If you had never heard of Harry Dresden before and didn’t want to sink much time or effort into deciding how you felt about the idea of reading his series, Welcome to the Jungle would be an excellent jumping-off point. For one thing, it is a prequel to the first book, so it’s not like spoilers are really possible. For another, the short format-limits of a reasonably sized graphic novel make it a pretty small time investment, and the high ratio of art to dialogue (even counting Harry’s omnipresent first-person monologue) makes that investment even smaller. In point of fact, I read the majority of the story around listening to a friend’s disco cover band playing at an area strip club. There were distractions galore, is all I’m saying, and yet it went by with surprising quickness.

For the as-yet uninitiated, Harry Dresden is Chicago’s only freelance wizard. In practice, this means that he sometimes helps people with minor tasks that could usually be done non-magically just as well, but mostly he assists the Chicago PD when weird things happen that nobody can explain. Like a zoo groundskeeper being violently killed, purportedly by a gorilla who obviously couldn’t have done it except that people like that answer better than some kind of magic bugaboo as culprit. Mix in a hellhound, a damsel in distress, and a power-hungry mastermind and you’ve got the makings of a quick and dirty mystery that does a fine job of introducing our Harry to my hypothetical too-busy-to-read populace. Enjoy!