in which I blather about a kids book.

I need to vent about Mary Anne's Bad Luck Mystery graphic novel somewhere relatively safe where I can trip over my words (words are hard, mmkay?) but you'll still get the idea. Maybe. Probably.

Anyway!


Behold, the graphic novel versions of Cokie and Grace. Y'know, the closest the series comes to antagonists. Annnnnnnnnnd choices were made. I can't tell if Cokie's meant to be NB, simply androgynous, butch, or what, and I couldn't find any answers. I know the illustrator for this volume goes by they/them so I'm not thinking it's meant to be a dig but it also still comes across as...weird? Like, ideally your bully should be able to be just about anyone, but we're not there as a society yet. Hell, at this moment in time we're rapidly backsliding on this front, so you kinda pay attention to these choices.

Sooooooooooo.... yeah. Cokie's changes are a choice and a half, really. Especially when you factor in how obsessive she gets over MA later on in the series. o_O That's rep we do not need, mmkay?

And then you've got Grace there. Who the fuck decided let's make Grace fat and one of the villains? This isn't the Little Sister series where they made other 'good' characters fat that weren't before so it could balance out a little. Nope. The BSC might not all be the same size, but none of them read as fat. But of course we'll make the sidekick villain fat.

You know what fat kids don't need? To have their rep be the bad guys. We've gotten that for years. It's not groundbreaking or even a good idea at this point. It's just fucking lazy and mean and cruel. Yeah, it's not meant to be that deep, but also fuck this shit. I'm not saying we need to be perfect angels or victims, but kids are cruel enough without reinforcing the idea that fat=bad. Haven't we spent years figuring that shit out? Why is this one of the changes pushed through in the graphic novels? It feels like a massive step backwards and a middle finger to boot. It doesn't help that one of the things the original series did NOT do well was handle fat people.

Sigh.

In other ongoing news, I still do not accept non-redhead Jackie Rodowsky. I do not like them giving Mary Anne blue eyes. Brown eyed kids get the short end of the stick A LOT and I get that we need to avoid problems like ye olde covers being very difficult to tell whether it was Dawn or Stacey at times, but Kristy and Mary Anne are supposed to look similar, down to the eye color. It's not like the rest of the club doesn't have blue eyes covered, y'know?

I also do not love the artwork. Which is going to sound weird in a second because there are moments I do absolutely love. But here:

I think Dawn's Bleh is adorable but Cokie and...whoever that is? So bland. So basic. So what the fuck that it wasn't until just now I realized that was Cokie in this shot.

That being said, I do think this go round manages to capture the moodiness that comes with a Stoneybrook mystery set at Halloween. There are storms that roll in and make me long for thunder and rain, and honestly it feels very much like a kid's Halloween special at times and I cannot pretend I don't love that.





Zombies in the BSC! Love it.


I need a BSC witch spinoff NOW, please. Also, apparently this one has a lot of pushback from the conservatives on the whole witchcraft thing, which means they're still reading these... which brings us back to the problem of Cokie being presented as a conservative's perfect idea of what's ~wrong with the world~.

Sigh. So... yeah. Thoughts were had by meeeeeee.