Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“Das Kalte Herz” ist der erste Graphic Novel, den ich auf Deutsch gelesen habe!
Okay, and as much as I would love to write the rest of my review in German, the language skills aren’t quite there yet.
Das kalte Herz (The Cold Heart) was recommended to us by a lovely young woman at a comic-book shop during my visit to Cologne.
This is a graphic novel adaptation of an old German fairy tale, and I was warned that it might get a little dark. But for a horror fan, it ultimately turned out to be a fairly standard moral tale about greed.
Set against the moody, foreboding Black Forest, the story follows Peter Munk, a charcoal burner dissatisfied with his meager earnings and difficult life. While speaking to his mother one day, he recalls a legend about a glass spirit dwelling in the forest, known to grant three wishes to certain people.
Greed eventually leads Peter to seek out darker magical beings, and while he does obtain the wealth he desires, it also corrupts him in terrible ways. There’s a bit of an interesting ‘good witch vs bad witch’ situation going on in the story (well, they aren’t witches though).
Perhaps the only funny moment in this otherwise gloomy tale comes is when Peter suffers from an existential crisis and is at a low moment in his life, and someone older advices him to get married. Maybe not all readers would see humor in it, but as an Indian, it was culturally relatable: that across the world people seem to think marriage is a solution to a single man’s problems.
I wish the graphic novel had spent more time fleshing Peter out, because he’s a fairly bland protagonist whose downfall never feels tragic or even interesting. Thankfully, the atmospheric artwork of ‘Das Kalte Herz’ does keep the reader engaged, pulling you in a gloomy world of forests, folklore, and greed.
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