Secondlina's Panels

I've been feeling minor outrage over the quality of comics for young girls. There's a couple of good ones, but there's also so many shittyones. Books with awful, awful lessons. At work, it's kinda my job to read the new stuff we get and kinda toss aside some of the awful stuff.The latest one to bug me was this book about this pre-teen (11 years old) that has a boyfriend, but then goes away on vacation and falls forthis douche. Most of the book is spent on freaking over said douche and his douchy ways. She learns the guy is a douche, and actually fallsfor this other guy, whom she kisses. Then she goes home and kisses her boyfriend, saying her vacation was awesome. 

This book got thrown into my wrong pile for several reasons - overly focused on the importance of boys, several lines implying a girl isnothing without a boy, infidelity, talks about the bigger the boobs, the better, etc. Basically, I found this book to be insulting to a girl'smorals, a girl's body image and just displaying a character with awful comment sense. 

I stepped into another book store and was kinda sorry to see the book in the best seller pile along with other awful "comics for girls" I hadrejected at my own job.

I'm wondering if my standards are too high? But at the same time... selling books like these make me feel dirty. I'd rather sell the ones likeAnya's Ghost who have good characters and are interesting and challenging. I know everyone likes a good soap-opera-guilty-pleasure flingonce in a while... but jeez. I really can't tolerate these stereotypes anymore...

I kinda want to do my own girly comic, a good one. Girls need good characters and fun plots. Why is it always love triangles with a douchyhypotenuses? 

I haven't been drawing a lot because of exams and the attention-sucking grip of a really interesting book called: "Fairy tales and fantasy worlds:the transitional stages from childhood to adulthood". And yes, for those wondering, I have started reading that because of the shadow of the Narnia movie coming. What can I say? I'm a Narnia book fan and the movie visuals just make it look like this movie is gonna be out of this world (no pun intended).

There's a really interesting chapter in the book (oddly enough between "Sex in fairytales" and "Sexology of the villains...heh...)called "The A B C of Portals to the other world." Apparently you can classify portals in 5 differents categories: Mundane, transitional, mystical, futuristic and land mark.

The Mundane portals are objects from your everyday life that normally do not fonction as doors. Like the wardrobe in Narnia for example. Popular ones in the category are Mirrors (that are kinda always associated to an alternate reality due to the reflexion), pieces of clothing (fairy tale witching cloak), pieces of food (Adam and eve's apple), keys and books.

The transitional portals are things that normally take you elsewhere, but then you jump in them and you're not where you expect to be. Like the rabbit hole in Alice in wonderland. Popular ones here are things like mysterious holes (also used in James and the giant peach), Trains (Northern express, Harry potter), Windows (Peter Pan), fountains (Magic knight Rayearth) and plain old front doors.

The door category is a category of it's own almost since you can break down doors to 3 kinds of portals: the front door, the mysterious door and the new door. The front door is like in the Wizard of Oz. It's your front door, but the world outside is different. You're just not in Kansas anymore. The mysterious door is a door that's always been in your house, but locked, and you've never been through it until that day you decided to do it (or something forced you to do it). For this category, people often think of the locked door in the fairy tale of Bluebeard that was hiding all his old wive's corpses. You also think of the mysterious "attic door" often used in movies like casper and jumanji. The new door category is a door that just appeared, like the dwarf mines door in LOtR.

The mystical portals are portals that do not exist beforehand and that appear in a very magical fasion. In this category we find suddent flashes of light, suddent flashes of color, old runes, old portraits, words and magical jewelry often with crystal on it (anybody remembers the old Mario bros movie?). The objects in this category often look like mundane things but are not. They are old and special. Something differs them from the mundane. Like the Jumanji board game. A board game is mundane, but anybody with a set of eyes could state that that game is funny looking.

The futuristic portal is something that was clearly designed to be a portal, even if it dosen't always take you where it was supposed to be (the car in Back to the future, Stargate, Startreck beam machine). These are often associated to advanced science or aliens.

The land mark is a portal that always seems to have been present, like the mundane portal, but that is more then an object. It's a place you walk in to that contains the wonderful place you discover. Examples of this category are the Bermuda Triangle, the pyramid, the mysterious swamp, the enchanted forest, the haunted house, etc.

 So when you think of it, there's portals really everywhere...