The translation felt off in this comic and the ending felt rushed and explained nothing. The art was the only thing that salvaged this.

OMG what the heck? What was UP with the ending to this? It explained NOTHING, resolved NOTHING and made no sense whatsoever! Sometimes I wonder about some of the Europe Comics, if maybe they just have terrible translators or they are just this bad in their original languages!

The graphic novel "The Danes" is a piece of speculative fiction. It is mainly set in Copenhagen, Denmark, with mention of similar events happening in other Western European nations. The plot starts off with a young black, Muslim immigrant giving birth to a blond, blue-eyed baby girl. To protect her from her husband's family's wrath, the social worker from the hospital conducts a paternity test, and to the family's dismay the baby is, in fact, his. This seems to be the case with many babies born across Denmark and other European countries, and with racial, cultural, and political tensions raising because of it, this quickly becomes an issue in the European Union and a lot specialists become involved.

The premise of this graphic novel, along with its beautiful cover, is what drew me to it. It is very short ( about 100 pages) and action packed, and it held my attention enough to finish it in one sitting. The art was also very nice, which is always a plus for a graphic novel. So then why only 3 stars?

The problem with this graphic novel, in my opinion, is that it tries to convey too much in not enough pages. There are a lot of characters who play an important part in the story, but we don't get to spend enough time with them to get to know them and get to care about them. There are a lot of social issues themes that are very relevant to the world today, like refugees coming to the EU, cultural identity versus assimilation to the European culture, the pharmaceutical companies and the run for money over the well being of the people, and so many more, but neither receive enough attention. I think this would have packed a much heavier punch would it have been a series, where each story line received its own issue and got more in depth dialogue around these themes.

Despite all this though, I really enjoyed it and it definitely left some food for thought. It's a quick read with a good message ~ one that the world today may benefit from hearing.

I love the idea of this book. I love the pacing because it reads like a thriller in graphic novel form. However, race is such a delicate issue that I feel the execution of the message was lacking a bit.

Very interesting concept! This will appeal to readers interested in sci-fi, immigration, racial tension, and vaccination. I would love to see a second installment.

This wasn't what I expected it to be at first, however I did not like the overall pacing and the story did not latch on to me that much. Overall it was a satisfying read but wasn't fit to my taste

An interesting premise that becomes bogged down in an overthought multilayered sci-fi cliche run.

The opening idea presented here is unique and could have made for a good look at how we view race and religion across Europe. Instead, this ends up being a bit of a confused and directionless mess.

I thought this would be interesting in the beginning but I quickly lost passion in this book and felt that it would be better for a different reader.

This was an interesting read. The cover really had me intrigued. I think this graphic novel would be great for group discussions. This near science fiction conspiracy will defiantly have you asking questions. I also thought the content of the book was something that could really happen in the world we live in today.

The premise of this graphic novel may seem fantastical, but the appeal is in the realism of both the pictures and the plot. After all, mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus can infect pregnant women causing their babies to be born with the birth defect microcephaly. The drug Thalidomade, touted to ease morning sickness in pregnant women resulted in more than 10,000 babies worldwide to be born with malformations, bone hypo plasticity and congenital defects before it was pulled off the shelves in the early 1960s.

It is not far fetched, then, to imagine a world where a retrovirus in pregnant women might produce blond, blue eyed babies even when parents are ethnically different. It is also not far fetched to imagine that the outward appearance, rather than the paternity test markers would cause ethnic unrest, disbelief, racism and chaos. Nor is it implausible that the pharmaceutical companies would race to try and create a vaccine for such retrovirus.

This story does a realistic job of imagining such a scenario, clearly playing out the stakeholders and balancing the unrest and corruption with a human story of love and family.

Ironically, I had a job working in South Africa in 2014 and I rented a movie to watch in the B&B called Skin which told the true story of an Afrikaans (Dutch that settled in South Africa) girl born in South Africa in 1955 to two white Afrikaners. Sandra, the daughter looked coloured, or part black, but genetically she was the product of these two white parents. How ironic that this true story and this made story are both about the Dutch. To be fair, though, Sandra Laine is a product of a genetic case of atavism, which basically is that a gene from a very distant ancestral traits resurfaces after generations. I feel like Skin predicts the kind of life that Sorraya and Ibraham's baby will go through if this story were also a memoir.

In The Danes, Belgian cartoonist Clarke’s suspense-thriller with science fiction tones, takes an accepted apocalyptic trope, a devastating pandemic, and turns it upside down. In most stories like these society collapses because of a desperate battle for survival against disease, but in The Danes, it’s the fallout of racial animosity exploding because of a disease.

If you’ve ever seen Village of the Damned, imagine something like it on a continent-sized scale, sweeping through Europe and causing violence to erupt. We’re introduced to the problem on a more intimate level, though, when a Jordanian woman, Sorraya, in a maternity ward in Copenhagen gives birth to a blue-eyed, blonde-haired girl. Taken as a sign of infidelity, she is rejected by Sorraya’s in-laws, but when a nurse reveals that a DNA test has been taken and Sorraya’s husband is the child’s father, the science can’t override what people think they see in front of them.

Across the room in another bed is Kirsten, who has also given birth to a blue-eyed, blonde-haired baby. But Kirsten is Danish and no one thinks anything of it. She knows better, though, and so does her husband. The child is proof of infidelity — a DNA test prove that and so does Kirsten’s personal knowledge of who the father is, but the race dynamics involved make the situation less of interest.

That casual prejudice is going to prove crucial as more and more blue-eyed, blonde-haired babies are born first throughout Denmark and then begin to spread across Europe, developing into a full-blown societal panic that has pharmaceutical companies pushing for vaccines before they are ready and using them to manipulate profits, while immigrants are attempting to flee for fear their future children will become victim to what becomes known as “the blond virus.”



While Sorraya and Kirsten are at the center of the drama, there is also Martin, the ne’er-do-well who stumbled upon the evidence of the pandemic early and has hidden the details from the authorities, and Jorgen Brandt, a journalist trying to figure out what is going on.

There is a level to which “the blond virus” is a silly disease, no arguments here, but it’s a fanciful one that works to prove certain points, highlight various themes. In the culture of the European right wing, an onslaught of Aryan babies seems like it would be a dream come true. But the question remains whether the focus of hate is on appearance or genetics. Is a person of color genetically a person of color or is all that’s needed to make the difference a change of skin and hair?

We know that race is a construct — in particular, a construct of white humans who created a deep-seated form of differentiation often for purposes of control, enslavement, colonialism, and, of course, as a justification for hate that often evoked pseudo-science.

It would have been simple to portray a situation where only people-of-color find their children becoming perfect Aryan types, but by making it a situation that everyone faces, including white people, Clarke, who is better known for his humor comics, orchestrates a situation where racists are faced with the reality that those they hate not only become what they most worship but by virtue of an across the board transformation, they become equal to a racist’s own child. How can you differentiate between people, how can you claim one person is inferior to another when everyone looks like a racist’s vision of perfection? What channels can hate find to thrive in?

At the same time, the people of color, the immigrants who do find this happening in their families, are faced with dilemmas themselves. Is this virus essentially an erasing of racial identity? If somehow the condition brought equality, is the price worth that equality?


Clarke never overplays these questions but rather lets them hang there in the story to infect the action. This keeps it from becoming too profound, which is a shame, but they do function as provocative subtexts for an enjoyable suspense comic.

At its root, The Danes is the story of two women with completely different lives who find themselves in a situation where they need each other, and the bond they create because of this perhaps transcends many of the questions being posed. The larger message, rightly or wrongly, is that understanding and empathy happens organically, though sometimes that means it never happens or happens too slowly, and that is perhaps part of the tragedy of the human condition.

The Danes was really interesting and kept my attention through the entirety of the story. I would definitely recommend it to my customers!

Very interesting and thought provoking, had me in tears several times the characters where we'll fleshed and believable.

art - 2,5
plot - 1

This book piss me off. Even with the best of intentions, if that, I don't think it was treated as intended or more probably it was bad elaborated since the beginning. I am a gut-feeling ranking-based reviewer, so this is what I feel. Even when the book wanted to deliver a message of unity and blah, it totally failed of its objective.

The plot? It start with a black muslim woman giving birth a blond blue-eyed baby. (Yeah, seems like a soap opera once I watch at tv). Infidelity is not the case, because DNA test said soAnd more and more blond blue-eyed babies are birthed to different race families, like a epidemy. Infidelities cries are shouted and violence explode among inmigrants.
If this is really a virus, a disease, who started it, why, and how can be contained it?There is no clear answer in the novel.

We follow two women with their babies, and a troupe of journalists, and some pharmaceuticals, and a runaway biologist.

Sadly it was not even Village of the Damned.

This could be a good thriller. It was not. Motives and characters fumbled by the book with unclear motives, and often confusing more the reader.

Star Trek made it better with the half-blue guys. Hell, Gulliver was more subtle with the egg thing.

I don't buy the color-race thing. We comment about this every time we gather, having a lot of teachers in the family. Humans don't need an excuse, the children are cruel to each other over the most stupid things: the way they laugh, they sit, they jump, dance, cry, shout, whistle, talk, writte or pay atention. It not just a physical thing. I often hear people bad mouthing people 'race' and it is really a country thing even when phenotypically are the same.

In another hand a reviewer commented about another issue that I agree - it rub the wrong way that all the people tryng to solve or prevent the violence are white blondish male guys, and the violence come from 'foreigners'.

I think the film Il a déjà tes yeux made a much better work of this racist theme. I love the final poster in the adoptive agency.


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Este libro me cargó. Incluso con las mejores intenciones, si es que ese fue el caso, no creo que se haya tratado el tema como se pretendía o, más probablemente, haya sido mal elaborado desde el principio. Soy un crítico basado en la clasificación intuitiva, así que esto es lo que siento. Incluso cuando el libro quería entregar un mensaje de unidad y bla, falló totalmente su objetivo.

¿La trama? Comienza con una mujer musulmana negra dando a luz a un bebé rubio de ojos azules. (Sí, parece una telenovela que una vez vi en la televisión). La infidelidad no es el caso, porque la prueba de ADN así lo dice. Y cada vez nacen más y más bebés de ojos azules y rubios para diferentes familias de otras razas, como una epidemia. Hay gritos de infidelidades y estalla la violencia entre los inmigrantes.Si esto es realmente un virus, una enfermedad, ¿quién lo comenzó, por qué y cómo puede contenerlo?
Cosas que nunca responde la novela.Seguimos a dos mujeres con sus bebés, una troupe de periodistas y algunos productos farmacéuticos y un biólogo fugitivo.

Tristemente, ni siquiera es Village of the Damned.Esto podría haber sido un buen thriller. No lo fue.. Los motivos y los personajes pasan a tientas por el libro con motivos poco claros y, a menudo, confunden más al lector.Star Trek lo hizo mejor con los tipos medio azules. Cielos, Gulliver fue más sutil con lo del huevo.

No compro lo de la raza por color. Comentamos sobre esto cada vez que nos reunimos, por tener muchos maestros en la familia. Los humanos no necesitan una excusa, los niños son crueles entre sí por las cosas más estúpidas: la forma en que ríen, se sientan, saltan, bailan, lloran, gritan, silban, hablan, escriben o prestan atención. No es solo una cosa física. A menudo escucho a la gente hablar mal de la 'raza' de la gente y es realmente una cosa del país, incluso cuando fenotípicamente son lo iguales.Por otro lado, otro reseñador comentó sobre otro tema que estoy de acuerdo: me causa mucha irritación que todas las personas que intentan resolver o prevenir la violencia son hombres blancos y rubios, y que la violencia proviene de "extranjeros".

Creo que la película Il a déjà tes yeux ("Él ya tiene tus ojos", Francia, 2016)hizo un trabajo mucho mejor de este tema racista. Me encanta el póster final de la agencia de adopción.

A blonde, blue-eyed baby is born to a non-white family in Copenhagen. A DNA test proving parentage does little to stop accusations of infidelity. Shunned by her family and supported only in secret by her ishusband, Sorraya raises her child alone.

Soon, similar cases appear across Europe – thousands and thousands of apparently illegitimate children. Racial tensions rise as society grapples with ideas of culture and identity. There is a panicked scramble to search for a cause, or even a cure.

The Danes is set in Europe in the near future, and attempts to explore ideas around race and prejudice through very gentle sci-fi: only one small change has been made from the real world, and it’s a perfectly reasonable one. From that single small change, ramifications grow and things spiral outwards to affect the whole of Europe.

The Danes suffers from a lack of space; it’s only about a hundred pages long, and that’s not much space for a graphic novel to cover both the plot and the themes. As a result, it’s quite rushed, with big societal changes that would have taken a while to occur happening within pages of each other. Some plot points come out of nowhere because there wasn’t time or space to tease them in. I’m unconvinced, for example, that even if the mysterious births happened in the real world, that the immediate response from society would be riots, grounded flights and an attempt at a medical cure. I’m prepared to accept these as eventual consequences, with some build-up, but The Danes – again due to a lack of space – presents them as an almost instantaneous response.

The plot operates at two levels – there’s the larger, societal plot with riots and politics and medical science, and then the smaller plot of people trying to track down the people who might be able to explain what’s going on. I understand that both strands are necessary, because otherwise there’d be just themes with no narrative, or just actions with no point, but again, this suffers in the short space available. Character motivations are unclear because they get one speech bubble to explain quite complex intentions, and I found that a couple of similar-looking characters became a little snarled up in my head; the characterisation was rushed and so they never fully established themselves as distinct.

Race is a complicated theme, one that it’s very easy to get wrong, particularly when dealing with “what-if” scenarios. I can see what the author was trying to do, but I think it didn’t quite work here. The Danes examines the idea of race linking to identity, and explores how this would start to evolve if race became totally divorced from ancestry. I think that’s an interesting topic, and one well worth the exploration. However, when dealing with the idea of racial tension and essential humanity, I think it’s important to show that common nature, and The Danes didn’t do that quite as well as I think it needed to.

In the aftermath of the births, tension rises. The author wanted to show the disruptive effect this would have on people of all races. However, the choice to focus primarily on blonde children being born to Muslim parents causes some issues. I don’t think the author intended this at all, but the racial tension and violence shown is shown primarily in that community – it’s the Muslim population who riot, it’s ISIS who set the bombs. Meanwhile, it’s primarily white men who do the investigating, who solve the problems and remain calm.

Again, I don’t think the author intended this. I think the author attempted to take an even-handed look at race and culture, and there characters of different races on both sides, mentions made of the prejudice on both sides. There’s an argument to be made, as well, that art reflects society, and the most obvious link for modern readers is Islamic terrorism. However, if you’re going to write even semi-allegorically about race and culture, then you need to be so careful that you’re not accidentally reinforcing the idea of a civilised white society and a more violent other.

The key issue is one of impact. It’s a problem because of space, because of the complexity – it’s a perfectly understandable problem – but it is a problem. The Danes doesn’t hit as hard as it needs to, doesn’t sink home its points. You can see where it should, and it’s always trying to, but the messages never have quite the impact they should. Instead, key ideas are skated over in the rush for the next idea.

There are several things to praise about The Danes. It’s trying for a big, difficult, and important topic, and that is courageous. Whilst I have criticised the impression of race relations it gives, I must stress that it could have been far worse; it’s an unintentional issue in a book that does do a lot to present thorny issues well. However, I do think that the problem of space is a significant obstacle – with more room given to explore the ideas in more depth, I think The Danes would have been a lot stronger. Still, it is trying to tackle a complex issue, and it deserves credit for that.

A socially-minded thriller, but one that doesn't quite hit enough nails on the head, and fails to give the relevant answers when needed. In Copenhagen people of colour are suddenly finding their children to be too Caucasian for their tastes, so do the obvious thing – take to the streets and riot. They riot about a conspiracy of Europeans to bleach immigrant culture (not proven), they riot because they can't go back home to protect their identity (which seemed to be a bit sudden to my mind, as if these children were instantly malleable teenagers and not babes-in-arms who should not face such influence anyway), and they riot, just because… The engine of the plot is the necessary search for patient zero in the case, for this is proven to be a virus and Big Pharma might get a vaccine to stop the bleaching effect.

The book is a bit too much of a melange – it tries to have high drama, and it tries to have heart, with a sappy romance between the guy that found the virus' potential in the first place and one of its early 'victims'. It tries to point out anti-white racism, but fails to get the target fully in sights. Several times the script feels as if we have jumped a page, and lost some telling detail. And as for comments about ''that ending'' – well, it's just one more aspect of the book that could have been hit home a lot more effectively (especially as I had to read the key scene twice to work out what the point being made was). All in all, a concerted effort to get important themes onto the page, but not a completely successful effort. Three and a half stars, to be generous.

A very interesting graphic novel. The art style is alright and the story line is interesting. Not quite a fit for our library, but I'll recommend it to certain patrons.

After reading "The Danes" I was struck with the feeling that a virus could be something that could be viable in the future. I don't think it could control everything that it intended to do. I think that it would have people rioting in the streets if it were possible. Clarke set up his story so that all the people in it found out what it means to have their ethnicity changed. It's a story of fiction and I hope it stays that way. I think Clarke was very good at Illustrating his ideas and put a thought provoking story together which will make people think of their biases.

'The Danes' with art and story by Clarke tells an interesting story about race and genetics and does it in a somewhat thriller based way.

When a very blonde baby is born to a Muslim immigrant family living in Copenhagen, it creates a stir amongst the married couple, but it's proven that she is faithful to her husband. When it starts happening on a wider and wider basis, it creates a crisis. The immunologists and geneticists label the weird outbreak 'the Danes.' A reporter tries to uncover the larger plot which ties in a young unemployed man and a pharmaceutical company. Could this be a racist plot?

I liked this story of race and the lengths that some will go to remove race. The story takes place now, and I liked the ending. The art is also good. This was a thought-provoking read.

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.