📺 Watched The Mandalorian “Chapter 7: The Reckoning”

📺 Watched The Mandalorian “Chapter 6: The Prisoner”

📺 Watched The Mandalorian “Chapter 5: The Gunslinger”

📺 Watched The Mandalorian “Chapter 4: Sanctuary”

📺 She-Ra and Girl Culture

When I learned Noelle Stevenson was showrunning a She-Ra reboot, I was psyched. I haven’t read Lumberjanes or Nimona yet, but her Avengers fan art and D&D tweets are top-notch. I was super into She-Ra as a kid, and I love that this new one is called She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.

I’m on board with modern girl culture, at least as it’s manifesting in animation and comic books. I was talking to another parent recently who said she’d been afraid to let her daughter watch My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, but was pleasantly surprised by how feminist it was.

I recommended she look into DC SuperHero Girls and see if she would feel okay sharing that with her daughter, because I think it has a similar vibe.

And I need to read the “new” Jem and the Holograms comic, I know.

I love that the stories I’m seeing about girls and young women in these media place the girls at the center and let them have their own adventures. Romance tends to be sidelined. The girls are dealing with identity development and relationship building. Each of these properties has characters who are so different from each other in their interests and personalities. We’re seeing that there’s no one right way to be a girl or a woman, and I love that. The other thing I love is how they take colors and art styles that are coded feminine and use them to communicate that you don’t have to choose between strength and femininity, and that there are many different ways to be strong.

I’m sure none of them is perfect and I know that they are vehicles for selling toys, but I’m still excited about them.

I would buy that She-Ra poster and hang it on my office wall.

(By the way, DC SuperHero Girls creator Shea Fontana is going to be at ALA Annual and you can bet I’ll be at her session. DC SuperHero Girls is an incredibly accessible way to get to know the DC universe and figure out which characters appeal to you. I say this as an inveterate Marvel loyalist.)

Out of the Madhouse

…yesterday my life’s like, “Uh oh, pop quiz.” Today it’s “rain of toads.”

Thus spoke Xander Harris in part two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s pilot episode, “The Harvest.”  Even in its later seasons, Buffy didn’t have the special effects budget to create an on-screen rain of toads.  The advantage to books is you aren’t limited by those sorts of budget constraints.  In Out of the Madhouse, Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder bring the rain of toads, along with all the trolls, sea monsters, skyquakes, and nasty Cordelia-chasing demons you could ever hope for.  What’s that, you say?  Trouble in Sunnydale?  Must be Tuesday.  The difference is, this time, it’s all happening at once.  Also?  Giles is out of town.  It turns out there’s an interdimensional mansion in Boston that’s been keeping these monsters at bay, but now its caretaker, the “Gatekeeper,” is ailing and his magic is weakening.  Buffy, Xander, Cordelia and Giles head to Boston to put a stop to the monster leak, while Willow, Oz, and Angel hold down the fort against an invasion of evil monks who are out to get Buffy.  (Note: I said evil monks not evil monkeys.)

Like any tie-in, Out of the Madhouse suffers from the fact that you can’t kill off major characters.  What you can do, however, is injure them severely, and in every fight scene in Out of the Madhouse I expected someone - usually Cordelia - to end up in the hospital.  Out of the Madhouse has a structure somewhat like a multi-episode arc; you’ve got the main problem of new scary monsters, plus signs that the Watcher’s Council might be sketchy, subplots involving outside forces looking to hurt Buffy, and some new recurring characters who are quite likeable.  The dialogue is strong, though not Whedon-quality, and except for the wild special effects that would be necessary to pull it off and the unlikely requirement of on location filming in Boston, I completely believed that this was a story I might see on the show itself.  Add in a surprise ending and you’ve got a recipe for fun and nostalgia.  (Plus, Golden and Holder manage to avoid the Ethan Rayne trap!)

I’d recommend Out of the Madhouse to any Buffy fan looking for stories to tide them over between issues of the comic book or to take them back to the good old days.

Book: Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book One: Out of the Madhouse
Author: Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder
Publisher: Simon Spotlight Entertainment
Original Publication Date: 1999
Pages: 384
Age Range: Young Adult
Source of Book: Library