Tag Archives: comics

Book Watching: The new Watchmen trailer doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy.

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Book Watching

It’s Wednesday! Time to talk about the latest book and comics adaptations coming to the small and big screen near you. This week, I’m revisiting last week’s post to talk about show on my feathery radar…

Watchmen

Just a few days after I chirped about the 10-second Watchmen clip in HBO’s 2019 season feature trailer, we got ourselves a full trailer! And, canaries, I’m torn. I want to like this, but I’m kinda creeped out.

Now, I hear you that the original was all sorts of bleak, and the comic had all sorts of things to say about society, and that the show is looking to set up some sort of Anonymous-Hacker vs Big Government plot. But check it: an anonymous militia of white dudes in white hoods framed against christian symbols as our protagonists? That doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy.

Also, that ticking trailer effect? The Wrinkle in Time trailer totally did it first.

 

Canaries, how did this trailer make you feel? What even is this show’s demographic?

[ Small Chirp ] Do novels work in comic book form?

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Graphic novels, these literary, comic-book-style stories, have become increasingly mainstream since the ’80s–enough that even a square like me has read Watchmen and the Sandman series. They are creative and thought-provoking and wonderful.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. There is a growing trend in the graphic novel world that I’m not sure what to make of: adapting pre-written novels into graphic novel format.

A few months ago, I was browsing Barnes & Noble and saw a graphic novel version of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Since Coraline looked a little older than her book self, I guessed it was produced as a way to bring the older Sandman crowd in to check out some of Neil’s other work. I finished it in a sitting and went on my way.

Not too long after that, my mother came home from the library with another graphic novel in her hand.

“I saw this and remembered you’d read it,” she said. “I don’t think you’ve seen this version, though.”

I had read the book, all right. Continue reading →

[ Pitch Slapped ] The Importance of Genre

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Long before a potential reader lifts your book to read the blurb, before they even spy your cover, they have to navigate the maze of bookshelves to find where your book is nestled. So before you even start to doodle cover art, you need to answer a fundamental question about your book: What genre is it?

Sometimes you start out writing with a specific genre (“I’m going to write a Victorian era romance”) or trend in mind (“I’m going to write a book like the Hunger Games“).

But other times, you’re crafting your story first, and it just happens to have magic or murder or robots.

Genre-fication:

When Robin Dempsey commissioned us to peck at her blurb, the first thing we zoomed in on wasn’t the story, but her description of it.  Who is the audience? we asked. Continue reading →