Dune: House Corrino #4 - BOOM! Studios

DUNE: HOUSE CORRINO No. 4, June 2024

Excitingly crammed full of misdirection, treachery and double-dealing, Issue Four of “Dune: House Corrino” certainly should have utterly enthralled any bibliophiles even slightly interested in Frank Herbert’s 1966 Nebula Award-winning novel. In fact, considering this comic contains a disconcerting Face Dancer of the Bene Tleilax, a blatant assassination of House Harkonnen’s ambassador on Kaitain, and the catastrophic crash of a Guild Heighliner, it’ll genuinely be difficult for anyone reading this comic to confidently guess just who will survive its thirty-three page plot, and who will die in a particularly gruesome manner; “I’m afraid you have been demoted. The Baron asked me to keep a special eye on… a particular matter.”

Easily this book’s most tensely penned sequences are those concerning Count Hasimir Fenring, and the evil emissary’s decidedly dodgy dealings on the usurped planet of Ix. The nobleman is quite quickly shown to be up to his neck in deadly intrigue when he participates in replacing some Navigator supply tanks with Master Researcher Ajidica’s inferior artificial spice, and at one point it genuinely appears that Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV’s most highly-trusted agent won’t actually survive the mission.

However, the swift rise to power of Project Amal’s utterly immoral leader is similarly as entertainingly told by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Carefully crafted for the pair’s “Prelude to Dune” prequel trilogy, rather than a character found within the science-fiction franchise’s original 1965 narrative, this master of manipulation debatably dominates every scene in which he appears. Indeed, many a reader will surely take great satisfaction in witnessing the disagreeably smug Hidar Fen Ajidica’s smile finally fade from his arrogant face when the grey-skinned genetic manipulator suddenly realises his experimental Amal won’t be superseding “all spice production from Arrakis” after all.

Somewhat disappointingly though, all these sly “plays for power” aren’t pencilled by mini-series regular artist Simone Ragazzoni, with Andrea Scalmazzi taking over the unenviable task of bringing the co-authors' majestic vision to this ‘pulp’. Fortunately, the new illustrator is clearly perfectly capable of providing the likes of Fenring’s brutal battle for survival against a Face Dancer to pulse-pounding prominence. Yet their sketching style is so disconcertingly different to that of their predecessor that it definitely takes a fair few panels before any onlooker can arguably settle back into the comic’s numerous coups.

The regular cover art of "DUNE: HOUSE CORRINO" #4 by Raymond Swanland