This Makes Me Happy: Scary Godmother

Jill Thompson’s Scary Godmother series is something of a Halloween touchstone for us. I’ve been a fan of the graphic novels and comics since she first created the character in 1997. While we took a bit of a break from watching the TV specials every year, we’ve put them back into our Halloween viewing rotation. The stories of Scary Godmother and her friends occupy a pretty unique niche in terms of Halloween stories, and that’s why I love them.

The Scary Godmother stories capture the joy of Halloween in a way that few stories do. Some of our other Halloween favorite movies are the animated adaption of Ray Bradbury’s Halloween Tree, the Disney movie Hocus Pocus, and Nightmare Before Christmas. However, as much as I love those movies, i don’t know that they capture a child’s joy of celebrating Halloween in quite the same way that the Scary Godmother stories do.

For example, Hocus Pocus is a story set on Halloween, and it’s about kids fighting witches and a reanimated corpse. The Halloween Tree, again, is set on Halloween, features a group of kids who plan on trick or treating until mysterious circumstances change their plans, and then they ostensibly learn the origins of Halloween through a series of dark and scary adventures. But neither one of them really focuses on the joy and excitement of dressing up, going trick or treating, hanging out with friends at a Halloween party. And, maybe most importantly, they treat the scary stuff as genuinely scary or threatening—even if in a somewhat light-hearted way, in the case of Hocus Pocus.

The Scary Godmother books genuinely show the thrill of going trick or treating, and the fun of being scared (but only a little bit) in the safe confines of the holiday. In so many other Halloween stories, it feels like the scary threats are meant to be really scary—at least to the characters—but it’s okay, because it’s Halloween. The costumes and trick or treating or Halloween parties are fun, but mostly incidental to the real action.

In the Scary Godmother books, Halloween and the associated activities are at the heart of the story. In the first book, young Hannah is going trick or treating without her parents for the first time. Her cousin Jimmy and his friends (all older than Hannah) have been told to bring Hannah with them. Frustrated with being saddled with a “baby,” Jimmy and his friends trick her into leaving candy to appease the monsters in an abandoned house. They believe that this will scare her into wanting to go home early, allowing them to hit up more houses for candy at a faster pace without her. What they don’t factor in is Hannah meeting her Scary Godmother and her monster friends.

Of course, all those monsters conspire to help Hannah get her own back on Jimmy and his friends, giving Hannah a chance to look like a hero, and humiliate Jimmy. This carries us into the second book, The Revenge of Jimmy! As the title suggests, the focus of the story is on cousin Jimmy’s attempts to eliminate Halloween, so that the trauma he went through the previous year won’t happen again.

The third book, Mystery Date, focuses on Scary Godmother, Hannah, and all the other monsters and kids going to a Halloween party. Only Scary Godmother has received a mysterious, anonymous invitation to the party. Who is crushing on our favorite redhead? Like I’m going to give that up here; you’ll have to read the book to find out.

The fourth color book, The Boo Flu, tells us what happens when Scary Godmother gets sick, and Hannah needs to step in and fill her adorable shoes. In some ways, this is reminiscent of Nightmare Before Christmas in the way that it shows characters preparing for a holiday. But it’s much cuter than the Tim Burton vision, and I love this as much as I love Nightmare Before Christmas.

As I said, these are all stories that very much depend upon the Halloween setting, rather than stories that just happen to be set on Halloween.

The color Scary Godmother books feature only a few very large panels per page, and probably include as much typeset text as traditional word balloons. They are as much children’s picture books as they are comics, and are gorgeous. Considering that, previous to this, Jill Thompson was probably best known for her work on Wonder Woman and Sandman, this really feels like an artist working on a passion project.

The art style Thompson uses here is perfectly suited for Halloween, but not in a cliche spooky-dooky kind of way. There’s plenty of traditional Halloween imagery, like cobwebs, twisty old trees, and cloudy skies and moonlit nights, but there’s also lots of brightly colored goofiness. From Scary Godmother’s outfits to her monster friends to the outrageous shapes in her house, these books are as happy and garish as a street full of costumed kids on Halloween night. The art celebrates the totality of a Halloween celebration; honestly, if anyone has had a Halloween that is nothing but dark and scary, I feel sorry for them.

Jill Thompson also produced a run of more traditional comics-format stories in black and white. These have been collected into the book Scary Godmother: The Comic Book Stories. It’s been a while since I’ve read these, so I’m not going to talk about them here, except to say that they are great.

The character and stories have been adapted into two animated specials from Mainframe Animation in the early 2000s. We watch these every year. The animation technology looks dated, but the design does a fantastic job of capturing Jill Thompson’s style. They’re a lot of fun, and it looks like they’ve been posted on YouTube in their entirety.

A number of years ago, Jill Thompson ran a Kickstarter campaign to produce a limited-edition Scary Godmother doll. We backed that campaign, and even though it took a while to be fulfilled, we finally got our doll. As you can see, she’s perfect!