If there was ever a manga (or Original English Language manga) that demanded
bishounen and
bishoujo (beautiful-boy and -girl, respectively) character designs, it would be the adaptation of
Labyrinth, a 1986 fantasy film that not only starred teenaged Jennifer Connelly as Sarah, but David Bowie as Jareth, the Goblin King. (David Bowie in a CODPIECE.) Tokyopop's what-happens-next OEL series,
Jim Henson's Return to Labyrinth, written by Jake T. Forbes with art by Chris Lie, absolutely fails to deliver this (the exception is Kouyu Shurei's deceptively alluring cover art).
I had counted on sexy, sexy drawings of Bowie (whose androgynous good looks helped to inspire the
bishounen aesthetic in the first place), to keep me turning pages: I was so disappointed, I considered skipping the books altogether. However, artist Lie has just enough talent for grotesquerie and setting (based, in the film, on Brian Froud's art, which in turn captured the zeitgeist of '80s fantasy imagery) that I decided to risk reviewing both volumes. I was justified by the adaptation of an '80s flick that, thus far in my series of columns, is the most successful at both whetting the nostalgia of the film's cult audience while mining the film's world-building for further narrative opportunities. (And, it's apparently commercially successful enough to expand from a trilogy to a tetralogy, according to the editor's afterward in Vol. 2.)
The film, directed by Jim Henson and therefore mostly peopled with puppet and FX wizardry, is about a 15-year-old girl, Sarah, who wishes goblins would take away her baby brother, Toby. To her surprise, they do, so she must make a path through the labyrinth to find the Goblin King and fight. Jareth requests that she stay with him, but Sarah breaks his spell and returns to her world with Toby.
The book fuzzes its timeline a little: it's the present day, and Toby is a teenager who gets everything he wishes for, although the wishes invariably go wrong. He finds that this is the work of Jareth. Although he rejects the Goblin King's "help," Toby is lured to the labyrinth by the goblin Skub. Once there he meets Hana, a de-winged fairy, her steed, Stank, and Moppet, a teenaged human female who dons a goblin mask and serves the goblin mayor Spittledrum. (Occasionally, we switch to Moppet's point of view, which reveals that she has loss of memory.) Sarah's departure greatly reduced the Goblin King's power and his kingdom had since fallen into disarray, leaving him to name Toby his successor. The second volume flashes back thirteen years into the past, when Jareth struck a bargain with Mizumi, the Queen of Cups, who has two daughters, Moulin and Drumlin. The monarchs made a deal, and Jareth must fulfill his end of it in 13 years time, or she will inherit his kingdom. In the present, the deadline looms a week away.
The first volume is beset with technical glitches — bad tones, what looks like faulty scanning, and the art
appears to have been composed at a larger size, and then cramped into the tankouban dimensions, which might also account for the too-tiny font in the introductory comics summary of the film — besides the aforementioned plain character design. The writing, too, is clunky until it leaves the "real" world for the Goblin Kingdom: there, both the writing and the art start to click. Lie clearly loves playing with film's designs: Skub the goblin is solidly drawn, and soon, Hana is too; Stank is an appealing cross between a cute manga mascot and a more detailed, Henson/Froud-esque beast (
Lie also does a good job of conveying a sense of Stank's distinctive body language and movements).
Lie also experiments effectively with a layout technique, which he uses to convey the timing of certain movements, by breaking the bottom panel of a page into increasingly smaller boxes. However, when Lie must copy the film's puppets (Sarah's companions make appearances), such as the anthropomorphic-dog knight Sir Didymus, his work stiffens. He struggles a bit with backgrounds, as well: they're detailed enough, but flat at first, unable to convey the film's grimy, textural feel. There's an obvious learning curve for both writer and artist in the first volume: Lie's drawing fails to communicate humor, even with readymade poop-and-pee jokes:
anything remotely funny is due to Forbes.
Of the two collaborators, Forbes finds his groove more quickly, delivering a reasonable facsimile of the film's patois as Toby solves a mason's riddles to gain entry into the labyrinth. Though Forbes too must do a lot of copying (dialogue from the film is integrated; additionally, he lifts from sources such as
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
Through the Looking Glass and classic fairy tales), he is able to show
how easily moved his goblin characters are without sacrificing their casual cruelty and grossness ("I have an appointment to get my boils refilled," Spittledrum harrumphs), and his action sequences are clever, if not as thrilling as one might hope.
There are missteps (pretty much any attempt at broad, manga-style wackiness, especially during the court scene) and some awkwardness that continues into the first part of the second volume (I believe the exact terms of Jareth's and Mizumi's wager are supposed to be a mystery, but they just come across as unclear) but by the end of that book, Forbes has genuinely managed to capture a little of the spirit and menace of the film, especially when he's working with Moppet's perspective. One sequence borders on sublime: Moulin and Drumlin use their powers (to wet and to suck dry, respectively) to clean up after a party, and it punctures manga "power up" sequences in exactly the same way that the film
Labyrinth deflates certain fantasy tropes (i.e., fairies look lovely, but their behavior is pest-like).
The second volume ends on cliffhanger. Since Lie's art has improved significantly (the graytones are under control, the settings have new dimension, the characters are more expressive and fluid in their movements and are therefore funnier), Sarah and Jareth, while still not nearly as gorgeous as their cinematic counterparts, are becoming pretty enough to spark some curiosity as to what happens next.
Jim Henson's Return to the Labyrinth doesn't break away from the movie to stand as a work worthy in and of itself, but for fans of the film who can't quite put away their childish things, it's there if they should ever need it.
Images ©2007 Jim Henson Company
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
The book fuzzes its timeline a little: it's the present day, and Toby is a teenager who gets everything he wishes for, although the wishes invariably go wrong. He finds that this is the work of Jareth. Although he rejects the Goblin King's "help," Toby is lured to the labyrinth by the goblin Skub. Once there he meets Hana, a de-winged fairy, her steed, Stank, and Moppet, a teenaged human female who dons a goblin mask and serves the goblin mayor Spittledrum. (Occasionally, we switch to Moppet's point of view, which reveals that she has loss of memory.) Sarah's departure greatly reduced the Goblin King's power and his kingdom had since fallen into disarray, leaving him to name Toby his successor. The second volume flashes back thirteen years into the past, when Jareth struck a bargain with Mizumi, the Queen of Cups, who has two daughters, Moulin and Drumlin. The monarchs made a deal, and Jareth must fulfill his end of it in 13 years time, or she will inherit his kingdom. In the present, the deadline looms a week away.
Lie also experiments effectively with a layout technique, which he uses to convey the timing of certain movements, by breaking the bottom panel of a page into increasingly smaller boxes. However, when Lie must copy the film's puppets (Sarah's companions make appearances), such as the anthropomorphic-dog knight Sir Didymus, his work stiffens. He struggles a bit with backgrounds, as well: they're detailed enough, but flat at first, unable to convey the film's grimy, textural feel. There's an obvious learning curve for both writer and artist in the first volume: Lie's drawing fails to communicate humor, even with readymade poop-and-pee jokes: anything remotely funny is due to Forbes. 
The second volume ends on cliffhanger. Since Lie's art has improved significantly (the graytones are under control, the settings have new dimension, the characters are more expressive and fluid in their movements and are therefore funnier), Sarah and Jareth, while still not nearly as gorgeous as their cinematic counterparts, are becoming pretty enough to spark some curiosity as to what happens next. Jim Henson's Return to the Labyrinth doesn't break away from the movie to stand as a work worthy in and of itself, but for fans of the film who can't quite put away their childish things, it's there if they should ever need it.
