Magical Girls

Magical girls are special. They defend love and justice with a squad of their best friends, and they look cute while they're doing it. Their transformation sequences into their alter-egos are filled with sparkles. They remind us that the girly aesthetic is not a bad thing, and can actually be very powerful. You've probably got a few magical girls in your life, so we've put together this gift guide to inspire you to find the perfect presents for them.

Most anime is adapted from manga, often produced by the manga publisher to raise awareness and sell it overseas. But what about the anime shows or film that go the other way, adapted from the screen to the page? How do those works hold up, and what changes or stays the same? That’s what Screen & Page aims to explore. This week, we're talking about an anime that set the internet on fire because of all the ways that it does --- and doesn't --- break the magical girl genre: Puella Magi Madoka Magica!

I've been a fan of the Magical Girl genre ever since I first saw Sailor Moon make a monster explode with the power of love and justice, so I'm pretty sure I'm right in the target market for what Kel McDonald is doing with her new series, Misfits of Avalon. Inspired by the legends of King Arthur and Irish Mythology, Misfits finds four teenage delinquents who are recruited into a life of battling monsters with magic words and super-powers in the classic style. There's just one problem: They don't know that they're actually the bad guys. To find out more, I spoke with McDonald about publishing her graphic novel through Dark Horse while also putting it online, the appeal of terrible teenagers, and just what it was that inspired her to take on a group of jerks.

We can all agree that things would be a whole lot better if there were more Magical Girl elements in our day-to-day lives, right? I mean, yeah, you'd probably spend a lot of time being lectured about the power of love and justice when you were just trying to get a cup of coffee, and those extensive transformation sequences are probably going to make you late for work at least twice a week, but tha

Here at ComicsAlliance, we were already pretty big fans of Natasha Allegri thanks to her amazing art and her work on Adventure Time, where she created the female version of Finn, Fionna - the most cosplayable character of the past five years (and wrote and illustrated Boom!'s Fionna and Cake comic miniseries). Now, we've been given another reason why her work's amazing in the form of Bee and Puppy