Disney Princess #2 from Joe Books

Disney Princess #2 from Joe Books

The second issue of Joe Books’ Disney Princess continues pretty much the same way as the first one. Again we have a mix of individual strips and short storylines with characters from Disney movies featuring the various princesses.

Some characters are the same as we saw in the first issue, but we also have a storyline with Jasmine and her tiger Rajah, Mulan and her friends, and Tiana’s friend Charlotte is hanging out in Duke’s Café.



I haven’t seen Aladdin or Mulan in forever, and they were not exactly fresh in my memory when I read this issue. So I actually re-watched Aladdin this weekend, and plan on watching Mulan again too. That's a little bonus effect by reading these comic strips; they make me want to watch the movies again too. As I said in the blogpost about the first issue, you’ll probably get a lot more out of these comic strips if you know the movie stories.

Even if I enjoy the comic strips a lot, I’m starting to have a little problem with this series. I tried to overlook the fact that 1/3 of the first issue was a preview for something I had no interest in, hoping Joe Books wouldn’t do that again. But sadly, that’s exactly what they did! This time 1/3 of the issue is a preview for an upcoming Descendants cinestory. I have no desire to pay for a preview, so please stop doing that now! I already have a subscription on this series at my local comic shop, but if the next issue is the same I'm afraid I have to cancel it. Joe Books: you can put previews online on your webpage, use issuu like IDW does or even send a preview pdf to the distributor and they will put a download link to it on their PREVIEWSworld page. Just don’t force us to pay for it...

Back cover and preview for Descendants cinestory

I realize that the publisher might have a problem filling the entire comic with new original content, the credits intro is unnecessarily stretched out over two pages too. Amy Mebberson would have to work like crazy to be able to fill an entire comic with artwork each month, and that would probably lower the quality on the work too. So that part is understandable. But there are other options. A lot of existing short stories with the princesses exist that could be used to fill up the comics. Joe Books already used several short stories like that as fillers in their "Disney Princess Comics Treasury" book, so it shouldn’t be a problem to license similar short stories for the Disney Princess series too.

I don’t have a general problem with a few pages of ads. IDW use to have 3-5 pages of ads in the back of their Disney comics too and I’ve never had any problem with that. A few pages with a summary of Joe Books’ other comics or upcoming titles could actually be interesting! But using 1/3 of the comic to preview one other publication is way too much!