GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW--The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen & Ill. by Emilie Majarian

Follow Gerda on an adventure to find her friend Kay, who has been taken by the Snow Queen!

Seven vignettes in a graphic novel format make up Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Snow Queen, which depicts the struggle between good and evil. More than 100 pages of illustrated action and adventure await! A demon creates a magic mirror that reflects negative thoughts. His minions break it, and shards of the mirror get into the hearts and eyes of citizens all over the land. Gerda’s friend Kay is affected, and is lured away by the Snow Queen to become her palace slave. Follow Gerda’s adventures in her quest to rescue her friend and restore his compassion! 

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest and voluntary review. I was in way compensated for this review.
 

The next Dark Tales graphic novel I received was The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen and illustrated by Emilie Majarian. It’s been a very long time since I read the original The Snow Queen, but I do remember some bits and pieces of it. So I can’t really say how much creativity and differences were taken with this story version. I felt like it followed the original tale rather well though, all things considered.

The story starts off with a group of demons creating a mirror that shows ones ugliest parts on the inside. When the mirror is broken over a town, bits and pieces fall into the townspeople’s eyes and their uglier nature comes to fore. The demons being pleased with this kind of chaos decided to create more mirrors and break them over towns.

This is where we meet two best friends named Kay and Gerda. They were neighbors and practically grew up together. So when a piece of cursed mirror enters Kay’s eyes and heart, he turns into a cold-hearted person and basically torments Gerda. It’s when he’s out with friends one night that he encounters the Snow Queen and they are enchanted with one another and he willing goes with her to her ice palace very far away.

After months of waiting for Kay to return, Gerda decides it’s time to take action and she sets off to find her friend despite his cruel treatment to her. She encounters a series of characters who will prove to either be friend or foe on her journey. The Snow Queen is, in a sense, a story about love and friendship.

I have to commend the artist Emilie Majarian on her artwork! It was quite beautiful, though I thought the Snow Queen was a little more terrifying than beautiful, but perhaps that was her intent. I remember this being one of Hans’ longer stories, so for it to have been condensed so thoroughly into a graphic novel gets its own kind of praise. Again, I haven’t read the original in some years, but I felt like the bulk of the tale was here and hit the many high points of the story.

The world was rather frightening, for Gerda to have traveled it all by herself was astonishing. I want to say she might have been near her preteens years, it’s hard to say. I remember in the original tale, she was a rather young girl, not the classic sixteen we tend to see in most fairy tales either.

This was yet another beautifully done graphic novel based on a fairy tale! I truly think we need more of these in the world! I’ve always loved fairy tales and having them condensed into graphic novels is entertaining, like seeing the Disney movies kind of entertaining. Though, here the novels tend to stick to the original story a bit more, which is rather nice.

This is definitely a good read for people wanting to know the origins of The Snow Queen story, as Disney kind of turned it on its head with Frozen, though in their early storyboards they were going to keep with the villain theme, obviously that didn’t stick. A most enjoyable read I’d recommend to all fairy tale fans once again!

 
Overall Rating 4.5/5 stars