The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles No. 1
Buy Me Toys
A new fantasy comic you shouldn't judge by its cover: The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles. The first issue comes with two painted covers, one by Joe Jusko featuring an ax-wielding blonde being ambushed by Oz-ites on a yellow brick road, another by Phil Noto featuring a buxom blonde and equally buxom brunette surrounded by headshots of L. Frank Baum characters. The story, by Ben Avery and artist Casey Heying, posits that a grown-up Dorothy and grown-up Alice live together in a Chicago apartment, thinking their public-domain literary adventures were simply the products of their fevered imaginations.
At least until flamingos, the Tweedles and Rollers (those creepy things that chased Fairuza Balk around in 1985's Return to Oz) begin showing up. Turns out that a new Wicked Witch is destroying Oz and Wonderland, and it's up to our heroines to save the day, as a pistol-packing Wizard of Oz explains.
It's not as fun as it sounds, partly because Avery and Heying are playing it completely straight.
The pair obviously did their homework, going way beyond the movie and deep into Baum's character catalog to populate their Oz, but unlike Alan Moore in his League of Extraordinary Gentleman, the granddaddy of intertextual comics based on past literary works, they don't play by the interior rules of the works they're messing with.
Alice, for example, should be 141 and British, not the coffee-shop singer/songwriter with a white rabbit tattoo on her hip seen here. Dorothy's a bit younger, but still 106. Of course, they probably wouldn't have made for very sexy comic book covers.
Return to Labyrinth Vol. 1
Tokyopop
As a kid-friendly graphic novel series set in the world of a 1986 kids' movie, Return to Labyrinth doesn't seem to be working with the best possible business plan.
Those of us who loved Jim Henson's Muppet-powered fantasy epic as kids are now pushing 30, and the simple storytelling of this comic can be hard to lose one's grown-up self in. And the chief pleasures Henson's film offers adults can't be adapted into a comic book: The impressive puppetry, the sight of David Bowie revisiting his glam years to play the goblin king and a fresh-faced, 16-year-old Jennifer Connelly.
Those in Return to Labyrinth's target demographic, meanwhile, have probably never seen a Muppet in the wild, and certainly not this side of Sesame Street.
Pretty much a real-time sequel to the film, the comic finds Toby, the infant Connelly's character was struggling through Bowie's maze to rescue, now a mostly grown-up high-schooler, whom the goblin king never quite lost interest in. He's been assisting Toby behind the scenes all his life, granting his every wish, which usually leads to trouble for Toby.
When Toby finally renounces his help, a goblin steals a history paper from him and takes off to the labyrinth, forcing our hero to chase him down. Along the way we meet most of the characters from the original (Hoggle, Sir Didymus, those things that take their own heads off) and some new ones that fit quite naturally into the world's aesthetic.
It's not the completely empty exercise that Disney's many needless direct-to-DVD sequels to their animated fairy tales are, and writer Bryan Jakes does his best to exploit the Labyrinth's fantasy-element overlap with Japanese manga. But it's a decidedly juvenile work.
The black-and-white art comes courtesy of Chris Lie, who strips down the highly detailed character designs of the film a little too far, until they look like refugees from an old Labyrinth coloring book. It's a shame, because the cover art, by Kouyu Shurei, is a gorgeous piece of work, perfectly finding the balance between the film's designer Bryan Froud and modern manga.
Maybe Tokyopop will do better next time. They have two more Jim Henson Company series to unveil yet, based on The Dark Crystal and MirrorMask.