ISBN: 978-1-68112-162-8
David B. is a founder member of the groundbreaking strip artists conclave L’Association and has won numerous awards including the Alph’ Art for comics excellence and European Cartoonist of the Year.
He was born Pierre-François “David†Beauchard on February 9th 1959 and began his comics career in 1985 after studying advertising at Paris’ Duperré School of Applied Arts. His seamless blending of artistic Primitivism, visual metaphor, high and low cultural icons, as seen in such landmarks as Babel, Epileptic and Best of Enemies: A History of US and Middle East Relations has utterly reinvigorated and rejuvenated the visual aspect of European sequential art.
His latest translated offering from NBM – available as an oversized (312 x 235 mm) full-colour hardback and in all digital formats – takes us into primal storytelling country to sagely examine the very nature of the process by referencing one of the most potent and primal story sources in human history.
One Thousand and One Nights (or more commonly The Arabian Nights) is an anonymous aggregation of folk stories from many cultures of the Middle Eastern Fertile Crescent. Its root material traces back to Arabic, Greek, Jewish, Persian, Turkish, South Asian, and West, Central and North African folklore and was first translated into English in 1706 as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, firing western and European imaginations ever since. The one constant throughout is the framing sequence wherein wily bride and imminent murder victim Scheherazade tells her new husband and supreme ruler ShahryÄr a story to postpone her own execution.
In this stunning graphic tour de force, rendered in vivid colours and sublimely reminiscent of oriental shadow-theatre puppet shows (if you’re old enough to remember Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s Noggin the Nog, think of that in full HD with the monstrous imagination turned up to 11!), that tenuous relationship sets the scene as – on the 422nd night – captivating Scheherazade begins the tale of a sage named Daniel who had not yet sired a son…
He roamed the world and lost almost everything before his wife fell pregnant. Daniel died before the birth but not before delivering a prophecy: the boy would be called Hasib Karim al-Din and be educated and adventurous. One day he would inherit all that Daniel cherished: long pent in a mysterious chest…
Hasib grew up to be an apprentice but – lazy and lacking ambition – fell in with a band of unscrupulous woodcutters. One day they found a golden hoard of honey in a deep cavern and the lumberjacks abandoned their comrade, leaving him to the tender mercies of a scorpion who lured him into the clutches of the fabulous and terrifying Serpent Queen. Deep below the earth Hasib feared for his life and soul but, in exchange for his own sorry life-story, the Queen began to tell him a tale of a king of far-off Banu Isra’il…
That saga leads into another and another and yet another (teeming with battles and journeys and princes and wanderers and monsters and wonderful creatures) and we are carried along on a sea of fable and incidence: an interwoven series of nested stories each concealing the next, like layers on an onion and every one peeled back to expose a new hero or fool.
This seemingly endless progression has a point and purpose however, and just when the whimsical tension can be stretched no tighter the tale-telling tide turns and each episode miraculously resolves and we move small steps closer to Hasib and his long-deferred inheritance…
Or so says Scheherazade as she weaves her own spellbinding yarn…
Bold, vivid and graphically mesmerising, this enthralling progression of history, myth and imagination is a wry and loving examination of the act of telling stories.
© 2015-2016 Gallimard Jeunesse. © 2018 NBM for the English translation.
Hâsib & the Queen of Serpents will be published on June 18th 2018 and is available for pre-order now.
For more information and other great reads see http://www.nbmpub.com