Jim Henson's The StoryTeller Witches: Part 1 of 4 "The Magic Swan Goose and the Lord of the Forest"

Critical Review of "Jim Henson's The StoryTeller Witches: Part 1"

Early last month, a new comic series began as homage to Jim Henson's 1988 live action/puppet children's series, The StoryTeller. For a twist on the classic formula, Archaia Comics, who publishes this monthly installment, has decided that each of the four comics will not only be retellings of classic fairytales, but that they should all surround witches. The first installment, "The Magic Swan Goose and the Lord of the Forest" tells the story of a young girl who must save her kingdom from the evil Lord of the Forest.

This comic book initially caught my eye because of the elaborate water colour painting used as the cover image. The intricacy of this piece was unlike anything I had previously seen or read from any typical comic shop. In my opinion, the usual Batman and Superman comics tend to be more pencil drawn and sketched, and this comic was obviously using water colours; a whole new medium. For me, this new style was enough of a difference to convince me that this was the monthly comic I would pursue for the remainder of this class.

After leaving the comic shop, I dove straight into the reading of this first "Tale" as it is called. The opening page quickly showed me that the water coloured paintings would be the medium used throughout the comic, and to great avail. This comic demonstrates that soft lines and artfully deliberate colour choices can help to set a style, tone and mood for the entire comic to come.

This comic's main concern seems to be with artful recreations of classic fairytales and the use of a softer colour palette than with typical comic style. This comic is not separated in the usual panel to panel style, and thus may not fall under what Scott McCloud classifies as a true comic book. Many of the pages in this book are almost set up in a single panel, with images interlaid overtop of other images. The effect of this is similar to reading a typical comic. You begin to read at the top of the page and progress down the page to uncover that a set amount of time has elapsed and sometimes there is a new scene taking place. This is done throughout the book, creating a more whimsical feeling and a sense that this comic is first and foremost about magic, and that it can take whichever form it damn well would like to! The action still happens in this comic, just not at the expense of having panels depict the time and action in between. Each page has its own scene laid out, like with Wolk's pregnant moment: you can piece together what happened right before this scene, and what will happen after this scene all by the images given in the single scene/panel. This is how the comic relies on moving the action forward. This is most obvious in the following page, where we are finally introduced to the Lord of the Forest,

We are given one image, one scene and one immaculately painted image. The image does, however, contain a lot of description given about who The Lord of the Forest is, and what he does in the forest so that you are able to piece together his character in your mind. This is obviously heavily reliant on the reader's own experiences with other multimodal mediums and intertextuality. We are all able to determine that this is the evil character of the comic because of the description about him as myth known because he has helped the forest to grow dark. Through intertextuality, this single image is able to convey a lot of paramount information about the story and to move the plot forward just by giving us a single image of the Lord of the Forest and to describe his life in the forest as something talked about by "lonely voices in the wind." As reader's, we rely on intertextuality to be able to pinpoint an "evil" character. We need to have some kind of prior knowledge of what makes a character evil in terms of regular fairytales and folklore; this intertextuality is what helps us to evaluate many aspects of this text.

Finally, this comic is interesting to me in terms of spatiality. Because each page is made up of its own image and its own panels over other panels, the spatial nature of this comic is rather different than your typical comic. Often the gutter is still on the page, but as more of a border to the main image on the page. Almost as often as it is included, there is part of the image bursting out of the gutter, as seen above. It is almost as if the gutter is only placed on the page to break another convention of the typical comic book. In this comic book, the images are bounding off of the page and changing the regular shapes and dimensions typically seen in comics.

Throughout this "Tale" there is also no white area. In a typical comic book, there are the panels, surrounded by the gutters and they are surrounded by white area. In The StoryTeller Witches, there is no area of the page without colour. At each opportunity, the artist, S.M. Vidaurri, splashes the page with more colours and designs which conform to the rich colour palette he has chosen for this book.

In this comic book, the colour palette is mostly of light pastel pinks, reds, purples, blues and greens. These colours are used to demonstrate the power of the water colour painting and also to allow the tone of royalty to come through. As these colours are often associated with royalty. This is, after all, a comic about a young princess who is saving her kingdom from an evil rabbit with horns. There must be an air of whimsy throughout the entire book. I believe it is effectively used through the entire first installment of The StoryTeller Witches.

Overall, I really enjoyed this installment into the homage of Jim Henson series of The StoryTeller. The idea to focus each fairytale on witches is different and innovative for this kind of story. I think that this comic is effective in laying out a kind of mood and tone which prepares you for the following comic coming out mid-October. This comic is beautifully created and I am just as eager to read the new "Tale". Though each installment in this four book series is unrelated in story, they do each follow a story about a witch and are all done in water coloured paintings. It will be interesting to see how the new installment looks, because along with a new story, this new installment will be done by a new artist. More to come.