I have been reading Daredevil for a few years. While both Bendis’ and Brubaker’s runs were well written and had fantastic art, every other arc dealt with one or all of the following.
-Matt is doing what it takes to protect the city. But he’s going too far! But what choice does he have!
-The Kingpin is gone. Now he’s back! But he’s powerless. But he’s secretly pulling all the all the strings!
-Matt needs a personal life or he’ll go crazy. But being daredevil is putting them all in danger! But if he dosen’t have a personal life he is not a person! But they’re all going to die!
I read the first issue of Andy Diggle’s run, and it looks like more of the same.
Sorry DD it’s over. Call me if you get a fresh perspective.
I have known about and avoiding this manga sequel from TokyoPop to the classic Jim Henson movie the Labyrinth, for a few years now. The Labyrinth is one of those special movies that I have watched many times since I was a child, and treasure as much now as then. So when, around five years ago I stumbled across the listing on Amazon for the first volume, I was taken aback. I could not help but be worried that the people producing this series would miss the charm and wonder of the original. I did not even want to take the chance that it would disappoint, so I left it alone. I am not sure what made me check if the library had them now, but I am glad I did. No, author Jake T. Forbes has not quite created a story as brilliant as the movie. He has crafted a narrative that pays homage to the original, while cutting it’s own path through the Labyrinth. This time it is Toby, whom you may remember as the baby that heroine Sarah had to rescue from the Goblin King, who is the teenage hero. He finds himself pulled into the Labyrinth and makes friends both new to the audience as well as familiar ones. His adventures in the first volume while not boring, do feel a little like a retread. However it is as the story progresses and we learn of King Jareth’s designs for Toby and his motives and also as we get a broader view of the world he inhabits that I found my self truly invested in the story. Volume 3 took the plot in a direction I was not expecting, and of course left us with quite the cliffhanger. There is one more volume in the works however it looks like the books have been released at least two years apart and number three just came out last May, so I will be waiting for the conclusion for a while. I especially appreciated that the author planted references to other Jim Henson fantasy works, such as the Dark Crystal, Fraggle Rock and the Story Teller. Jim Henson’s work from the Muppets and beyond, was my very first fandom and it is still my most favorite. Sorry Joss, I love you too! I am really glad my fears for this project were completely unfounded. If I have a small complaint, it is that the creatures that were created just for the manga don’t look like they were created by the same person who created the creatures for the film. And of course they weren’t, Brian Froud designed the firies, Ludo, and Hoggle for the film, while Chris Lie is the artist on the manga. It also would be nice if the series was in color, but then it would take even longer to be published. The series has it’s own website and forums at goblin.net.
Susie has picked American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, and The Eternal Smile by Gene Luen Yang, and Derek Kirk Kim. We will be discussing them on August 16 at 2 pm
My mega talented coworker Sally did this amazing Batman mural for a lucky kid’s bedroom wall.
So I have two questions for you. The first is, what comic themed mural assuming you had the space and property would you want? Second, what comic or cartoon themed mural would your eight year old self want? Now I think I would go for Fray in free fall surrounded by flying cars. At eight it would have been either Gem and the Holograms in concert, or the Thundercats in a group pose. And you?
We have allready seen two Dark Horse presents Dr. Horrible Comics. One featuring Captain Hammer (in print), the next was about Moist (in print). And now here is the third. Written by Zach Whedon
I really hope to see more of these, they really flesh out the world of the web series. Of course I would love to see a sequel to the musical, and now that Dollhouse, How I Met Your Mother, and Castle are all on summer hiatus it may happen.
I picked up Paul Hornschemeier’s Mother Come Home from the library because I vaguely remembered someone somewhere giving it a good review. I found it to be a profoundly sad and beautiful study of how children process loss. The core of the story is about seven or eight year old boy coping with the death of his mother and the resulting mental breakdown of his father. A subject that hits rather close to home for me. The loss of mother of the title has uprooted his father from reality, he loses track of anything other than his overwhelming grief, and the boy, Thomas finds himself in the care taker role. Thomas creates his own myths to explain his altered life, and clings to invented rituals to anchor himself in his now unstable world. The climax of the story involves his need to fix his father’s problem, and therefore fix his own life, which fails utterly. The book is narrated by an older Thomas, and it is his more mature understanding of the events that he is relating that keeps the story from being completely devastating. The art suits the story perfectly. It is straightforward and grim but at the same time innocent and childlike. I would recommend this to anyone who would claim graphic novels can’t have the same emotional impact of prose.
I saw the movie this week and I wil write about eventualy, but I had to post this video I just ran into on you tube. Watchmen cartoon
It is brilliant! And not that implausible, I recall cartoons being made from innapropriate source material pretty regularly, although none of them spring to mind just this second.
I love this strip! It is about a young Swedish couple who are having a baby, and probably shouldn’t be. Given that Anders can’t stop getting involved with other women, and Maria can’t seem to grow up. It is wickedly funny and terribly authentic. The art work some how manages to be simplified, and sophisticated at the same time. I was really tempted to buy an original page, but unfortunately the I did not get my tax return before the half off sale ended. It should be mentioned that even though the people are drawn in a very non photo realistic manner, 60% of the strips have included extremely explicit sex, that is probably not safe for work.
This strip is only a few months old. It follows the adventures of a very naive young girl who was raised by nuns. It is drawn in the style of kwai(cutesy) anime. Claire wants nothing more in life than to be the best nun ever, while still getting to indulge in all things sweet and cuddly. Unfortunately for her a sexy messenger from God disrupts her cloistered existence. I am totally digging it!
It is a slice of life styled strip centered around a gay male couple and their circle of friends. It is not as serialized as the previous two I mentioned, going with the more traditional 3 to 4 panels leading to a gag format. It is consistently funny and done by local Chicago artist.
I am too lazy to do the research myself, maybe you guys can help me figure out, whatever happened to…?
1) Serenity: the Shepherd’s Tale. When Dark Horse announced this three issue mini series that would finally document Shepherd Book’s past, they said it would be out Fall 2008. I have yet to see it listed in there upcoming lists.
2)Savant and Creote. Gail Simone’s run on Bird’s of Prey produced some very cool new characters, such as Black Alice, and Misfit, both of whom are still showing up in the series pages. However my favorite, the duo of Savant and Creote have completely disappeared. Savant is a highly intelligent, extremely unstable, misogynist pretty boy. Creote is his extremely loyal bodyguard/manservant/sidekick/husband? Despite the fact that their first appearance involved them holding Black Canary prisoner, Oracle was able to turn them into allies and ably used their skills to help her ever growing team. Savant eventually fled since Oracle’s reforming of him had seriously disturbed his calm, Creote being completely devoted of course went with him. I assumed they would be back at some point, but that was the last I saw of them. I hope some writer revives them. They might make an interesting addition to Gail’s own Wonder Woman run.
3) The next arc of Sky Doll. Sky Doll was probably my favorite discovery of last year. I even bought the hardback trade when it was released even though I knew there was no material in it other than the contents of the three issues already published. I want to collect it as books. I am dying to know what happens next, but there has been no sign of when Marvel will bring out the second series.
I was reading the Graveyard Book last night (and boy is it good), and I also noticed that the names of a pair of police men were Simon and Tam. Which just happens to be the name of Firefly’s handsome and proper/desperate fugitive doctor. So that got me wondering if it is an intentional reference. And if it is, that is cool! Which got me to thinking if he is a fan of Firefly, perhaps he is a fan of Joss. Since I can’t imagine anything making me happier than Neil Gaiman working on a Joss Whedon project. So on the theory that if you shout something loudly enough into the Internet it will actually happen, and so this post can actually be about comics. I am hereby announcing NEIL GAIMAN WILL BE WRITING AN ARC OF BUFFY SEASON EIGHT! Right, I hope that was loud enough. Let the completely untrue rumors soar! You can’t take the lie from me.
Florence wrote a while back that stories about faerie changelings were her literary comfort food. Now I am going to discuss mine. The magic land tale, it is a close cousin of the changeling tale, and they are often intertwined. The definition of a magic land tale for me is is not simply a story that takes place in another world that is more fantastical than ours ie: Middle Earth, or Loyd Alexander’s Prydain. The essential ingredient to a magic land tale for me, is that the protagonist, most often a young or adolescent girl (though sometimes it’s a boy or a group of children) is from our world or at least our world as was when the tale was written. The formula varies but the ones I am most familiar with has the protagonist unintentionally transported to a strange new world, and once there she will make strange new friends, embark on some sort of quest often to procure her way home, and prove herself in ways she could not have dreamed. That is a magic land tale to me, and like Florence with her changelings I will read any book or watch any movie that seems to adhere to this formula in some way, and I am rarely disappointed by result.
Before I get into the story the Abadazad books tell, I’ll tell the story of the books. And probably rant a bit. Feel free to skip is part if you are only interested in the content of the story, I will get to that eventually. I first became aware of them about five years ago, which was before thay were even books. I came across article about a new comic book series by J.M. DeMatteis that was firmly rooted in the magic land tradition. J. M. DeMatteis is the author of one of my all time favorite books (comic or otherwise) Moonshadow, add in a magic land and I was sold before the first issue ever came out. Unfortunately after just three issues had come out, and just as the story had gotten rolling, the company relaeasing Abadazad, Crossgen went out of business. Cut to two years later while browsing the all ages section of my local comic shop where I find Abadazad volumes one and two, and imediatly snap them up. It seems once Crossgen was defunct DeMatteis and artist Mike Ploog shopped them around eventually selling the rights to Disney’s publishing division, where it was decided to reformat them as a series of short novels aimed at children ala the Spiderwick Chronicles. After plowing through the first two volumes (book one basically being a retelling of issues 1 through 3, book two containing unbefore published materiel) I preordered the third volume on Amazon. Six months later I got an email informing me the order was cancelled since the book was not being published. I figured that was that. But perhaps a year later I found book three for sale on Amazon once again, so again I ordered it. And It arrived this summer. A few days ago I read it, and was sucked in all over again. So I went to Amazon to see if and when book 4 would be out. I found a title for a fourth book but no date for publication. So I finally did a search for information on what was going with these books. It seems that the series was planned to be around ten books long, but after the first two did not sell up to expectations, book three was delayed and then published only oversees. Then the series was completely cancelled with at least one more book written but unpublished. Suffice to say I am bit upset I went to trouble to find book three with very little chance of ever getting to the ultimate conclusion. I also feel that Disney did little to support the series in the first place. After all, if someone like me who was allready sold on the series did not know it was being published untill I found it at an independent store, how was anyone new going to become aware of it. I never saw it at any of the big chains. Just after the cancellation anouncement there was talk of returning it to comic book form, but nothing official has been announced since then. I guess I will just have to be content that it will remain open ended.
And that is a shame because as far as magic land tales go, this one manages to be entirely it’s own, while paying homage to many that have come before. It centers on a thirteen year old girl named Kate, who is an loner with a sad past. Maybe it was Kate’s bitter, antisocial attitude that scared off potential readers (or their parents), although this not an entirely new archetype for the magic land protagonist (Meg Murry holla!). Kate’s troubles stem, mostly, from the disappearance five years earlier of her younger brother Matty. Before he disappeared Matty was Kate’s constent companion and only friend. Matty had loved the Abadazad books a {fictional} series of children’s book from the turn of the century that seem to have been inspired by the Oz series. Even the name of the Abadazad author Franklin O’ Davies appears to be a tribute to Oz’s creator L. Frank Baum, and an indirect reference to J.M. Barrie, who was inspired to write Peter Pan by the Davies family. Once Matty disappears Kate withdraws from the world and rejects the trappings of childhood, especially any thing to do with Abadazad. Naturally she finds herself transported there, with aid from her very old, some what batty neighbor who claims to be the actual Little Martha, the sweet as sugar herione of the books. Once there she finds that Davies changed quite a few details to make the books more palatable, and the inhabitants do not look like the illustrations she grew up with. She also discovers that Matty is being held prisoner there. Finding him is the ultimate goal of the books, but there are many freinds to make, and villains to thwart on the way. It is a classic magic land adventure yet it feels fresh. If I have a complaint, other than the publishing woes, it would be the art. Mike Ploog’s illustrations are inventive, and vibrant but his style is very cartoonish, which feels a bit out of place in book which so tries to invoke classic children’s literature. I feel like the job might be better to suited to someone like P.Craig Russell, or Charles Vess. Also at times we get to see pages from the original Davies books, and Ploog does these illustrations as well, he changes the look of the charecters, but the tone does not seem all that differnt from what we see of the real Abadazad. These though are minor quibbles for me though, and he has done a great job bringing both the human and Zadians to life. I just hope they story is finished somehow.
First, here is a cute fanart comic of Captain Hammer fighting Captain Tightpants. I wonder when we will see a Captain Hammerpants?
And here is the twentieth anniversary of Sandman (Neil Gaiman version) poster that debuted at comic con last week
33 artists from the comic’s run contributed. Geek pop quiz! Can you identify by name all the characters shown? Bonus points for identifying the artist. The prize? Pride in a well trained memory.
I have been meaning to talk about about this one for a while. I picked it up at a $5 trades table at Wizard World. I recognized it a s something I had been intrigued by when it first came out, but not enough to buy. I did not quite remember what is was about. Looking it over I surmised that it was the Dark Wallcrawler Returns. After reading it, I was not wrong. It has an awful lot in common with Frank Miller’s classic Batman tale. It takes place in a dark possible future where an aged and haunted Spiderman returns from a long absence. It even features a spunky young girl leading an army of children. The scratchy art, and color pallet is similar as well. However all that does is for me is to underscore some fundamental differences between the characters. Even a scarred and suicidal Peter parker is saner than Batman. Because in the suit or out Peter is always Peter. Where as Batman is always Batman. Not that I believe Bruce Wayne no longer exists inside the Bat, he just is deeply buried. Peter is just under the mask, and he is always aware of how crazy his dual identity can be. Perspective is not Batman’s strong suit. This story is not as original as the Dark Knight Returns was, but is still a well told Spiderman story. And certainly worth the five bucks.
I just got back from seeing Hellboy: the Golden Army. I had been planning to see it because I had liked (but not loved) the first one and because director Gulliermo Del Toro had truly impressed me with Pan’s Labyrinth. But of the summer movies I had put on my to see list (such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Iron Man, Wall-E, Hancock, and Dark Knight) I was not anticipating it the way I was some of the others. Which is why I was so pleasantly surprised to have loved it. I mean really loved it! I mean gasping with shock, laughing hysterically, wishing for a pause button to get a look at all the cool creatures stuffed in a scene, and bouncing giddily waiting for whatever it threw at me, loved it! It was so geared to my sensibilities, reminding me at times of Star Wars, the Princess Bride, the Muppets, Crouching Tiger, LOTR; that I don’t know if people who don’t share my tastes would love it as much. In fact of the thirty or so other people in the theater only a man a few seats away from me (who happened to have a fidgety, but enthusiastic, six year old with him) was not just the only one laughing and ooing at the same places I was, but also the only one displaying any kind of reaction at all. Perhaps it was just a subdued crowd, I certainly did not hear any one complaining or dissing the film on the way out, but nobody was praising it either. I am sure it will not beat Hancock at the box office, which is sad in it’s own right because it is a far superior film. I think it is more sad that most six year olds will be seeing Wall-E (which I did think was excellent) for the second or third time instead of Hellboy 2. Because it was seeing similar movies at that tender age that had me grow up to be the kind of person who loves them at this advanced and tender age. I definitely recommend it, if only to gage what people who are not me thought of it. Also I now am very glad that Del Toro has signed on to direct the Hobbit. I am only sorry that Peter Jackson’s team did such a good job of establishing the look of Middle Earth, because I would have loved to see what Del Toro would have come up with from scratch.
…dary! Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog has a website. So far all that is there is this glowing picture of Neil Patrick Harris all Dr. Horrible suited up. For those of you have no idea what the @#%$ I am talking about, here is what you need to know.
Joss Whedon announced today, special Internet Musical.
Whedon reports that during the WGA strike he started writing the musical which will be a limited internet series. Each of the three episodes will be approximately ten minute each.
Co-writers for the internet feature are Joss’ brothers Zack and Jed and Jed’s Fiancé Maurissa. The writing has been completed and shooting commenced today.
“It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.” Says Whedon.
“Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” will star Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, Felicia Day as Penny and a cast of dozens.
I know! Awsome! There has yet to be a premiere date set but, Joss has said it will be before Comicon, which I think is in August. And with the website up there is further proof that it is actually happening. I am giddy!
I love comic books, that is pretty obvious, but I think I may like these things even more.
1) Marvel/DC
No I am not talking about the rival comic publishers, or their occasional cross company crossovers. I am talking about the youtube webseries starring action figures of both companies most popular characters. It started as a parody of, the hi I am a mac and I am a PC comercials. And it was funny. Superman played the uptight PC role and Spiderman was the laid back Mac. It worked as a parody of the comercial as well as poking fun at the characters and their respective companies. Observe
It is clear that the creator Some Random Guy, has a deep affection for the characters he has borrowed. As the series progressed more characters were worked in and the format shifted from the mac ads formula to a narrative. The Universe threatening crisis that concluded the first season was far more exciting and engaging to me than anything being published by either company right now. The second season Marvel/DC: Happy Hour has just started. I must admit I was more giddy about this than about the upcoming release of the Dark Knight.
This webcomic strip is currently on a long term hiatus, presumably so Matt Parkinson the creator can find work that will pay. The archive is definitely worth taking a look at. The first month or two of strips can be skipped unless you want to see how far his skill as a stripist(?) stripper(?) progressed. The premise is simple, all the marvel characters are children that go to school together. The charecthers are pretty adorable my favorite being the hyper and a bit dimwitted Speedball
Sometimes the strips are simple gags like Beast from X-Men morphing into Cookie Monster at the sight of a plate cookies. Other times they are dissections of the often ridiculously complicated Marvel continuity. Here is a strip featuring the kids from the school across the road.
3) Cat Tales. This a long runing series of fanfiction. There are currently 5 books and at least 2 spinoff projects. So far I have only read the first seven chapters of book one. It centers around a relationship between Batman and Catwoman, but whole batcast is featured. It is very well written and a pretty funny and compelling look into their heads. IUt also is conveniently available to download in PDF, making it easy to transfer to portable devices.
So that is it, my favorite comic related stuff. Ooooh! One more. Larry Niven’s essay Man Of Steel, Women of Kleenex. It was written in the seventies and deals with the problematic realities of procreation for Superman and Lois Lane. It’s funny y’all. It was collected in his short story collection All the Myriad Ways.
Lot’s of stuff to write about! 1)Last christmas Florence, and Marty got me the first volume of Absolute Sandman. It was awesome, the second volume is even better. The Absolute line (yes the name does make it sound like a promotion for Vodka) from DC is basically a repackaging of some of their most acclaimed series, in oversized, beutifully designed hard covered books. Usually the art is recolored, and the back of the book is jammed with extra content. I usually don’t think it is worth buying a second copy of something if the story has not changed, and other Sandman I don’t think I will (although Kingdom Come is tempting). With Sandman they have reprinted three tpbs, per volume. Volume 2 contains the Seasons of Mists, a Game of You arcs, and most of the short stories from the Fables and Reflections collection. Though volume 1 had some really great issues, this is the period in Sandman in my opinion where it came into it’s stride both with the story and the art. SoM, is an epic that feels like an ancient myth that no one had transcribed yet. Lucifer decides to quit being the adversary, kicks everyone out of Hell, leaves locking the door behind him. He gives the key to Dream, whom he had previously vowed to destroy but now just hopes it will make his life a little difficult. Which it does, as figures from many different pantheons (religious as well as comic book) arrive in the Dreaming seeking the deed to Hell. Reading it again now, it is amazing how a few small interactions in these early issues set in motion the conclusion of the whole series. At one time Season of Mists was my favorite arc, but now I feel a Game of You surpasses it. It is a much smaller scale story than most of the other large arcs, and though Morpheus id in it, he is mostly periphery. The main character is Barbie, who was a periphery character in the Dollhouse (collected in volume 1). She had at one time had a very vivid dream life, in which she was a princess in a magic world of talking animals called the Land. She has however stopped dreaming, and no longer remembers the Land. In her absence the Land has started to die and is under the thrall of a monster called the Cuckoo. Barbie does eventually return to the land and the it causes serous damage to the waking world. The story could just be another “magic land ” like Oz, or Wonderland, but the conclusion id entirely originally. The supporting cast Barbie’s neighbors: sweet transvestite, Wanda, lesbians Hazel and Foxglove, and the witch Thessaly (the only one to have any importance to the bigger story of Sandman), as well as the Land’s animals, giant dog creature Martin Tenbones, and Wilkinson a cynical rat wearing a trench-coat, are some of the most memorable in the whole series. These are the stories that where the art finally moves away from the typical horror comic style (overly lined faces, and colored in sickly purples and greens) . Despite having some of the most horrific scenes in the whole series, a man chained to rock in Hell having his chest repeatedly torn open, a pile of decapitated heads singing, the face torn from corpse nailed to wall happily chatting away with it’s wagging tongue. It was well worth spending seventy dollars for this excellent new printing. 2) I also read echo number 1. It is Terry Moore’s new creator owned comic. It appears to be his take on super heroes. Of course the heroine is one of his beautiful girls. the first issue is a simple origin story. Girl taking pictures in the dessert, inadvertently finds herself in the path of a explosion, gain a super powered suit. That is all that has happened so far. Except that we know that the owners of the suit seriously nasty, killing the previous wearer of the suit (hence the explosion) just to test it’s durability. I know in few issues this is going to have completely sucked me in, and the story will be any thing but simple. This is from the creator of Strangers in Paradise after all. 3) I have totally fallen in Love the album Super Secret from the band Ookla the Mok. They are by far the geekiest band I have every encountered. Nearly every high energy song song is a packed with references to comic books, old school science fiction, or alien abductions. A sample of one of there lyrics from the song Theme from Super Skrull “He can turn one leg invisible, which is not all that practical. Unless you are quite gullible, you won’t get fooled by Super Skrull!” My favorite song on the album is called Stop Talking About Comic Books or I will Kill You, but the one I can not stop humming is Guggenheim Love. The songs are not only catchy, they are hilarious. 4) In a couple of hours i will head over to my local comic shop and pick up a months a worht of issues. Including issues of, Buffy, Angel, Runaways, Fables, Astro City, and the first issue of Serenity: Better Days! Woo hoo!That is all.
When I read the last issue of Y the Last Man, I had this feeling of deja vu. I felt to me like the last chapter of Lord of the Rings. Both are basically a really long epilogue. All the plot threads have been tied up and the story is pretty much over. They serve to tell us what happened to the heroes once the adventure has finished and both give a bittersweet view of what happens to heroes once the adventure is over. The issue begins sixty years after the previous issue ended. The human race has tentatively recovered from the plague that killed all creatures with a Y Chromosome, back in issue one. A vaccine has been developed to prevent the plague, and cloning has advanced to the point that the population is on the rise. Whether the old fashioned way of making babies will make much of a come back is uncertain. As for Yorick Brown, the only survivor of the plague (along with his helper monkey Ampersand), he is an old man. He had become an important symbol of hope to what had remained of humanity. His daughter now in her sixties is the president of France and seeing him grow bitter and suicidal in his old age, fears the affect should his condition become public. He is locked up in straight jacket and kept company by several, far too well behaved, clones of Ampersand. The only possible way to bring him out of his funk, she believes, is to have him spend time with one of his many clones. Through a series of flashbacks ( that to the reader are still flash forwards) we see what became of the supporting cast, and it is indeed bittersweet. Each one eventually dying . He is once again the lone survivor, this time of his makeshift family instead of his gender. The young Yorick clone is twenty-two and the spitting image of Yorick from issue one. But this man is as much a cheap imitation as the helpful Ampersands copies. It is clear that what formed Yorick into the man we have grown so fond of over the last fifty-nine issues, is the journey he took and the relationships he formed during those fifty-nine issues. It is telling, and fitting, that the one flashback we get to happier times, takes place amid rotting corpses and eminent danger. The last page hits just the right note. Leaving you to decide if Yorick is Frodo going at last to the the Grey Havens, or Sam returning to his family sad but content. Maybe both. So while I hate to see this series end, I can’t wait to find out what Brian K. Vaughn will do next
, for a few years now. The Labyrinth is one of those special movies that I have watched many times since I was a child, and treasure as much now as then. So when, around five years ago I stumbled across the listing on Amazon for 
, I was taken aback. I could not help but be worried that the people producing this series would miss the charm and wonder of the original. I did not even want to take the chance that it would disappoint, so I left it alone. I am not sure what made me check if the library had them now, but I am glad I did. No, author Jake T. Forbes has not quite created a story as brilliant as the movie. He has crafted a narrative that pays homage to the original, while cutting it’s own path through the Labyrinth. This time it is Toby, whom you may remember as the baby that heroine Sarah had to rescue from the Goblin King, who is the teenage hero. He finds himself pulled into the Labyrinth and makes friends both new to the audience as well as familiar ones. His adventures in the first volume while not boring, do feel a little like a retread. However it is as the story progresses and we learn of King Jareth’s designs for Toby and his motives and also as we get a broader view of the world he inhabits that I found my self truly invested in the story. Volume 3 took the plot in a direction I was not expecting, and of course left us with quite the cliffhanger. There is one more volume in the works however it looks like the books have been released at least two years apart and number three just came out last May, so I will be waiting for the conclusion for a while. I especially appreciated that the author planted references to other Jim Henson fantasy works, such as the Dark Crystal, Fraggle Rock and the Story Teller. Jim Henson’s work from the Muppets and beyond, was my very first fandom and it is still my most favorite. Sorry Joss, I love you too! I am really glad my fears for this project were completely unfounded. If I have a small complaint, it is that the creatures that were created just for the manga don’t look like they were created by the same person who created the creatures for the film. And of course they weren’t, Brian Froud designed the firies, Ludo, and Hoggle for the film, while Chris Lie is the artist on the manga. It also would be nice if the series was in color, but then it would take even longer to be published. The series has it’s own website and forums at 
), the next was about 
). And now here is the third. Written by Zach Whedon
