Reviews

Hasib & the Queen of Serpents: A Thousand and One Nights Tale by David B.

crowyhead's review

4.0

Stories within stories tangle like the body of the Serpent Queen! What a beautifully illustrated interpretation.

miss_tsundoku's review

4.0

A story within a story within a story and it goes on...
Very interesting. Love the colourful drawings.

bluermi's review

3.0

Words can't describe how much I loved the art. Truly phenomenal.

littlecat's review

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No

The art is colorful,  detailed but cartoony. I liked that. I am not sure about the story, feels like I am missing a lot of context for it. 

blchandler9000's review

4.0

Delirious, lurid, and wondrous.

David B. retells a saga from the Thousand and One Nights folktales featuring tales within tales (as any 1001 Night story should). It's exactly the kind of fairytale adventure I love, with mysterious places, mystical creatures, magical items, romance, dungeon crawling, and lost lands. The illustrations are delightful, both simplified and cartoony, but incredibly busy and detailed. He often plays with layout, making the page itself part of the storytelling. Wonderful stuff; I very nearly gave it 5 stars.

mlindner's review

3.0

DPL hoopla

maiakobabe's review

3.0

This comic is gorgeously illustrated, each page a rich tapestry of colors and patterns, calling to mind Persian rugs and Indian manuscript paintings. The story is pulled from a middle portion of the Tale of a Thousand and One Nights, though I assume somewhat modified by the author. Page one introduces Scheherazade as a frame-narrator, but she is relatively unimportant to the story, though small scrolls interrupt throughout to tell the reader "And it was the 483rd night... and it was the 484th night..." periodically. The story itself is very fairy-tale-like in that none of the characters are given much of a motivation or growth arc- they fall in love at a glance and decide to secure or throw away their fortunes with no premeditation. Overall I found this book exquisitely rendered but unmoving.

glitterandtwang's review

4.0

I really like David B.'s art, but was expecting to encounter something more along the lines of Epileptic or Incidents in the Night - and this is definitely not that. This story is framed within one of the tales from the Thousand and One Nights and works very well to revisit that device to add layers to the story. It's well told and beautifully colored, but the story itself just wasn't for me.

I received access to this title via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.