amounts of certain metals. While most Allomancers only have one ability, Vin is a Mistborn, able to use a variety of different skills.ย
Vin is adopted into a group of thieves who plan to overthrow their evil god-like emperor by stealing his treasury. The second and third books follow the aftermath of their plan, especially when they discover that the emperor was holding back an even greater darkness on his own.
Where the Mistborn series gets really interesting is that Sanderson returned to the series several years later with new storiesย set several hundred years after the initial trilogy. Whereas the original Mistborn books were vaguely medieval, the newer books are set during an Industrial Revolution-esque period filled with guns, trains, and even airships. Although several characters from the earlier book make appearances, Vin and her friends are largely historical figures, seen as myths or legends as opposed to real people.
Each “set” of Mistborn books can be read seperately, but to fully appreciate the series, start withย The Final Empireย and work your way through the original trilogy first. The newer books remind me a bit ofย DC’s Legionย of Superheroes, where part of the fun is seeing how the past still resonates far into the future.
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