Muppet Sherlock Holmes by Patrick Storck

Since today is the birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I thought it would be a good time to review a comic book adaptation of his work with this graphic novel by The Muppets. Our Book-a-Day blog has reviewed some of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books before and we have also reviewed some Muppets books before — so, much like Reese’s peanut butter cups, here are two great things that go great together. In true Muppet fashion, they have put their own humorous spin on one of Doyle’s most famous lines: “Once you eliminate the rational, whatever remains, no matter how absurd, must be the Muppets.”

This graphic novel collects four of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories with Gonzo the Great as the world’s greatest detective and Fozzie Bear as his loyal companion, Dr. Watson, who narrates the stories. Inspector Lestrade is played by Kermit the Frog, and many of the large cast of Muppet characters also make appearances throughout the stories. The first story is The Speckled Band, a classic locked room mystery, which even contains a 19th century version of the Veterinarian’s Hospital sketch from The Muppet Show. The second story to be re-told by Gonzo and crew is A Scandal in Bohemia featuring Miss Piggy as the intriguing Irene Adler — who was always referred to as the woman by Holmes. And, just as he did in the first season of The Muppet Show, Gonzo (Holmes) falls madly for Miss Piggy (Adler). The third story is The Red-Headed League in which shady goings on lead Holmes, Watson and Lestrade to don red wigs and take up menial clerical jobs with the league to try and deduce why their client, Mr. Wilson, is paid so handsomely for work that keeps him away from his shop during the day. The final tale is The Musgrave Ritual about an old aristocratic family legend which just may turn out to be some sort of treasure map. This version, however, concludes the final story with an abbreviated version of the events which occurred at Reichenbach falls (in the original Doyle story The Final Problem) with Holmes/Gonzo facing down his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty (played by Uncle Deadly).  The writers did an excellent job of re-telling these tales as faithfully as possible, while also putting the unique “Muppety” spin on them at the same time.

For you more serious Sherlock Holmes fans (who should still totally give this graphic novel a try), you can find many different collections of Doyle’s stories and novels in our catalog.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

P.S. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle shares his birthday with my wife, so Happy Birthday my love!

Summer of the Super-heroes: 2011

It’s seems that several summers over the past decade or so have earned the nickname “summer of the super-heroes” and 2011 can hold it’s own claim on that title, too.  So far, we’ve had Thor and X-Men First Class from Marvel, Green Lantern from DC, and soon we’ll have Captain America: The First Avenger, again, from Marvel as part of their multi-movie lead up to the mega-team up movie Avengers, due out next year. Anyway, I thought I’d take today’s blog to write about these popular summer movies, and some of the books they were based on.

“Thor” was the first big superhero movie of this summer (have you noticed that for Hollywood “Summer” starts in the beginning of May?) and the movie was well received by critics and movie audiences alike.  Unlike in the movie, when Thor of the comic books was first sent to Earth to learn humility by Odin, his spirit was placed into partially disabled human, Donald Blake.  Thor had no memories of his godhood and Blake’s personality was dominant until he came across Thor’s magic hammer and his body went from skinny runt to Norweigian god in order to punish evil-doers.  Thor and Blake shared their body and became much like other superheroes hiding amongst humanity with an alter-ego. While our libraries don’t own many graphic novels solely devoted to Thor (we have a few in our Kids Graphic Novel area, for the elementary school set), but you’ll also find him included in books starring The Avengers.

“X-Men: First Class” is a prequel to the other X-Men movies that came out in the early 2000′s and takes a look at young Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr, the man who becomes Magneto.  It’s mostly set in 1962 (one year before the X-Men comic debuted in real life) around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and has been critically acclaimed as well as grossing over $300 million.  X-Men has been one of Marvel’s most popular comic titles for many years, and it’s no surprise why with themes of good vs. evil, and humankind’s natural fear of the “other” – even when the others are also human.  Notable graphic novels to check out include: The X-Men First Class series, starting with Volume 1, any of The Essential X-Men series, and X-Men the Dark Phoenix Saga.

“Green Lantern” has certainly not impressed any of the critics, which probably in part led to it’s disappointing performance at the box office, although in my humble opinion the movie was not nearly as bad a critics are saying.  The movie did get Hal Jordan’s “origin story” pretty close to the comics, and the villain Parallax is not too far off the mark, either. The one part that may be tricky for some is learning that even though Hal Jordan was the first ever human to become a Green Lantern, there have been three other earth men (American, of course) to wield the emerald ring, too (John Stewart, Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner). Not to mention Alan Scott, the Golden Age Green Lantern, whose ring works differently than Hal’s and is not part of the Green Lantern Corps.  A few key titles to get you up to speed: The Green Lantern chronicles. Vol. 1, Green Lantern: Secret Origin, Green Lantern: Rebirth, and Green Lantern: The Greatest Stories Ever Told.

“Captain America” is certainly getting lots of buzz and hype (so did Green Lantern) and 97% of users on Rotten Tomatoes have said that they want to see it, but we’ll have to wait until July 22 to see how it fares with critics and audiences.  From the trailers and plot summaries online it seems that the movie is sticking with the origin story from the comics of the early 1940′s.  Scrawny Steve Rogers is denied entry into the Army and volunteers for a secret military project to create a super soldier to combat Hitler and the Nazis.  A few key stories include: Marvel Masterworks Captain America 1, The Essential Captain America series, starting with Volume 1, and be sure to see the Marvel Civil War series, which led up to the historic Death of Captain America in 2008.

So, what do you think?  Have you seen (and did you like) any of these movies? Are you a graphic novel reader? If so, which books are your favorites?  If not, would you consider reading one if you liked the movie on which it was based?

Promethea, vol. 1-5 by Alan Moore

Is Alan Moore, from Northampton, England, the most influential writer alive? Perhaps not, but for more than two decades, Moore has been a dominating force in his field – comics, or graphic novels – reaching millions of young, and not so young, minds.

In 1986, DC Comics began publishing Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen. When the story reached its conclusion in 1987, the landscape of comics was forever changed. Traditionally, the world of comics had been dominated by straightforward, linear stories. A flashback here and there might disturb the steady flow of time, but not in any significant way, and therefore the chaos and multi-perspective of Watchmen was quite sensational.

Fundamentally, Watchmen is a story about the end of the world, a fear that may be as old as life itself, but it is also a hope that possibly has been around as long as reflective thinking. Again and again in his career, Alan Moore has returned to the end of days, and the theme is the centerpiece of another story by Moore: Promethea (vol. 1-5).

The apocalypse of Watchmen is, however, different from the end of the world scenario of Promethea. Where Watchmen takes place in a dystopia, Promethea is a search for utopia. In Watchmen, it’s a matter of mass destruction caused by the belief in the supremacy of one rigid idea or another. The apocalypse of Promethea is an issue of hope. And while Watchmen is dominated by fanatics and the bloody consequences of their convictions, Promethea is a story where different faiths and belief systems are merged into one tolerant and multifaceted way. Moore tries to share a simple idea: everything that is, is part of the same body – in the old Hindu saying, everything is everything. The name of the body may vary – the world, the universe, God, the Tree of Life, the Brahma, the Buddha, the Christ, the Way – but it’s still a matter of one body, albeit a body with “a thousand faces” (to paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi).

Although the message is simple, Alan Moore presents it in a complicated manner. At times, Moore is an example of imagination running wild. Sometimes his creations contain too many events and too little substance, and while Watchmen was a tight piece of art, Promethea might be considered obese at times. It has been accused of being too talkative, and perhaps the story would have turned into a tell-not-show nightmare if it hadn’t been for the mind-bending artwork of if J.H. Williams, et al.

What has been neglected is the possibility that the talking heads often can be found in the most carefully illustrated parts of Promethea, and that there might be precise reasons for all the talk. The word-flooded pages slow the reader down; it is not possible to just glance at an image, burn through a few words, and then move on. The pace of the comic and the perception of time itself change – time is stretched out as words and images create a radiating union, and this is the body, spirit, and soul of comic book storytelling.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Muppet Snow White by Jesse Blaze Snider, et. al.

“It’s time to start the music, it’s time to light the lights! It’s time to get things started on The Muppet Show tonight!”  If you remember that catchy little tune, then you’ll love this new comic book style re-telling of the classic story of Snow White by your favorite Muppets.  Just as they did with other classic tales (the movies A Christmas Carol, & Treasure Island) the Muppets have now put their own hilarious spin on this beloved fairy tale.

Jacob & Wilhem Grimm (Gonzo & Rizzo) narrate the story for us, in which The Queen (Miss Piggy) discovers from her magic mirror (Fozzie Bear) that she is not the fairest of them all.  The woodsman (Sweetums) must take young Snow White (Spamela Hamderson – who is accompanied by her agent, Pepe the King Prawn) into the woods to kill her, but he can’t do it, so she ends up finding a nice little cottage to live in.  That cottage is occupied by the seven dwarfs (not dwarves, as the Muppets are keeping with the original spelling from Brothers Grimm), portrayed by the band Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem.  The band turns out to be one dwarf short, so they hold auditions.  Meanwhile, Prince Charming (Kermit) is about to meet Snow White when he’s captured by Queen Piggy who has somehow gotten ahold of the dragon from Sleeping Beauty.  Kermit is kept prisoner by the Queen – if Piggy can’t have her frog, then no one can – and Snow White eventually falls under the sleeping-in-a-death-like-trance spell, leading to a very long line of potential suitors who are each charged $1 for a kiss and the chance to be the one to break the spell.  Hilarity ensues throughout the story and just about all of your favorite Muppet characters make an appearance!

As with the best books, movies or TV shows for children, there’s plenty of humor for grown ups in here too.  In fact, there are several “in jokes” that only true Muppet fans would get and that will go right over the heads of kids (or almost anyone under 30).  I don’t want to spoil anything here, but suffice it to say that if you don’t know who the “Mahna Mahna” guy is, then you won’t get the joke he’s in. There are several other Muppet versions of classic “tales re-told” (Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, & King Arthur) in comic books form, and I hope we’ll see them all in the library one day.  But, for now, after having read this, maybe I’ll watch some of the original Muppet Show via Netflix while I eagerly await the new movie “The Muppets”, written by and starring Jason Segel, coming out this Thanksgiving.

“Why don’t you get things started” by reserving your copy of Muppet Snow White!

Tintin in Tibet by Hergé

Those who dream of snow for Christmas can turn to the pages of Hergé’s Tintin in Tibet – it is guaranteed to deliver. The whiteness of this comic book, or bande dessinée (“drawn strip”) as Hergé knew the art form, haunted its creator at night and the nightmare the story deals with is that of isolation and loneliness – thus the vast, snow-covered mountains of the Himalayas and the existence of its legendary snowman, the yeti, or migou.

But Tintin in Tibet is at the same time a story about friendship and about what friends are willing to do for one another, and the most basic question of the tale is, perhaps, “How far are you willing to go to save those whom you love?”
Tintin and his comrade Captain Haddock are on vacation in the French Alps when they learn that Tintin’s friend Chang Chong-Chen has been aboard an airplane that has crashed in the Himalayas – he’s presumed dead. But Tintin has a vision and he becomes convinced that his friend is alive. Privately, Tintin and Haddock organize an expedition in Nepal and Tibet and begin the search for Chang.

The plot is beautifully plain, but the story is rich with slapstick, exotic lands, deep emotions, and adventure – here described by Captain Haddock during the meeting with a Tibetan Grand Abbot, “We tramped for days! We hauled ourselves up vertical rock-faces! We baked in the sun and froze in the snow! We tumbled down into bottomless crevasses! We were walloped on the head by avalanches! Worst of all, er… Grand Mufti, the yeti pinched a bottle of whiskey! Only just opened: and the last one I had left!”

There are no villains here, only beings trying to help each other survive, and the non-dualistic nature of this comic book shows Hergé reaching one of the creative peaks of his career – it is a master’s piece.

Tintin in Tibet was created during a period of great personal strife for Hergé, as he and his wife were going through a separation. In his nightmares, Hergé saw himself lost in a white, featureless world, but when one of his colorists, Fanny Vlamynck, helped him shape the character of the yeti, a whole new landscape of creative possibilities opened up. And in Vlamynck, Hergé found a friend for life. In fact, the two would later get married, and she would help Hergé remain one of the masters of Franco-Belgian and European comics.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli

It seems to me that blogging and hubris go hand-in-hand, so maybe now it’s time for a little braggadocio.   Not mine, though.  Asterios Polyp’s.

Asterios Polyp is the protagonist of David Mazzucchelli’s graphic novel by the same name.  He (Polyp) is a child of immigrants, their surname halved by an impatient administrator—fans of Homer will likely guess the omitted part by the end.  He’s also a quick-study genius, an expert in and esteemed professor of architecture (despite never having built a single structure), and an all-around pompous jerk.  When we meet him he is broke, newly divorced, and his house is burning down (despair, lightning), so he runs to the appropriately named town of Apogee, where he becomes a car mechanic.

Except that’s not really what the book is about—that’s how it starts, though.  The rest of this novel is hard to explain without Mazzucchelli’s illustrations, which is perhaps why I think that this comic is so brilliant: you truly have to see it to completely understand the story.  Even the colors are significant, though it isn’t necessary to be a student of printmaking to grasp the author/artist’s intentions.  For example: in a flashback, Polyp is shown meeting his future wife.  He’s depicted entirely in cyan, while the color used for her is magenta.  Their “blending” happens literally when, as they have a conversation over the course of a few panels, they both are gradually rendered in purple ink.  Over time as their marriage crumbles—largely because Polyp is incapable of understanding the world in anything other than black-and-white, true-or-false terms—the two-color cyan/magenta dichotomy returns.

It’s simple, beautiful, perfectly suited to the medium, and sort of amazing that this is relatively new territory for so-called Graphic Novels.   Some artists, like Chris Ware, are more adventurous with their graphic storytelling techniques, but by-and-large I’d guess that comic book fans are used to authors drawing/telling a linear story: the action unfolds from left to right, panel by panel—all easily translated to a movie screen, I might add.   Mazzucchelli, however, moves far beyond this, and will utilize something like the “one page” comic (see Frank King’s Gasoline Alley) as a means to simultaneously depict his characters’ wildly different perspectives while they engage in a conversation about postmodern musical composition; that he does this without alienating his reader (in fact, you might not even notice this at first) is what makes this book so brilliant.

Whether you like comics, art, or just skillful and innovative storytelling, you must read this.