Marvel announces ‘Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur’ by Reeder, Montclare and artist Bustos
What an odd fucking title. And man, am I ever stoked for odd, out of the normal titles from the Big Two. The announcement caught by eyes because of the presence of Amy Reeder, whom I totally love on Rocket Girl.
When Devil Dinosaur lands in the post-“Secret Wars”Marvel Universe, his best friend will no longer be the caveman known as Moon-Boy (though he will appear in the comic “for a little bit”).
In co-writers Amy Reeder, Brandon Montclare and artist Natacha Bustos’ “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur,”Jack Kirby‘s red Tyrannosaurus Rex finds himself paired with teenager Lunella Lafayette, a character (described by Reeder as “female Inspector Gadget — only this time, she also knows what she’s doing”) the creators hope will appeal to readers of all ages.
“[Editor] Mark [Paniccia] and I were talking about how whenever people come in with young kids, or even just for Mark’s own kids, we don’t have that many publications that we can give to people that have that broad reach,” assistant Editor Emily Shaw toldEntertainment Weekly. “We’re skewing a little bit older with a lot of our titles and we wanted to create something that adults and kids could really love, like a Pixar feel. That’s where the tone jumped off for us.”
“The character lives in this world where people don’t really get her,” Reeder said of Moon-Girl. “That her brain just works a little differently than all of the other kids her age really resonated with us, and that idea of feeling sort of isolated and on your own during that very early time of life we thought was really compelling, and could really resonate with a lot of readers.”
“You’re going to have a 30-foot dinosaur interacting with a three-and-a-half tall girl…I can’t think of any other book that’s kind of like that,” Montclare said of the series in the interview. “[W]here you have these kind of crazy things that are going to be very different to work on. But if everyone can pull it off, it’s going to be a unique type of storytelling”
A Marvel Comics newcomer, Bustos is particularly excited to be working on a project starring a female ethnic lead. “It’s great to be a part of the creation of something which can mean something special to so many people,” the artist told EW. “I myself have come up against this dilemma (I’m half Afro-Brazilian and half Chilean besides being Spanish) of finding few or no cultural references, especially in Spain, a country where there is isn’t any community comparable to the African American community in the states. You end up ironing out your differences and you need to work hard on this aspect to be able to continue maturing as a person.