(no subject)

[d_aulnoy]

TPB, staring at the sight of me slavering over new BPAL offerings with disbelief, and spotting my shelf of review books behind me:

"The Witch of Cologne.  Guess I'll have to put that one on my 'To Be Read' list ..."

Comments

[papajoemambo.livejournal.com]

Har!!

(thinking of you - hope all is well...)

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

All is well, indeed! I was actually just thinking about you when I saw your latest post, and ...

I'm giving a lecture on fairy tales and comic books in a few days. Any last minute additions you'd recommend?

P.S. - How go things with you?

[papajoemambo.livejournal.com]

My goodness gracious - so much to suggest!

STARDUST - by Neil Gaimen and Charles Vess

THE BOOKS OF MAGIC - an ongoing story about a modern magician who has the Faerie Queen as his mother.

FABLES - by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham and Steve Leialola

BONE - by Jeff Smith ( Charlie Brown styled simplicity of artwork cleverly disguising a Hero's Quest straight out of the core of Joseph Campbell, with a female protagonist who isn't identified as such until well into the middle of it).

Check out P Craig Russell's heartbreakingly beautiful adaptations of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales as well. Russell is gay himself, and adds a touch of the pathos of Oscar's back-story relating to his relationship to his children to the work.

You might have all or some of them but that's what tickles the brain from the outset.

PS: Things are busy but good - wishing I was living in New York these days and I might actually work towards that happening someday.

PPS: Most newspaper comic-strips that were geared specifically towards kids in the early days of the form were adaptations of fairy tales - some of the LITTLE NEMO I've posted is a good example of that. The Uncle Wiggly stuff was an incredibly popular example of such.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Hee! Great minds think alike ... the lecture was "commisioned" at the opening of the Kaluta/Vess opening at MoCCA. So I'm definitely using Stardust, as well as a few of the sequences from BoM. Bone is brilliant, but given the cope of the lecture, I might have to stick to a brief mention - if I were to go into it in any detail, it would rapidly take over and become a seperate lecture in its own right! Russell's work I only stumbled across while I was doing research for this, but, my god, is his work lovely ... I'm definitely sucking it into my overview of modern adaptations.

Some of the other things that I'm thinking about are most *definitely* the links between fairy tales and comic books as genres "ghettoized" in YA fiction, as well as Wonder Woman as one of the few characters to have a "mythic" background ... at this point I'm just wondering if any of the early romance comics consciously employed fairy tale tropes. Cinderella seemed popular in Britain, but finding direct links is killing me ... and none of the critics that I've found have made the connection (which, I suppose, is quite good for me if I try to publish after finding more concrete examples).

Other examples that I'm definitely using at this point: Fables, the Green Lantern storyline that employed Sheherezade, Aria, Castle Waiting, Promethea, etc., as well as a few on-line comics (No Rest for the Wicked, etc.) .... I have all of the material I *need*, I think, but being an incurable collecter, I just can't resist looking for more. So if anything hits you in the next week or so as an additional suggestion, I'd love to hear it!

P.S. - Come to New York. Come to the Dark Side! C'mon, you know you want to ...