A light hearted way to shed light on 'villains'. The facts were interesting and overall the entire book felt informative. The highlight for me was the lovely art.

A fun (is that quite the right word) look back at the villains of history, with plenty of facts to keep everyone of all ages entertained and wonderful art within the pages.

This first installment of History's Greatest Villians is about Dracula and his origins and I found it to be amazing. I have read many books about Dracula and this was one of the best.

Having a huge interest behind the person that was directly responsibale for the creation of Dracula, the blurp sold me, but the content inside was a let down. People would rather joke about real life events than tell a compelling story. I am sorry, i can not help but dislike this one.

Interesting concept but didn’t like the execution of the story, it wasn’t my taste. I’ll give it another opportunity later on.

This one is a really interesting concept and I like the idea of a graphic novel about infamous people throughout history. It is the first graphic novel I’ve read and I wanted to see whether I would enjoy it. There are some interesting aspects certainly but I think the humour is a little ill-judged in places if I’m being honest.

Vlad Dracule is a figure I wish I knew more about but I've struggled to find an engaging book about him. This is better than the other attempts I've made. The illustrations and text work together well to convey events. It's not a particularly coherent narrative, though .Just a bunch of disjointed episodes. And I couldn't always follow how characters were or where something happened.

I like the idea behind History's Greatest Villains: Dracula by Bernard Swysen & Julien Solé, but the execution proved a poor fit for my tastes.

On one hand, I felt the concept of a graphic biography intensely creative, but I also found the humor of this volume tonally awkward for the subject matter it covered. My primary comment, however, is that the author offered little aid to readers who aren’t already familiar with Voivode Vlad Dracula of Wallachia’s story.

The narration jumps from one point to the next, referencing people, politics, and places at a truly blistering pace. Personally, I did not feel the novel offered enough historical exposition to understand the motives, movements, or culture of the cast. That oversight left me feeling less than satisfied with the overall story and hard-pressed to recommend the book to other readers.

I have always been a history nerd, so when Netgalley offered up this book that promised fun way of discussing dark history, I jumped up at it. It was a fun way indeed, Vlad was a terrible person. Many portrayed him to be terrible to his enemies, but what people don't realize is he's not exactly friendly towards his subjects. I think it also owes to his horrible childhood. But anyways, despite the fun, there are some things that shouldn't be make light of, such as child rape the graphic nature of death. Overall, I still really enjoyed it though!

History's Greatest Villains: Dracula by Bernard Swysen & Julien Solé presents the life and times of Vlad Dracul- the Dragon, the Impaler- in a graphic novel format. I had such high hopes for this graphic novel! Sadly I was to be disappointed. I thought the concept was neat, and plenty of research seems to have gone into the work. However, the artistic style chosen was more cartoonish, and lacked the grittiness I would have expected (as in 300 or Sin City). Not only that, but the attempts at humour throughout was crude and ill-conceived given the topic at hand. Vlad Dracul is a fascinating figure from history, but he was a harsh man in a harsh world. He accomplished great things, and committed grave atrocities. There's nothing humourous there, not even of the gallows kind.

***Many thanks to Netgalley and Europe Comics for providing an ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I Loved this!!
If you have ever wanted to dice into Vladmir's history but found it too tedious, then this is perfect for you.
I loved the art and the humor in this. the art reminded me of newspaper comics. Its not meant for kids , it has some gory scenes.

Thank you, NetGalley for the preview of this graphic novel.

I have read about Vlad Dracul before and I was curious to read a graphic novel about him. But sadly, this did not meet my expectations. Vlad was a horrible man and this book made bad jokes about all the horrifying things he did and made his decisions look comical. Also, so much information was crammed into the pages that it made me hard to follow the storyline.

I like this series so far. Dracula was a fun topic as well. I'll definitely recommend this to patrons and professionals.

I was really intrigued to read some non-fiction in graphic novel format. I can see where the author was trying to go with this but unfortunately it fell flat as the humour did not fit with the serious topic. I did not finish this as I could not continue due to the inappropriate jokes.

I think sometimes it is better not to comment on a book, and this is one of those times. This was a disappointing book to go through.

Okay, so I didn’t actually finish this graphic novel. I just couldn’t. So my review may not be completely fair, in that I don’t know how they cover the latter two thirds of the subject.
However, the tone for such a serious subject was just too light, and the artwork too comical. I am not exaggerating when I say that they were joking about slaughter and child rape in this book. I know that they were likely trying to make history approachable here, but they missed the mark.
I was originally really excited when I saw this graphic novel listed on NetGalley. I’ve always been fascinated with the origin of the legend Dracula, so I was happy to see it condensed into graphic novel form. Unfortunately my hopes for this series were utterly let down. I honestly don’t think I’d be willing to try any other ‘history’s greatest villains’ after this one. It’s a great concept, but a wasted one.

Abandoned at about 25%
I just can't.... There's too much happening and not enough explanations and I cannot keep up.
The premise is cool, and parts of it were funny (though very dark), but I'm not a historian. If I was already familiar with the full story, I'm sure I would like this, but I'm not, soo...

'History's Greatest Villains: Dracula' by Bernard Swysen with art by Julien Sole is a graphic novel for people who like their humor tinged with humor amid all the morbid stuff.

Vlad the impaler was a pretty bad guy. He had a nasty temper and killed viciously at the drop of a hat. Besides a few dates along the way, that's about all the reader will learn. There is little mention of the context of the times, and a few references to his family, but beyond that, it's just a series of Vlad killing people. Sometimes he eats amid the impaled victims. Sometimes he feeds his enemies to other enemies.

The humor is oddly out of place amid child rape, murder and cannibalism. The art is cartoonish, but that also feels weirdly out of place. The whole thing was a slog to read. I was hoping for more history and less glorification of such a terrible person.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Europe Comics and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

As a fan of gruesome histories, I was thrilled to see a graphic novel on Vlad the Impaler and even more thrilled to see the amount of knowledge and research put into it. As a librarian, non-fiction and accuracy go hand in hand.

That being said I was disappointed in this. The illustrations did not match the content. The information was quite serious and the Wizard of Id like drawings did not compliment it's content.

The dialogue and few fact sharing text boxes shared the history of Vlad and it droned on. As I was reading this I began to feel as if I was reading a textbook, counting how many pages were left until it was done.

I give it a rating of 2/5 only because of the historic accuracy.

Clearly an attempt at a Horrible Histories style approach to Dracula, the humour really fell flat for me. I don't find the rape of young boys funny. I don't find homophobia funny. I don't find this funny. This type of humour combined with a humourous, childish art style was pretty disturbing to me.

Honestly, I'm all about Dracula in every form, so the fact that I didn't enjoy this in any way speaks volumes about how bad it is. Really not my thing.