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The Dune Comic That Never Was

Published Sat, 24 Dec 2011 15:18:20 -0600

A couple years ago, Matt Bellisle was approached by Bluewater Comics to help them with a pitch they were doing for Frank Herbert's Dune series. He writes about it for Bleeding Cool;

I assumed they had writers and artists already lined up for the main part of their proposal, but I was asked to contribute a cover to show a style I would bring to the front of the books. Because I was such a huge DUNE fan, I asked if I could also contribute more than the cover and have a chance to do some back-up stories, that would go behind Bluewater's main story.

For that, I brought in my good friend, Chris Garrity to also contribute to the pitch. Our hope was that Chris and I would write a multi-timeline story with Chris doing the pencils to one timeline and I drawing the art for the other timeline. Our plan was to have it based on a tribe of Fremen, not part of Paul Atreides' group, but another faction on the planet. That way we weren't messing with any continuity issues with the main story. Those timelines would then intersect, throwing both sides into the middle of a war on Arakis. While we never shared any of these story ideas or text with the people at Bluewater, they agreed to letting us contribute to the pitch. The deadline for the pitch was just a couple days away, so I did my cover art and Chris did one page of pencils for the interior of the back-up story.

The pitch happened and then I never heard back from Bluewater as to the status of how it went or what had happened. Typically these kinds of things take time, so I waited patiently, but nothing came of it. I was obviously never paid for this work and never signed any kind of contract for the work either.

So now that a few years have gone by and BOOM! has announced that they have landed the license to work on adapting the Dune books, I thought it might be interesting to share what could have been…

Here is the cover art I had done and the interior pencils Chris had drawn.