Through Aug. 3rd, the Experience Music Project Museum in Seattle, WA is hosting a traveling Smithsonian exhibit, "Jim Henson's Fantastic World," featuring puppets, videos, props, fabrics, photographs, costumes and other ephemera from Henson's 45+ year career. Included are many examples of Henson's drawing: landscapes, proposal pages illustrated in saturated colors, mid-century Modern art posters for his college theater department, character sketches, storyboards, doodles (he kept sketchbooks), a gag panel and his high-school comic strip Pierre the Rat (a Walt Kelly Pogo influence is discernable). Like many cartoonists, Henson's sketches and pencils are lively: they suffer from being tightened up, or boxed in. The design sketch for Animal, for instance, is a loose starburst with eyes: an associate finished and refined the design, adding details until the now-familiar look emerged.
As such, Langridge's ability to translate the rhythms of verbal comedy and a theatric sensibility into the comics medium serve him well in his adaptation of Henson's television program, The Muppet Show: for example, Langridge's widely spaced, thick white panel borders help to convey the impression of camera shots organized around a proscenium arch, which was both diegetic to TV–show-within-a-show and a practicality for the puppetry. Just as the show liked to play with the medium of television on many layers, Langridge riffs on comics (as they do on the program, Statler and Waldorf break the fourth wall: the Newscaster exclaims as the page, drawn as if it's being lifted, intrudes into his panel). In a larger sense, what puppetry and the comics medium have in common is that, for belief to be suspended and simply to "work," the audience must invest some of their own imagination.
On the other hand, in the one-shot Fin Fang Foom Return!, there's a real warmth to the way he portrays Marvel monsters Fin Fang Foom, Googam, Gorgilla and Elektro that can't be simply chalked up to Scott Gray's writing. While he employs the same wide white panel borders here, his layouts expand horizontally out of the tight grids of TMS #1, breaking out of the bantering rhythms to give more room for action and the expansive, dominating physicality of the megalomaniacal creatures as they attend a group therapy session with Doc Samson and feature each in their own short tale. Gray and Langridge infuse the struggles of the quartet (who have resized to human scale and consigned into servicing the Baxter Building) to get by in the world despite their disappointed hopes with dignity, and, on occasion, cuteness, such as in the H. A. Rey-style art in "Curious Gorgilla and the Man in the Stovepipe Hat." 
Perhaps it is the subtle difference in the type of underdog, and inhumanity, that each group represents that Langridge's art is responding to. As implicitly stated in TMS #1, the Muppets are a group of oddballs united in purpose (to put on a show) and formed into ad-hoc family (they are always there for each other). The Muppets have their own world in which humans can enter and interact with, but who aren't, in the grand scale of things, all that important. Commercially successful, the property is known throughout the world. Whereas, the FFFR can't even be in the same room together without battling: other than the occasional love interest, the FFF are alone, one of a kind, bedeviled by humanity when they're not bedeviling it. They're little-known monsters, the detritus of the Marvel Universe. Of course, that's all speculation. But, it is certain that there is one other thing that Henson and Langridge had in common: though both were perfectly accomplished, inspired creators on their own, like a comedy duo or troupe, their work took/takes on an additional flavor or dimension when they had other talents to bounce off of.Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
