Scary Godmother is a series of children's books and comic books created by artist Jill Thompson and published by Sirius Entertainment beginning in 1997.

Characters

Main

  • Hannah Marie - Hannah is scared of monsters, but then she realizes monsters don't eat kids. Hannah's very kind and friendly, and it's implied that she has a crush on Orson, a young male vampire. In the first TV-special, her older cousin, Jimmy, and his friends scare her, but the monsters on the Fright Side help her get back at them in the end. Dresses as a fairy princess. She is voiced by Britt McKillip.
  • Scary Godmother - a tall, skinny and pretty-looking fairy-witch with long curly red hair, pale green skin, small bat wings on her back, and purple and green leggings. She lives on the Fright Side (a world where scary Halloween monsters live). She befriends a little girl named Hannah Marie, who was scared by her older cousin Jimmy into holding the doorknob to the haunted house Scary Godmother and her "broommates" were in. She also rides a broom and has a pet ghost cat named Boozle. Thompson has acknowledged that the character bears a resemblance to its creator. She said that "comics are so segregated now" and that she wanted to create something that both young readers and adults could enjoy. The books employ a combination of storybook/comic formats.

Comics

  • Scary Godmother. SIRIUS Entertainment. 09/1997. Book.
  • Bloody Valentine Special. SIRIUS Entertainment. 02/1998. Comic.
  • Revenge of Jimmy. SIRIUS Entertainment. 09/1998. Book.
  • Holiday Spooktacular. SIRIUS Entertainment. 11/1998. Comic.
  • The Mystery Date. SIRIUS Entertainment. 09/1999. Book.
  • Wild About Harry. SIRIUS Entertainment. 02/2000 - 04/2000. Comic miniseries (3 issues).
  • The Boo Flu. SIRIUS Entertainment. 09/2000. Book.
  • Activity Book. SIRIUS Entertainment. 12/2000. Comic.
  • Wild About Harry TPB. SIRIUS Entertainment. 09/2001. Collecting Scary Godmother:Wild About Harry #1–#3.
  • Scary Godmother. SIRIUS Entertainment. May 2001 - February 2002. Comic miniseries (6 issues).
  • Ghoul's Out for Summer TPB. SIRIUS Entertainment. 07/2002. Collecting Scary Godmother mini-series #1–#6.
  • Spooktacular Stories TPB. SIRIUS Entertainment. 08/2004. Collecting Scary Godmother Summer Preview 1997, Bloody Valentine Special, Activity Book, Holiday Spooktakular.
  • Scary Godmother HC. Dark Horse Comics. 10/2010. Collecting Scary Godmother, Revenge of Jimmy, The Mystery Date, and The Boo Flu.
  • Scary Godmother Comic-Book Stories TPB. Dark Horse Comics. 06/2011. Collecting Scary Godmother #1–6: Ghoul's Out for Summer; Scary Godmother: Holiday Spooktacular; Scary Godmother: Bloody Valentine Special; Scary Godmother: Activity Book; Scary Godmother: Wild About Harry #1-3; Scary Godmother and Friends Ashcan; Scary Godmother: Six Feet South of the Border from Action Girl #13; and more.

Awards

  • The original book Scary Godmother was a top votegetter for the Comics Buyer's Guide Fan Award for Favorite Original Graphic Novel for 1998.
  • 1998 - nominated for the Lulu of the Year Lulu Award
  • 1999 - won the Lulu of the Year Lulu Award
  • 2001 - Eisners for Best Title for a Younger Audience and Best Painter/Multimedia Artist(Interior)

Film adaptations

Two films have been produced based on the series. The first, Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular, premiered on television in Europe, Latin America, Australia, and Canada in 2003. Later, it premiered in the United States on Cartoon Network in 2004. The film was the first one Mainframe Entertainment used its new software/animation pipeline for. Jill Thompson co-wrote the script, and had some creative control over the project. When she was shown early character designs for the film which resembled the watercolor illustrations in her books, she requested that the characters instead be fully computer-generated. In an interview, Thompson stated that she wanted them to go with CGI because "I'm doing 2D. Nobody else should be doing 2D, just me". However, the mostly static backgrounds used in the film more closely resemble traditional cel animation or the illustrations in Thompson's books.

The second, Scary Godmother: The Revenge of Jimmy (based on the second book), premiered in 2005.

Further reading

  • The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen: Awesome Female Characters from Comic Book History by Hope Nicholson, Quirk Books (2017)

References

  • Scary Godmother at Don Markstein's Toonopedia. Archived from the original on February 23, 2017.