Moana graphic novel

Moana graphic novel and Moana Comics Collection published by Joe Books

This post it mostly to let anyone interested know that Moana comics are in sale. Personally I haven't seen the movie yet, so I'll save the comics for later.

Both comics pictured above are published by Joe Books, and both have the same comic adaptation of the movie inside. But the "Comics Collection" book also has a few shorter original comic stories in addition to several "cinestories" (stories created with screencaps).

Zootopia Comics Collection

Zootopia Comics Collection from Joe Books

I just got Zootopia Comics Collection from Joe Books in the mail. The book looks like it's kind of a continuation of the Fun Book series that Joe Books did for Frozen, Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur (check my previous blogpost about those books). The book is in the same pocket format but has more comic content compared to the other three.

Comic adaptation of the movie

The book starts with the entire movie adapted to comics.

Original comic story

We also have five original stories from 4 to 8 pages long.
 

Short original comic story

And there’s a bunch of 1-2 pagers (about nine I think), drawn in quite a different style than the longer original comics.

And we have two cinestories/cine comics or what they are called. They are scenes from the movie that are made into comic stories by using screencaps from the movie. If you ever wondered how the slow-motion scene with Flash would look adapted to comics, just take a look at image above. Most of the story goes on like that…

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!

Disney Princess from Joe Books

The first issue of Disney Princess from Joe Books came out this week. All artwork is by Amy Mebberson, while writing is done Amy, Georgia Ball and Geoffrey Golden.

I’ve been curious about this project for quite a while now. We got the first look at some strips back in 2014; then planned to be a series of digital comic strips and a subscription service.

Strips planned for a digital subscription service - Images from bleedingcool

That plan was never realized and instead we now got this printed comic book with strip stories. None of the early preview strips with characters from Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph and Lilo and Stitch are included in the first comic book, so it seems the project was changed to be princesses only too. I don’t think Elsa (and Anna) have joined the official lineup of Disney Princesses yet, but maybe we’ll see the above strips under another title in the future.

As I’ve already said a few times now, the comics in this series are comic strips like the ones we use to see in the newspapers, and not the regular type of comic book stories. Each strip has its own gag, but some also make small story arcs together.
 

Inside Disney Princess #1

As seen on the image above, the first issue started with two single strips from Snow White and The Little Mermaid. Then the next two are the first strips in a 6-part story arc with Aurora and her fairies.

Also, you can see the strips are printed sideways with two on each page. We got a total of 22 pages with comic strips like this in the first issue, while the rest (11 pages including the back cover) is a preview for an upcoming Zootopia cinestory book. I really hate these kinds of previews, it’s basically 11 pages of ads for just one publication and not what I intended to buy… I hope they don’t do it again. But even if they wasted 11 pages of the comic, $2.99 is not that bad a price. Still, IDW’s Disney comics (at $3.99) will give you a lot more comics for your money compared to this one.
 

Back cover and Zootopia cinestory preview

If you have followed American Disney comics during the BOOM! run and now IDW you might have seen work by Amy before. She’s done a lot of covers (like the Oswald one in my last blogpost) and also stories based on Disney•Pixar movies and the Muppets. Her best known work however is probably the popular series of Pocket Princesses. But while Disney Prinsess from Joe Books is an official licensed comic, Pocket Princesses is a fancomic. Both the humor and drawing style are very much alike though, so if you love Pocket Princesses you’ll probably like the new comic book too!

But there are also a lot of differences between the two. In Pocket Princesses they are all one happy gang hanging out together, and rarely interacts with anyone else than other princesses. In the official comic strips however each "universe" is separated from the others, so you won’t find Merida and Rapunzel discussing their morning hair or something like that. Instead all other characters from the movies are used to interact with, and I like the clever way they are used a lot! Even if the princesses can be a lot dorkier than in the movies (especially the older ones) they still remain the same personalities as in the movies, and don’t just do something randomly funny but things you’d actually expect them to do. And the same goes for the supporting characters. Gaston is still a douche, Scuttle still pretends to know everything about human objects, and the Three Good Fairies makes a mess out of baking and sewing. So the comics will be a lot more fun if you have seen the movies (but who hasn’t?)

The character design is also a bit different from the movies. In a short interview in the December Previews catalog, Amy said Disney had approved her design to be a "cuter, more comedic “chibi” style". It’s not totally chibi like Disney Cuties or a manga style like Kilala Princess, but expect large heads and big eyes :) The princesses still looks very much like themselves, so being a bit "off model" to be cuter is fine by me.

I tried doing a comparison with the movies (left), the comic adaptation of the movie (middle) and the new style in the comic strips (right).

In Europe we’ve had an ongoing Disney Princess magazines for more than 10 years. But the stories in those are dumbed down, the princesses all live in a perfect world and if you’re not a pre-teen girl you’d probably not find anything interesting inside. The new series from Joe Books can’t be compared to those magazines at all! The humor worked fine on me, so I think both adults and kids can enjoy the comic strips in the new series. I’m going to get the next issue too!

The future of the series:


Some notes on what to expect from this series:

• 3 more issues have already been announced in Diamond’s Previews catalog. Order codes: JAN161536, FEB161608, MAR161538. So it seems they are planning to release a new issue each month.
• According to a tweet by Amy, 8 issues are planned.  
• Also, according to another tweet the comics are going to be available digitally too. I know some comics by Joe Books are available on iTunes in the same category as other Disney comics. But hopefully they’ll end up on comiXology too; that I think is a better platform for buying digital comics. 
• The website inside the magic got an exclusive preview and ended the article with "[...]the comic will feature new stories starring all eleven Disney Princesses. Further titles will include “Frozen,” “Finding Dory,” “Star vs. the Forces of Evil,” and “Harvey Girls." What this really means I have no idea, my impression was that all issues were going to be under the Disney Prinsess title.

"Fun Books" from Joe Books

So far Joe Books have published 3 paperback books called "Fun Book". Before getting the books I found little to no information about what they really contained, so this blogpost will be a short summary of the contents for anyone interested. Then you can decide if it’s worth buying. Personally I don’t think I’m going to get more of these.

Frozen

Frozen was the first one out, and I mostly got it out of curiosity when I read that the book contained comics. Of the 240 numbered pages, the content is as follows:

• The comic adaptation of the movie Frozen (48 pages)
• 13 short original comic stories  (32 pages) 
• Game pages (32 pages)
• "Scenes from the Frozen Cinestory Comic" (71 pages)
• "Frozen Fever Cinestory Comic" (32 pages)
  

The movie adaptation is also published in its own comic by Joe Books. The other print is a regular sized comic and on much better paper, so I’d recommend getting that one instead if that’s the only part you are interested in.

Frozen comic adaptation, published by Joe Books

 

The Fun book compared to the regular comic

The part with the original comic stories is what I personally am most interested in. As I already had the comic adaptation, that part was in fact the only part I found interesting! They are all short gag-based stories, but I thought it was fun to see how the movie characters could be used in new stories.

Original Frozen comics

The game pages are just simple puzzle games for kids (but the whole book is probably targeted at kids and not me..)
 

Game pages

The "Scenes from the Frozen Cinestory Comic" part is a waste of paper in my opinion. It’s made up of lots of screen caps from the movie with speech balloons inserted. And we just get selected scenes from the movie in this book. They are all taken from the "Frozen Cinestory" book, also published by Joe Books, that contains the entire movie told this way. I’ve never liked this concept, and printed on cheap non-glossy paper it’s even worse. The movie Frozen also has a lot of dark scenes that are not suited for being printed on paper at all! In a lot of the panels in this book you can barely see what’s going on. It’s better to go watch or re-watch the movie instead of wasting time reading this.

Cinestory in the Fun Book

Frozen - The Cinestory, published by Joe Books

The book end with "Frozen Fever Cinestory Comic" where all the screens are from the Frozen Fever short movie. This part is not included in the "Frozen Cinestory" book pictured above.

Frozen Fever Cinestory

Inside Out

This book is built up pretty much the same way as the Frozen book. We have:
 

• The comic adaptation of the movie Inside Out (48 pages)
• 6 short original comic stories  (16 pages)
• Game pages (10 pages)
• "Scenes from Inside Out Cinestory Comic" (121 pages)
• Disney•Pixar Comics Treasury preview (23 pages)

The Inside Out comic adaptation might be available in English digitally somewhere, but I haven’t seen it printed in English anywhere else.

 

Inside Out comic adaptation

Again, the original stories are the parts I’m most interested in. But we got less pages of that in this book compared to the Frozen one.

Original Inside Out comics

The cinestory scenes are taken from another cinestory book I guess. But I only got the Frozen one so I can’t compare. At the end of the book we get a preview (ad) for the "Disney•Pixar Comics Treasury".
 

Preview for Disney•Pixar Comics Treasury

The preview is parts of (i.e. no complete stories) the Finding Nemo and the Monsters University comic adaptations. And if the this kind of preview works you’ll end up buying this 800 page monster book:
 

Disney•Pixar Comics Treasury

The Good Dinosaur
 

• The comic adaptation of the movie The Good Dinosaur (48 pages)
• Scenes from The Good Dinosaur Cinestory (142 pages)
• First part of the Inside Out Cinestory (30 pages)

So no original comic stories or games in this book. Here are the same scene as seen in the comic adaptation and the cinestory:

 

The Good Dinosaur comic adaptation

The Good Dinosaur cinestory