Comicsgirl

Archive for November, 2006

Read the New York Times piece while you can, because well, it’s as good as any.

Yes, the name is kind of silly but I think it’s just salacious enough to attract the attention DC’s going for. They are going after the generation of girls that have made Bratz popular, after all.

I think it’s possibly doomed to fail, but who knows?

This thread at Ask Metafilter is surprising. Yes, you’ll find the usual suspects of The Sandman and Y: The Last Man, but the recommendations are for a real woman (and quite often, from real women). It’s much better than any “How to get your (quite possibly fictional) girlfriend to read comics” list I’ve seen, even when it covers much of the same territory.

There’s a great mix of stuff in there and while I’m sure interest in responding will drop off pretty soon, I’ve been watching it with interest for a good portion of my evening.

The Associated Press has an intelligently-written roundup of challenges to graphic novels in libraries. (Arlington Public Libraries [Va.] have about a half-dozen copies of Blankets but no copies of Fun Home.)

Read it. Get mad. Or just sigh because this is pretty much expected.

I managed to break my website last night. Which was fine, since I was planning on switching content management systems. I have all the old entries, but as of right now, I’m facing importing them into the system myself (I have yet to find something that clearly imports pMachine entries into Wordpress). I’ll clean everything up later.

To be completely honest, I bought Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall because of one artist: Tara McPherson. Of course, adding Derek Krik Kim and Jill Thompson (not to mention Charles Vess and well, mostly every one else) into the mix didn’t exactly hurt my desire for this book.

That’s kind of my long way of saying I don’t read the montly title of Fables nor do I believe I’ve ever read anything by Bill Willingham before.

Last night, I bought the book and sat down and read it straight through. I didn’t want to stop because I was enjoying it so much. The concept is nothing new — retelling fairy tales was quite popular there for a while — nor is restoring a level of darkness and violence to these tales, but Willingham does something a bit different with it. He isn’t trying to prove how “edgy” he is by making childhood tales “scary.” His approach doesn’t feel out-right revisionist but rather like he’s taking these familiar archetypes and turning them into characters that have motivations and conflicts. He’s doing something very cool.

But yes, the art is amazing. The individual stories which range from tragic to funny to touching are perfectly married to the style of each artist, from the three-page joke of “A Mother’s Love” illustrated by Kim to the sexy “Fencing Lessons” with John Bolton to the playfulness of “Fair Division” with Thomspon. The range of both art and stories makes the book an enjoyably diverse read.

It makes me want to pick up the rest of Fables.

And yes, I liked the McPherson tale. I love her art but I was still impressed how well she managed to pull off the comic book format. I look forward her comic, Donor, which will be out from Vertigo … eventually.