Scary Godmother Compendium: This Was Your Childhood by Jill Thompson

What a charm- and value-packed compendium of virtually all the Scary Godmother material published to date!

I knew of Jill Thompson from her work on Neil Gaiman’s Death and Endless properties for DC Comics, but hadn’t realized the extent of her oeuvre otherwise. In particular, I had no idea that her own original creation, Scary Godmother, had been made into a TV movie series! This compendium swiftly brought me up to speed, and provided hours of delight to someone who hadn’t been aware of how rich Ms Thompson’s body of work is before I started reading this hefty volume.

And there is a lot here, from the stories that inspired the movies, to multi-issue arcs, to short comics written both before and after that television heyday. Sprinkled throughout are recipes for kid-friendly Treats, and towards the end are bonus art and text, including a full-on slate of fun Halloween-themed activities for kids of all ages.

The stories themselves revolve around young Hannah Marie, who starts out in these pages as a little girl who’s just gotten old enough to go trick or treating with the big kids, including her selfish cousin Jimmy. While his friends help her keep up with them, Jimmy feels that her shorter legs and earlier curfew are preventing them from getting as much candy as he’d prefer. He thus decides to prank her by having her go into a haunted house alone, in hopes that it will cause her to go home early so that he and the rest of his friends can go trick or treating without her. Little does he know, however, that Hannah has a Scary Godmother who helps her see that the things that go bump in the night are a whole lot less frightful than a bunch of mean kids. Perhaps even more satisfyingly, Scary Godmother is ready to help Hannah turn the tables on said mean kids, and help everyone learn the true meaning of Halloween.

The stories continue over the years as Hannah and Scary Godmother get into a series of adventures and scrapes, accompanied by a delightful supporting cast. The character designs are brilliant, especially with the vampires. Some of the black and white stories get a little more difficult to read as the linework gets more crowded but the storytelling is overall very solid, and the color stories are just phenomenal. Ms Thompson is an amazing painter and artist, and it’s a delight to see so much of her work in one place.

As an older comics aficionado, I was also incredibly impressed by the section she had teaching readers how to create their own comics. One of my pet peeves in comics reading is poorly directed flow, which is fortunately not a flaw evident in Ms Thompson’s work. Her helpful how-to demonstrates best storytelling practices that neatly sidestep this pitfall, in one compact chapter that feels like it should be required reading for all comics artists, aspiring or established.

This 500+ page tome is a really great treat for people whose favorite holiday is Halloween, or for anyone with a goth streak and an appreciation for a good comic book. I’m a little surprised that it didn’t come out before this year’s Halloween festivities, but that just means that I can feel less guilty about finally getting around to reviewing it with Christmas just around the corner.

Scary Godmother Compendium: This Was Your Childhood by Jill Thompson was published November 4 2024 by Image Comics and is available from all good booksellers, including