Veronica tells Archie to pretend to be a life-sized doll of himself in one of these comics so she could give him as a present to Betty. 

The art is so cute!! This is my first MH comic and I really do love it!!! 

Two cute little stories! Clawdeen and Toralei make a cute couple and I'm glad they start their story off a little rocky because I think it's incredibly in character. They both have very strong personalities, so It makes more sense that they don't mesh together perfectly 100% of the time. 

I wish Ghoulia had either gotten her own dedicated storyline, but this little storyline didn't really seem to fit into the Pride issue? It's a fun and cute little story and like I said, I wish it was given more time to be its own thing, but I also wish it was in a different comic. It kind of seems jammed in to fill a page count here. :/

Valentine and Spelldon's story is so cute! :,) 
It's nice to see him again and I'm glad he's trying to redeem himself and become a better person. This story was half the length of the other one, but I think the pacing works for only being 10 pages. I don't think I really need it to be longer, I just want more of Spelldon and Valentine together. 

Overall, I'm a little disappointed in how juvenile the comic is overall. The stories are life lessons for grade schoolers and are spelled out at the end like a children's TV show. I understand Monster High is a doll line and it's primary target audience is kids, but specifically a pride issue seems more for older fans. I'm not saying the characters need to fuck nasty on every page, but I do just wish this issue didn't feel like educational programming and was more similar to the novels that came out back when the series was first launched. 

Been seeing this one on Hoopla and the Archie Comics website for a while, so I'm excited to finally sit down and read the run. :)

It's fun! Big fan of cosmic horror and Faustian bargains. Love all the creature designs, too!!

Fun set up to a new series. I LOVE the original book and the movie so I'm excited to see where this goes :)

Quick note -- I say "It's complicated" to the characters being likeable and the flaws being a focus because 1) we're so early on and there's so little there to really say for certain and 2) the Universal Monsters movie bastardizes the text and the characters SO BAD. In the 1933 movie, which this is clearly the source material for and not the original novel, Victor is stripped of all complexity (and his name?) and gets whittled down until all that's left is a caricature of a mad scientist. 

But that's the movie, not the fault of this particular comic. 

I'm excited to read the rest of these!!! I love the art style and I appreciate that they're not just adapting the original novel or the 1933 film and they're adding something to it. I just hope they don't completely mess up the story and it's meaning like the film did :,(

Ever After High you should have never been cancelled,,, 

I read this in middle school when the book came out but never kept up with the series. Unfortunate, but at least there's not much more for me to catch up with :,)

The story holds up! I'm in college now and I'm still invested in the characters! I need to know what happens next!!!! I want to know how this story was supposed to end!!!!

Some of the lore in EAH is pretty intense. Briar being an adrenaline junkie because she's terrified of missing out on everything happening around her while she's in a magical sleep for 100 years. Dexter having a vague idea of what his life is supposed to be while his brother is the golden boy who has had his entire life laid out for him. 

I ended up giving my copy to my younger cousins recently and borrowed this on Libby. I'm really happy I gave it to them. I hope they read it and take something good away from it. It's genuinely such a shame EAH got cancelled. 

Fun and all, but kind of annoyed that it kind of states its thesis outright at the end as if the audience is too stupid to pick up on the extremely heavy handed metaphors. 

**There is currently a boycott going on against St. Martins Press and I completely missed that this was published under a St. Martins imprint so I am VERY sorry for crossing a picket line**

This has been my second attempt to find a romcom that I didn't completely hate. It's definitely much more of a romance than a romcom, but it was fine. 

If I had read this while I was in high school, I probably would have been obsessed with it. But now that I'm almost out of college, it was a little painfully PG which is just not what I'm interested in right now. I found this in the non-YA romance section of the bookstore and I'm kind of convinced this was supposed to be YA and somehow wasn't published as a YA book. 

Definitely wasn't bad. Unlike some of the other romance novels I've read in the last few years, I can actually understand why someone would enjoy it and I wasn't writing "I want to kill myself" in the margins the whole time. It's good as a fluffy little "baby's first gay romance novel" so if that's what you or someone else is looking for, I definitely recommend it. 

I appreciate how good the characters are at communicating with each other and how empathetic they are towards each other. One of the things that has bothered me in half of the other romance books I've read were how terrible they were at talking to each other. One of the major conflicts in the book is

Erik's family constantly controlling his every move because every little thing he does needs to be approved by his grandmother, the queen. So I was expecting a huge falling out after Erik insists they can't be public or that they had to break up because "You'll never know what it's like to not be able to make any of your own decisions" and Jamie would respond "Why do you let them control you" or something along those lines.

But every time this comes up, Jamie is completely understanding and it never turns into a huge fight. It's genuinely refreshing to see 17 year olds maturely talk things out and work through their problems like adults when half of the romance books Ive read are about grown adults and just devolve into (or start with) a huge fight and a breakup before the 3rd act because they can't put themselves in the other persons shoes. 

Great but I definitely would have enjoyed it way more if it had stayed a little more grounded in reality or at the very least was a traditional gothic ghost story, like Jane Eyre or The Turn of the Scree, etc.