Except it’s not really magic but more paranormal, with sci-fi tech; and while it’s a Boarding School there are also hints that its more than that as well. Annie is also not an orphan. It’s quibbling and there are obvious influences from one to the other but “special kid with powers who has adventures with friends” also describes about 69.784% of anime, too.
I’m not too versed in anime or manga, but I also suspect that’s another huge influence I can’t pick up on.
It really is magic. There’s some sci-fi stuff, but that doesn’t negate all the “etheric” business. Annie’s doing magic with that blinker stone.
Let me jot down a few bullets on the HP parallels before I go to bed, not to try and score points, more as an exercise:
[ul]
[li]Effectively an orphan: Just like Harry, Annie spends a holiday with her adoptive family, the Donlans.
[/li][li]Ghosts: Jeanne / Moaning Myrtle and Mort / Peeves.
[/li][li]A mother’s love: Surma and Harry’s mom sacrifice themselves for their children.
[/li][li]The previous generation: All the flashbacks to Annie’s mom and her group of friends are just like the Snape flashbacks to his schoolboy days.
[/li][li]Child of destiny: This is so common I’m really just adding it to pad out the list, but much like Harry, Annie has super special abilities that thrust her into situations, usually with the adult’s urging.
[/li][/ul]
Yeah, there’s a reason there are a whole series of Orphan tropes. By themselves it’s not much of a reason for comparison.
Annie was an orphan, and she also had a destiny (though her special powers were “is now heir to a forture whose measure is beyond the dreams of avarice”. They, don’t knock it).
[ul]
[li]Ghosts: Jeanne / Moaning Myrtle and Mort / Peeves.[/li]> [/ul]
Eh. . . that’s pretty weak.
[ul]
[li]A mother’s love: Surma and Harry’s mom sacrifice themselves for their children.[/li]> [/ul]
Yes, Surma made a sacrifice but it’s a very different beast from Lilly’s. Parents love children and will go above and beyond for them. It’s not really a very unique thing to either Gunnerkrigg or Harry Potter.
Additionally, there are quite a few things we don’t know about Surma’s situation:
Assuming Surma understood the consequences of having a child, why did she do it? Was it just because she wanted to have a child, or was there some other reason? I suddenly can’t remember for sure, but was her sickness something that was actually traced back before the pregnancy, or was it that consequence manifesting? Maybe she had some other reason to expect reduced life expectancy? I doubt very much she was having the kid just because the dad wanted one.
And what if she wasn’t aware of the consequence? Seems unlikely, but who knows. Her act, if she knows, is alltogether different than Lilly’s. Lilly reacts as the way any decent parent would under extreme duress, at the spur of the moment. Surma basically said “well, this is going to kill me but I’ll have a baby anyway”. That’s an extremely difficult and deliberate choice that cannot be hand-waved away by saying “all parents love their children so it makes sense”. Her act, if she does not know, is a cruel twist of fate and not really a sacrifice. But I imagine she knew, as the story is clearly carrying elements of tragedy.
If Dumbledore hadn’t been such a layabout, Lilly wouldn’t have had reason to fear for Harry. OTOH, Surma was always doomed if she wanted to have a kid. There’s elements of classical tragedy in that situation that are not present in Lilly’s.
[ul]
[li]The previous generation: All the flashbacks to Annie’s mom and her group of friends are just like the Snape flashbacks to his schoolboy days.[/li]> [/ul]
Right and we could go pick out any number of media doing flashbacks like this. So? Given that HP and Gunnerkrigg are both using British boarding schools as a foundation, we should expect some similarities (and there are, of course).
You seem keen on likening Jones to Snape but they aren’t really similar. I mean, yes, all love is unrequited, but Snape’s case is pretty different. While it’s likely he’s never going to be anything other than a friend to Lilly, he started hanging out with a bunch of vile thugs who started dabbling in torture and murder. Which means he went from “one in a million? So you’re saying there’s a chance!” to “not if we were the last two people on the planet”. I’ll wager no subsequent redemption of Snapes would have erased that, but it’s speculation.
The thing is, I don’t know if we can apply this trope to Jones. As we now know, she doesn’t feel emotions. She has not, strictly speaking, been pining for Eglamore all these years. Their relationship is complicated, honestly. She’s mimicing emotional and physical interest. But she probably also values the relationship more than others, just on an objective level. It’s certainly a possibility that Eglamore never got over Surma. What Jones is offering is not really a substitute though. That isn’t to say what she’s offering is invalid or somehow lesser. But it is different.
[ul]
[li]Child of destiny: This is so common I’m really just adding it to pad out the list, but much like Harry, Annie has super special abilities that thrust her into situations, usually with the adult’s urging.[/li]> [/ul]
There’s a reason this is a trope. It’s not really a good basis for comparing things just on it’s own.
It certainly seems that HP has influenced Tom’s work. But the two works don’t seem very alike to me. I find the connections between the two only really seem to exist at an abstract level. E.g. they’re both “fantasy”.
Let me put this another way: are you familiar with Neil Gaiman’s Books of magic? It’s a tremendous graphical novel. It features:
A kid (who on the cover is an eerie clone of Harry Potter; or rather it was the other way around as Gaiman’s work predates HP by a decade) who discovers he can do magic, has super awesome magic potential, has a destiny, has an owl familiar, has parents that died tragically when he was a kid. There was a minor uproar over this comparison in like Madigascar when HP took off. Gaiman waived it off stoically.
The two stories really aren’t alike at all. I mean, there’s no boarding school back drop, but we don’t really follow Tim Hunter (I think it was Tim) from childhood to adulthood either. Gaiman’s work merely covers 4 magicians (Mister-E, The Stranger, I can’t ever remember the third one, and John Effing Constantine) meeting and deciding what to do about the child (as I believe the Stranger puts it “he can be a force for good or for evil, for magic or technology”). Ultimately they each show him a piece of the magical world and discuss with him what it might be like to be in it, what magic means, what it’s costs are. It’s fascinating. Of course, the kid has a choice, though ultimately that is irrelevant because John Constantine doesn’t gamble.
Unfortunately, Gaiman never wrote more. The world he built was a fascinating mishmash of DC comics lore, what I would call the “Moore-Gaimain” DC lore, and stuff he was just making up (it wasn’t intended as a “cannon” work in other words). Someone else took up the series and wandered off in directions that may or may not have been Gaiman’s original intent, and then it was canceled and later revived with a jump into the future (Tim’s 18ish or 20 something, where as the first series he was still early teens) and it was pretty different as I understand it. In fact, he may never have intened to write more, merely write that book and move on. I wish he had, but never mind.
There are superficial connections to Harry Potter (including the most superficial of all; the cover!) but its not alike. Gunnerkrigg has a stronger similarity with the boarding school, but to me it doesn’t carry the comparison anywhere. They’re both set in boarding schools and that’s that.
A lot of people think Harry Potter is way too similar to Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea novels.
Anyway, I like Gunnerkrigg Court and don’t care about Harry Potter.
John: Keep scrolling past this one. I’m going to toss a few more logs onto the fire.
peacedog: How do you define similarity between two pieces of fiction? I think the amount of material shared is important – like we share 99% of our DNA with chimps, for instance. You seem to believe that similarities are only relevant if they are very rare. But I’m taking these common tropes in aggregate, not individually.
Here are some more:
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone / The alchemy business in GC.
Snape/Jones was a comparison of very impassive teachers. Your unrequited love point is interesting, though.
Punishment for leaving school grounds, sneaking out to socialize.
Secret chambers.
Anyway, I don’t pretend that the HP parallels constitute a fatal flaw. It’s just interesting that this kind of thing happens to kitchen-sink style trope splicers like Siddell. (Also, I haven’t yet figured out what’s so alluring about the magic boarding school formula. Maybe it’s the fact that it is its own world, which can be simultaneously familiar and bizarre.)
I am confuzzled.
Because he said “Andrew Smith” and the final frame they didn’t all look confused, but rather just one of them did? Me too.
After all this, she doesn’t get chosen to succeed her mother as medium, even after cracking Jones’s shell. I wonder if Coyote will have anything to say about this? Actually, maybe the Court noticed that Coyote obviously has plans for Carver and is thus thwarting them…
The Court is weaponizing Smitty. Things always work out for him, and if the things that always work out for him are the things the Court wants to happen, well then.
I just think it’s odd that by the end of the strip the kids STILL didn’t realize she didn’t get picked. A cool twist though, indeed. Such a great tale!
I’m wondering if reality has been warped by a certain someone with a vested interest in Annie being the medium. Note how the last panel has no dialog with Reynardine turning. We may be getting a bit of interaction between R. and the visitors from the forest while everyone else in the court is frozen.
I took the last panel to be them all realizing that their expectations were not fulfilled and freezing as they adjust to the shock…Kind of like Wile E. Coyote realizing he’s in mid-air after running off a cliff. Just simple comedy.
No, I don’t believe so - they look the same in the last two panels. They simply never realize it was Andrew that was announced, for some reason. And now that Jonathan pointed it out, it’s odd they stop speaking mid-sentence…
Yeah, I was bracing myself for the reveal as to whether the court would announce Parley or Smitty to be the medium. Annie has proven to be way too uncontrollable to get the nod.
I think this is more Wile E. than Coyote. When Coyote freezes time, it looks like this: Gunnerkrigg Court - Page 823 - By Tom Siddell.
The thing that Jones was recommending Carver for must be some other office/title/task, more sleight of hand.
Edit: Hopefully not the next Guardian of the Annan Waters.
Edit edit: Or that Parley is being set up for that and sending Smitty is the first step. <eyes>
Wow, way to jump to a horrifying conclusion for Parley that I never considered. Making her part of a cyclic sacrifice of lovestruck swordswomen would certainly veer off into horror-story land.
There are so many darkly-tinged notes in this story already, although it would be new to actually lose an established character in such a way.
We know that Jones recommended a “she” for a position:
after which the headmaster said that they would have to “choose a date to announce the next medium.” Here, though, Jones notes that “things will be changing” for Antimony shortly:
Everyone assumed that Antimony and the Forest were to whom that referred but now it seems that isn’t the case. She does seem to be chosen for something based on the above. When Jones tells Annie of the danger to come, Jeanne is in the frame. It will be a very interesting strip tomorrow.
One of the things I think Tom has done very well has been making Coyote into a truly chilling creature. Charming enough to think he’s just a scamp with a little bit of Spankies! … and then suddenly Annie’s wrist or Y.'s memories show exactly how terrifying he can be. We’ll see what happens in tomorrow’s strip, but it is clear that both the Court and the Forest are capable of abominations.
and SKA-DOOOSH. Something is afoot, alright, and I still have my money on it having to do with whatever is going on down by the Annan.