coraline – Comicsgirl

Today’s trio of links

comicsgirl — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:17:41 +0000

Anne Billson at the Guardian wants a real cartoon heroine. She objects to Wybie in the movie adaptation of Coraline (as we all did) and evokes the great Hayao Miyazaki’s young heroines (among others). Do boys really not want to watch girls, or are they just not given the opportunity?

Link via When Fangirls Attack

I was a little young for the Riot Grrrl movement so I totally missed out on Bratmobile. But I do think it’s really awesome Allison Wolfe is the English-language writer for Nana (my feelings on Partyline notwithstanding). Wolfe was selected personally for the job, which is really cool. She’s a great fit — she understands the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle as well as the feminist undercurrent of the title.

I feel quite inspired to include a Bratmobile video:

Link via Journalista

Joe Quesada makes some insane comments about Marvel Divas in this week’s MyCup o’ Joe. Here’s the relevant bits:

The cold hard reality of publishing and trying to sell our books to as many people as possible, so here’s an example of what happens more often than you may think here at Marvel. From time to time, we’ll be launching a title that doesn’t focus very heavily on the super heroic. From time to time I’ll get a cover sketch and it doesn’t have a costumed hero or villain on the cover, what we internally refer to as a “quiet cover.” On those occasions, more often than not, I ask my editors to direct their cover artist to give me at least a first issue cover with the characters in costume. Why? Because it will help launch a book that will most likely have trouble latching onto a large audience. We want to give every title the best possible chance to be successful. Marvel Divas is no different and that’s why you’re seeing our strong female leads in their super hero personas.

What Quesada doesn’t seem to understand that the “quiet” cover would’ve gone over much better. After all, like I pointed out, Tonci Zonjic’s art is more appealing that the cover. I understand trying to appeal to a wide range of people, but by picking that cover, Quesada gave people — especially women, who would be likely to read this title — the wrong idea about what it could be. To me, Roberto Aquirre-Sacasa’s words said one thing and the cover said the complete opposite.

I am still going to give Marvel Divas a chance and I do hope other people do too. But Quesada seems pretty clueless as to why people reacted to the way they did.

Link via io9

Two more quick links

comicsgirl — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:21:35 +0000

Paste magazine has has a little feature on the many versions of Coraline. It’s just an overview that discusses the movie, P. Craig Russell’s graphic novel version and the upcoming musical.

(I am planning my own Coraline piece but the rate I’m going, it will be done by the time no one really cares about any of it anymore.)

Scott McCloud has relaunched his website. There are some comics here I remember reading after paying through the short-lived micropayment system BitPass. (For all I know, they may have been free for a while.) Everyone adores McCloud and this does remind me I never wrote about Zot!

There is also a lot of Watchmen news out there and talk of the Spider-Man musical. But I figure if you care, you can find those things yourselves. I just can’t muster much enthusiasm for either one.

Coraline made by a boy’s club?

comicsgirl — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:26:46 +0000

Amid Amidi of Cartoon Brew links to a commentary by Danny Hayes saying that the people who worked on Coraline were mostly men.

Amidi doesn’t necessarily disagree with that, but does point out that women are making a lot of cool animation (and commenters there do point out the contributions of women in the production of Coraline).

Animation is maybe a little bit more difficult than comics, but with programs like Flash and such out there now, animation isn’t off-limits to anyone who wants to try it. If the Coraline production was a boy’s club and unwelcoming to women, that’s disappointing to me, but I do have hope that it was these particular circumstances and not a conspiracy.

While the contributions of women in mainstream animation may be currently lacking, Amidi concludes with this:

“In other words, the animation world is currently experiencing an unprecedented diversification of its gender make-up, and as a result, the art form is becoming much richer and more interesting to watch.”

And I can only hope these voices begin to get wider recognition.

Who am I to deny a personal request from Neil Gaiman?

comicsgirl — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:29:58 +0000

OK, so it was personal to about 10,000 of his Twitter followers, but look, I can pretend.

This is his favorite trailer for Coraline:

I was very grumbly and ambivalent on this movie at first — mostly because it wasn’t going to be my vision of Coraline (it’s probably the book of Neil Gaiman’s I most related to) but then I was won over by how awesome it looks. I am very excited to see it.

(And I will, one day soon, review P. Craig Russell’s comic version of it. When I remember what pile of books it is in.)

Coraline trailer

comicsgirl — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:33:04 +0000

It’s very quiet out there and my schedule being what it is, I haven’t had much time to work on much. All my Google searches are just turning up stuff about Twilight right now (although the post from Splash Page about Neil Gaiman’s daughter Maddie and Mike Mignola’s daughter Katie reading the books was pretty much fun). Also a lot about Gossip Girls creator Josh Schwartz writing a movie script for X-Men: First Class (Not that I watch Gossip Girls or any of the other shows he’s been a part of, but I approve. I always liked the angst of X-Men. Still, we’ll see what happens).

Both those things are interesting on their own, but not so much worthy of their own post.

But I do feel the Coraline trailer is worthy of one.

OK, so it wasn’t a comic (although I did quite like P. Craig Russell’s comic version of it, which I’ll get around to reviewing here eventually), but I like Coraline. I was dubious about the movie at first but I’m now squarely in the “WANT TO SEE NOW” camp on this one.

I do think it’s funny that Neil Gaiman is not mentioned anywhere in the trailer. Not that I noticed, anyway.