Gamayun Tales 1 – Comic Review
Enter a world of magic and adventure in this stunning series based on traditional Russian folklore.
Jam-packed with stories of magical quests and talking animals, golden chests that turn into palaces and encounters with terrifying Water Spirits, there’s no end to the adventures in these books!
Gamayun Tales
Gamayun Tales 1 is an anthology of modern Russian folk tales, written and illustrated by Alexander Utkin. This 180 page volume is comprised of 3 interlinked tales; The King of Birds, The Water Spirit, and Tyna of the Lake. The stories contained in these pages seemed both wonderfully new and comfortingly familiar at the same time.
The three tales are woven together with impressive skill as they are narrated by Gamayun, a magical, omniscient, human-faced bird from Slavic myth. As the first book, The King of Birds, drew to a close I found myself yelling at the book that it couldn’t leave the story like that. Thankfully just a few pages later the thread is picked up again in The Water Spirit.
Certain elements of the story were quite familiar too. For example the deal that the merchant makes with the mighty Water Spirit had me thinking of the Law of Surprise in The Witcher. Tyna and her sisters removing their feathers to swim called to mind Swan Lake.
There’s even mention of Baba Yaga, the witch who lives in a house that moves around the forest on chicken legs.
I loved the art style Utkin uses as well. The bold colours are eyecatching, and the detail is exquisite. The pages showing the great battle between the birds and animals stopped me in my tracks. The whole book left me wanting more, both of this beautiful art and these rich, complex stories.
Get It Now
If you want to pass a sumptuous couple of hours, delving in to some wonderfully illustrated and woefully under-represented folk stories then Gamayun Tales is the book for you. You can find the Gamayun Tales 1 anthology on the Nobrow Press website. It is priced at £12.99 for the softcover. The three individual stories are also available there as separate hardback books. Those are £12.99 each.
