Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Giants Tale Two of Four

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Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Giants Tale Two of Four

Can this comic series possibly live up to the show?

"The Tailor’s Daughter”

Story and Art – Brandon Dayton

Color Assist – Spencer Holt

Design – Jillian Crab

Assistant Editor – Cameron Chittok

Editor – Sierra Hahn

October 2017

 

Jim Henson’s The Storyteller is one of those pristine family series that entertains everyone equally. Released stateside in 1987, the British series originally featured John Hurt as the titular Storyteller and utilized Henson’s trademark puppetry for the various fantastical elements of the European folk stories Hurt would weave to entertain his faithful blonde Pudelpointer (a type of dog that Jim’s puppetry and Brian Henson’s voice bring to an all too real kind of life) Cloggs.

The show was fantastic, winning an Emmy for Outstanding Children’s Program for Hans My Hedgehog that first year and being nominated twice the next year for A Story Short and The Luck Child. The show later would garner BAFTA awards for Best Children’s Programme and Best Costume Design and a nod for Best Make Up.

The sad part for me is that the series was so compact. The first season was only nine episodes and they leave you desperate for more. It’s like someone cracked open a fairytale book to rival all of Grimm’s or Andersen’s combined and then only read a scattering before closing it shut forever. And like eager children begging for a new bedtime story, those nine make you wish the show had a hundred episodes.

Exceedingly well produced, meticulously adherent to a charming tone that respected the source material yet robbed it of none of its power to enchant, the stories produced were also painstakingly researched. Series developer Anthony Minghella deserves the credit there, as it took him two years to investigate and write the screenplays for those nine episodes. All that effort paid off in a series that valued quality over quantity.

The show received a second season, although this time Michael Gambon took the role of a different Storyteller (although featuring the same dog voiced by Brian Henson). Gambon’s Storyteller was a ancient Greek forced to wander the Minotaur’s labyrinth looking for a way out while entertaining his companion dog with four tales of the classic Greek Myths.

I caught the entire production on HBO and thought that it was made specifically for that cable channel. The run featured both series together and I fell in love instantly. A few years ago a DVD version of the definitive collection came out and I snatched it up. 

When picking up the discount bin find The Storyteller: Giants book presented here, I was a bit skeptical. Archaia has produced four series so far in The Storyteller comic book franchies, each focusing on a different fantastical creature (Witches, Giants, Dragons, and Faires). But even with the type of success those expansions implies, could anything be as good as Minghella and Henson’s TV show?

We should take a look and see…

Our opening, to anyone who has seen the show, arrives as expected. The Storyteller sits sewing by the fire with Cloggs napping on the hearth. He exclaims as he pricks his finger and that awakens his pet and companion.

Which leads to our narrator beginning his story opening, as Cloggs gets comfortable and we shift to the house of a tailor who knew he was close to death…

The daughter’s hand in marriage now belongs to the great, rich lord who lives in the castle upon the highest hill in the land. Being a dutiful daughter, she does as she is asked to do, but she has one request. Her father does not send her off empty-handed.

Along the way to the castle she encounters three animals, each in a trap. They have been caught by the “Great Lord” that is her bridegroom and she sets each free. For her good deed, each gives her a magical item of great value. The goose gives her a collar that can’t be cut, the rabbit gives her boots that can’t be burnt,…

…and the mare gives her a hair comb that saved him from the lion’s paw(somehow?)

Note that the number of items and animals is NOT a random thing. I’m nabbing this from the trivia page of IMDB: In folklore, three parts often represent the past, the present, and the future (which are mentioned in The Storyteller series introduction narration). However, it also used to be interpreted as a cycle of life: life, death, and rebirth. In every show of the first season the number three featured prominently in terms of encounters or attempts on a characters life or number of items…all in keeping with the "rule of three" in the original tales.

It’s actually quite wonderful to apply the idea of this “sacred story rule of threes” to something like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter ending with the story of the three brothers and the three magical items they received from death (Elder Wand, Resurrection Stone and the Invisibility Cloak) also known as the Deathly Hallows.

I don’t have space here to boil this down even more, although the rule of three is a constant in folklore and even modern storytelling. What I will do is point you to other sources that explain the rule of three and how it relates to literature. HERE is a great piece on Fairytalez.com on just that.

Back to our story, however, as Brandon Dayton draws us in even more as, after the Storyteller and Cloggs having a brief discussion on whether the dutiful tailor’s daughter should have run away at that point, we find her knocking on the door of the castle.

Her betrothed is a horrible giant! However, this opening reeks so much of Beauty and the Beast that you might feel this is going to travel down that path with the giant transforming into a handsome prince at the end. I’ll spoil this a little by telling you that you are only half wrong in that assumption.

After such a tour, the giant has the daughter for supper...NO! No! NO! Not HAS her for supper, but you know? Dines with her. Not ON her. 

However, he has terrible table manners.

Still, that’s not all that bad. Eating habits can be changed with a few beatings and some electro-shock. I should know, I’m the parent of a teenage boy.

After a fretful night of barely sleeping, the daughter finds herself alone in the castle after the giant leaves to check his many, many traps. I’ll let the Storyteller take over from here…

…and she opens the door to find…

…a room full of the giant’s brides. Those who remained faithful were turned into scullery slaves and those who did not follow his rules…

And with that, the daughter’s will is tested as she can find no way to escape the castle and the garden maze outside. At last she calls upon the one animal who pledged to come to her aid and beseeches him for any information on how to escape the giant’s clutches.

The goose’s story makes it clear that the key to her escape lies in the palm of the giant’s hand…

She sends the goose off and prepares to meet the giant in a test of cunning, for you see…

…and with that, he snatches her up and prepares to devour her, but the daughter cleverly outwits him, time…

…after time…

…after time. 

Until the giant is so furious that fire spat from his mouth. But the daughter’s cunning had one final trick up its sleeve…

…and with a poof, the giant is transformed into a tiny little gnome that the daughter dispatches to a horrible, yet rightly deserved, fate.

In the end, the prior brides reverted to being princesses once again, the hare became a handsome footman, the goose a giant swan, and the mare a noble knight. The daughter and the goose flew them all back to her father’s tailorshop where…

…our happy ending unfolds…

…and the Storyteller has it over Cloggs one final time. 

SUCH a good story! I love this book and feel that it matches the beats of the TV show very well. In addition, it stands up on its own as a decent fairy tale story. If you enjoyed Jim Henson’s The Storyteller series, these books appear to be worth checking out. They definitely have that same kind of magic!

Steed and Mrs. Peel #2

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Steed and Mrs. Peel #2

The AVENGERS!

Just, you know…not the ones you were expecting

"Life in Hell:

Steed Checks on Breakfast/Emma Checks and Mates”

Story – Mark Waid

Script – Caleb Monroe

Art – Will Sliney

Colors – Ron Riley

Letters – Ed Dukeshire

Assistant Editor – Chris Rosa

Editor – Matt Gagnon

October 2012

They were there first, appearing on TV in the year 1961 which was a full two years before Marvel’s more colorful (or colourful, as you like) team of do-gooders made an appearance on paper. As history is the judge of things, however, the pairing of British secret agent John Steed with a succession of assistants was not destined to keep the name The Avengers. They lost out to Marvel. Even though Steeds television exploits lasted for eight years and spawned a big budget movie in 1998.

I encountered them the way most of my generation did, in syndication on early morning rotations during summers spent at home. I remember the show being flashy and confusing, the camp factor amped way up. For a long time I attributed all of it to the fact the show was British not so much that it played a bit like an adult Batman show. That quintessential English gentleman Patrick Macnee’s Steed carryed the thing off with his natural charisma and a wink in his eye. Of course, pairing I most remember was Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, the second woman Steed was partnered with and unarguably his most famous.

 

I don’t believe it is simple nostalgia that makes me long for a rewatch of The Avengers or any of the other far-out British programs I grew up with. Shows like The Prisoner, U.F.O. and Space:1999 will always have a strange attraction for me due to their penchant for the bizarre. Certainly, they extruded a panche unlike any of their American counter-parts.

Here they also took the action in a tongue-in-cheek style. The refresher HERE from Must See TV-The Avengers goes so far as to state that it appears that if someone were shot, because there was no blood, the audience would just assume that they got up after the scene and went on their way. Thus absent a true “vicious” instinct, these shows were more light-hearted fantasy and incorporated a much looser, elegant reality

They even beat their contemporary name-stealers in the comics to the big screen, when Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman stepped into the roles of Steed and Peel in 1998 in a romp that had them facing off against a playing-against-type villainous Sean Connery, Eddy Izzard, and a bevvy or special effects. I remember very little about this movie.

Perhaps it BEARS a second viewing…

…or maybe not. No. It doesn’t. Not at all.

So that was a flop, which is a shame as the succeeding generations will likely miss out on the greatness that was The Avengers and MacNee’s brilliant performance as a result. Anything that could draw attention back to the original series is a boon.

And thus we come to this series by Boom Studios titled “Steed and Mrs. Peel”. I find it a shame that they can’t use the original title, but we live in a litigious society now that also assumes people are moronic half-wits unable to tell two books with the same title apart. Enough about that, though. The real question we should be concerned about is whether or not this book portrays an accurate representation of the television Avengers or if it needs to be disposed of like that awful big-screen adaptation above.

Let’s have a look, shall we?

We begin with Steed and Peel walking through a bomb-blasted ruin, while carrying a picnic basket. Steed appears to be using a dowsing rod to detect…something. They both look impeccably dressed, Steed in his old English gentleman three-piece suit and Peel in a sleeveless halter top and hip hugging jeans. So far the style is right on for what the TV show would throw at us: a juxtaposition of elements both new and old in a setting where you would likely not find any of these items. But how is the dialogue?

It’s pretty much spot-on, thanks to Waid and Monroe. And this next sequence, where Steed clears away rubble to find…

…a bottle of champagne is so reminiscent of the TV series opening that I have to applaud the book immediately. I settle in at this point, as it appears they are going to get the tone of things right. 

As Steed pours, we learn that this is the middle of London and not some out of the way industrial ruin, so I’ve missed a bunch by stepping into issue number 2. Don’t fault me please, but I didn’t see the last issue blurb on the credit page until after I’d read the story through once. It explains where we are and how we got here:

John and Emma were investigating an agent’s death when London apparently suffered a horrific nuclear assault, leaving both the agents in a bombed out London where the only people prepared were the agents of the villainous Hellfire Club (not the one from X-Men, fellow Marvelites. They did that name first as well.) and several high-ranking British military and government types.

And the Hellfire Club’s entrance is right below Downing Street…

I love that it takes six pages for us to get here. The book’s unhurried pace creates the same tonal vibe that the show had. Sure, these two would save the day and the world, but there was no reason to rush in and gun everyone down like an American secret agent would. No, this is all about unraveling a mystery in a very British way, with manners and taste.

And here that mystery is how did the Hellfire Club know to prepare for just the sort of barrage that devastated London. The pair split up to find some answers.

Steed takes a meager breakfast with the prime minister and another government functionary. They discuss trying to find out more info on how widespread doomsday was.

Then a curious admission by the man to Steed’s left and a reappearance by Mrs. Peel, who can’t seem to find the General AND appears to remember that breakfast meal pairing. 

As to the General being gone, it is a fact made all the more suspicious given that there aren’t any places for a person to go outside of the Hellfire Club. It’s an odd occurrence that puts to mind that the general isn’t the only one missing.

The art in most of this is fine, overly simplified and reliant on the viewer’s eye to “fill in the gaps.” For the fist time in any of the pictures I get a dose of what looks like Carmine Infantino’s

But back to the story as one of the Hellfire Club leaders, a woman whose name I didn’t catch brainwashes the General in question in a darkened room using a white screen. After he is convinced to do anything to stop Armageddon, she douses him with knockout from an aerosol spray can the likes of which I haven’t seen since that Jurassic Park book.

As the general is dragged out, we learn the woman has a male counterpart in this operation who hasn’t been as successful, and that they have plans for Steed and Peel. As the scene ends, she tells the chap that she’ll be the on to take “Father’s Revenge” which means that the Hellfire Club is in league with the higher-up foil of Mother. Mother was the director of the secret agency Steed worked for in the final season of The Avengers and appears in the big screen adaption. Father in both appearances was up to no good.

Our little miss also speaks to the white screen, calling it Dirgent while pleading it for patience, telling it not to worry.

All these odd goings-on and set pieces feel like a direct lift from the TV show and again I have to give our writers credit. Along with this next bit where a chess match between Emma and Steed…

…is more than it appears on the surface and it ends most satisfactorily.

Always love to see Peel get the upper hand on Steed. The pair could always generate on-screen sexual tension without either of the saying or doing ANYTHING overt. It’s a shame there weren’t more seasons of them together.

Emma finds that the General went off with Joan Cartney (and our mysterious brainwasher gets a name), so she confronts her in her office. It begins cordially…

…but turns into a page-long catfight with Emma gassed and dragged away, possibly for some mild brainwashing?

Steed has busied himself with finding out why everyone appears to have had the exact same breakfast at the exact same time, when two Hellfire Club guards escort one of the men off right in front of him.

He eavesdrops on Cartney working her magic on the gentleman by weaving in a narrative of a preventable apocalypse and what would he do to stop it. It’s easy to see how this mind control mixes with the devastated London above, that must be some kind of faked prop.

However, John won’t expose the jig quite yet. He’s taken by a judo chop to the back of the neck while inspecting the projector. 

And his assailant is revealed to be none other than…

…a brainwashed Emma Peel, reverted to her Queen of Sin costume for dramatic effect. Makes you wonder what is it with Hellfire Clubs, sexy ladies in black lingerie, and Queen titles that always seem to go together?

This was an enjoyable, if short issue. The art, while minimal in places, conveyed the story well enough and I like the direction the book is going. I’d pick up more to see if it continued on in The Avengers trend.

It certainly has created a hankering for those old shows, though. If you are like me and similarly inclined to want a rewatch, I’ll leave you to browse youtube and check out The Avengers Forever website. You’ll find all manner of information there on the show, the cast and the trivia, all well organized and documented.