Jill Thompson's Girl Comics #2 cover

Marvel Comics' Girl Comics is a series entirely written, drawn, edited, etc by female comics-creators. This has caused some controversy, as many claim that such a comic tends to marginalise rather than promote female comics creators.

Whilst I think the debate is interesting and certainly bares thinking about, I'd also like to draw your attention to the fab, Snow-White-themed cover for the upcoming second issue, by artist Jill Thompson.

Still, just because I'm largely keeping my thought to myself doesn't mean that you have to. Please feel free to let me know what you think of Girl Comics via the comments section.

Gretel and Hansel

Gretel and Hansel is a short point-and-click adventure game in which you take on the role of Gretel on her quick search for stones she may use to mark a path through the forest, so that she will not be stranded once her parents lose her there.

Makopudding's game takes place in a grim watercolour world and also features a neat example of player goals and player-character goals being drastically at odds: the player is actually rewarded for finding all of the different ways one can make the protagonist die a horrible, violent death!

The game's author also promises that further episodes in the series are forthcoming and shall - of course - feature Gretel and Hansel in the forest and at the famous witch's house.

Warning: this game does contain bloody violence.

Bensons for Beds commercial

Once again, the product trumps true love in this advert for Bensons for Beds.

The Snow White Project

This mash-up/parody by BlackoutDOTcom nicely plays upon some of the common imagery between many fairytales and modern horror films, in particular the common trope of being lost in the woods.

[Warning: strong language]

Fairytales in Dominoes: Snow White

Dominodayfreak's "Fairytales in Dominoes" is pretty much exactly what it sounds like and it really is fairly spectacular.

Jeftoon01's Twisted Princesses

Jeffrey Thomas (aka Jeftoon01) has a whole series of images based upon "twisted" variants of the classic Disney Princesses, from Aurora and Ariel to Mulan and Nala (of The Lion King). My personal favourites are his Cinderella and Snow White (which appears to co-star a cast of Critters).

Vertiklychalingd's "The REAL New Princess"

This cartoon by vertiklychalingd raises a good point. I recently got around to seeing Disney's Enchanted and yet, it never once occured to me whilst watching it that, despite being referred to as such multiple times even within the text of the film itself, "Princess" Giselle is at no point technically a princess at all. It is Nancy (played by the wonderful Idina Menzel from Wicked) who ends up marrying the film's prince. Ultimately, it all comes down to the fact that the notion of "princessness" has transcended any actual reality attached to the term. Instead, "princess", and in particular the "Disney princess" brand, has become a sort of hyper-real notion that describes a set of behaviours, attitudes and appearances, regardless of whether one is actually a legitimate princess or not.

Queens

When it comes to trying to describe Noonat's game Queens, I really can't do it more justice than auntie pixelante does in her description:

in most difficult contemporary jumping games, it’s taken for granted that the player will die and try again many times, most likely taking many incarnations to reach the end of the game. in queens, these lives are characters and the repeating cycle of their deaths and replacement is the narrative, suggesting the expendability of women (who are neither faceless nor nameless) to a henry viii-style patriarch.

Dark Princesses: Snow White

Doing a little more research into Alabaster, I came across the work of artist ClaireBeauchamp, via the blog of Alabaster co-creator Emily Short. Claire has done a fair few fairytale/Disney-related pieces, but the one that most stands out to me, especially in the wake of Alabaster, is her Dark Snow White, featured above. I'd also recommend checking out other works by Short, too.

Alabaster

Now to revisit a genre I don't see often enough on here: interactive fiction. Alabaster is a wonderful piece of IF that places you in the position of the hunter in the tale of Snow White. Like certain other narrative-driven fairytale games before it, Alabaster exploits that fact that there are many different paths that one could take from a story's simple starting point, and there are many endings to discover. Additionally, Alabaster also brings in influences from a wide range of myths and folklore that extend beyond Snow White, including tales of witchcraft, vampires and even apocryphal Judeo-Christian myth (a little hint of Gregory Maguire's Mirror Mirror there, perhaps).

Have fun discovering some weird and wonderful secrets in this really very creepy take on an already rather unsettling tale.

Target Women: Story Time/StilletoREVOLT

I adore Sarah Haskins, and wouldn't you know it, she's gone and done a fairytale-related piece for her regular piece on stupid advertising aimed at women, "Target Women".

Also, allow me to point out this awesome post on fairy tale images in advertising over at StilettoREVOLT. Here's a little preview of the kind of stuff they cover (note, as they rightly point out on the site, how exactly the reality of the Britney/Kevin relationship went).

The Wizard of Oz word-image

I discovered this over at award-winning comic book artist Derek Kirk Kim's blog. I'm not too sure about the original source, though. You probably can't tell unless you click on it and see it blown up much larger, but it's a picture made up of the text from the first eleven chapters of Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I love things that play around with the ambiguous space where text/images overlap, and this, something that literally uses the words to paint a picture, creates such a great visual pun.

Update: I try to be curteous and host my own images rather than hotlink, but Blogger only allows images of a certain size. Clicking on the above image will not blow it up large enough to see the text that makes it up. Please head on over to DKK's blog instead to see the image in full.

Little Pigs

More "Three Little Pigs"-themed metal now, but this time a slightly more energetic (that's certainly one phrase for it) track from Mucky Pup.

There really isn't a lot of substance to this video/song, so not much to say, but I decided I pretty much had to put this up after posting the Green Jelly vid; it was only fair.

Three Little Pigs

Sometimes, it seems I just need to post a silly metal video.

As far as I'm aware I don't tend to get any children visiting this blog, but just in case, I'd better warn that the following video for "Three Little Pigs" by metal band Green Jello (a.k.a. Green Jelly)* does include some mild drug use and sex references. Still, in the spirit of Celebrity Deathmatch, "it's only clay!"**

The below video is actually slightly redacted. The full (embedding disabled) video is here.



*One day I'll learn how to put heavy metal umlauts in a blog post
**Or, in keeping with the appendix to the ful-length video, only a "stupid puppet show".

Emerald City Confidential

When it comes to finding a way to describe the overall mise-on-scene of point-and-click-adventure game Emerald City Confidential, I really can't do better than the game's own creator, Dave Gilbert, who calls it "Raymond Chandler meets L. Frank Baum." Emerald City Confidential is a gem of a game that puts a film noir spin on the wonderful world of Oz, coming up with something that's a little Sam Spade, a little Gregory Maguire and with just a hint of Sam & Max (I was right, I really couldn't do better than the game's creator).

ECC is a thoroughly engaging game that's sure to be an especial treat for Oz geeks. For more on this game and its genesis, check out the video below which features an interview with the game's creator (from which I snagged the above quotation).

Hansel and Gretel

I haven't seen it, so I can't make any claims as to its quality, but I'd be lying if I said that I didn't think this South Korean film based on Hansel and Gretel didn't look really interesting (warning: some minor violent imagery in the below video).



An American remake is supposedly set for a 2011 release.

Bri-Chan's Princesses

You've probably seen her stuff elsewhere on the internet already, and Disney Princesses are arguably in a category all of their own which might be slightly removed from what I typically deal with, but I couldn't resist linking to Bri-Chan's (Brianna Garcia) deviant art page and the typically cheeky and amusingly iconoclastic images of the Disney fairytale princesses that she posts there. Enjoy!

Wizard of Oz: Kele-6

More Wizard of Oz stuff now, and yet another rap music video, too:

The rappers in question are Israeli group Kele-6.

The Oz purist in me is mildly annoyed that this video changes the order in which 'Dorothy' meets her three companions (it took me the longest time to realise that the second guy she meets was not just a really poor rendition of the Tin Man, so deeply was the idea of the narrative order ingrained in me). Also, is the Tin Man wearing a necklace made of spoons?

Oz Squad

Now, I haven't actually read Steve Ahlquist's Oz Squad, so I can't claim to give a fair appraisal of it, but from what I have read about it, I certainly seem to agree with Dave Campbell's comment that it seems "gratuitously irreverent," and I imagine that if I ever read it, I might come down on the side of critic and Oz fan Steve Teller, who called it "The most repellent published work with the name Oz in the title I have ever seen." From what I can tell, it seems to take the "add in some sex, death and swearing and that'll make it more 'mature'" attitude that ultimately of course only serves to make things far more puerile. But then again, it all seems to be done with a great deal of tongue-in-cheek humour, so at this stage, who am I to judge?

Still, if you're interested in learning more, Dave's post on the subject and this site about the comic might provide some decent starting points.

RIZ-ZOAWD

It's all in Japanese, so it may be of limited use for those of us who don't speak the language, but check out the official website for RIZ-ZOAWD, a new videogame for the Nintendo DS set in the world of Oz. As far as I can ascertain from the website, the game features lots of running around using an ersatz trackball. The character designs are much more interesting than the gameplay, methinks.