Parenthetical.net

I read the original Coraline, but — and I say this as a total Neil fangirl — I found it overrated. Meh, the other mother has black buttons for eyes and some rats. WTF-ever! (My boyfriend thinks I don’t watch enough horror movies to be properly scared by anything. He’s probably right.)

Apparently turning it into a graphic novel was exactly what the story needed, though! Once I could see her, the other mother was freaking terrifying, and something about the lettering for the rats’ creepy little song… *shudder* Happy Halloween, everyone!

(And a shout-out to my friends’ little baby Coraline, who will have a very scary namesake book to read when she’s old enough.)

ETA: Sara’s comment helped me realize that I need to clarify my feelings about the art. I certainly don’t think it’s the Best Thing Ever. It makes a difference to me that this is an adaptation of a novel, rather than a work that was originally intended as a comic. The art and text didn’t go together from the beginning; the art is a literal illustration of the text. So I’m grading it on a different scale, I guess. The art made the story come alive for me in a way that the text alone didn’t.

In other words, what I meant to say in my original post is that when comparing book-Coraline with graphic-Coraline, graphic wins — but when comparing graphic-Coraline with graphic other things, Coraline has some serious flaws. (For instance, even though I’m usually more about realism than gesture in my art, this was a bit too literal even for me.) Now that I read over it again, this was totally unclear and I’m sorry. (I wrote it while supervising study hall; what do you want from me?)

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