I still think Muppet adaptation comics aren’t strictly necessary, but Muppet Snow White makes a pretty great case for their continued existence. Issue 2 isin comic shops today (Wednesday, June 16), and it has a lot of Muppets, a lot of jokes, and a lot of fun.
Gonzo and Rizzo, as the Brothers Grimm, welcome us back (with a joke from Rizzo about waiting a month since last issue which might not play so well in the eventual trade paperback), and then we pick up with the Electric Mayhem’s seven dwarfs coming home to find Spamela’s Snow White in their house. We get a proper introduction to each dwarf, and yeah, these are some good casting choices. Floyd as Grumpy doesn’t quite fit, but Zoot is a perfect Sleepy and Janice makes a fine Happy. Janice’s meeting with Spamela made me laugh… Now I’m almost sorry we’ll never get a scene with those two in a real Muppet production.
One of the reasons Muppet Snow White works is that it’s recognizable as a version of the fairy tale, but writers Jesse Blaze Snider and Patrick Storck don’t really care about sticking to the plot points of the original. This issue shakes things up, with one of the dwarfs leaving the group, and Pepe promising to find a new band member to take his place as Dopey. I was hoping it would be Digit, but no such luck, although the choice they end up with is a pretty good one. Meanwhile, Piggy, as the evil queen, is trying once more to get Snow White/Spamela out of the picture. She’s hired two assassins played by fan favorite Muppets, both of whom happen to be Jerry Nelson characters.
When the assassins show up at the dwarfs’ cottage, auditions are under way for the new band member, and here’s where the creative team tries to cram in as many minor characters as possible. By this point, it seems like we’ve seen every obscure Muppet pop up in a comic book, but there is one guy here from Muppets Tonight who I don’t think has ever been in a comic before. No, it’s not Gary Cahuenga, but at this rate we’ll probably see him in issue 3.
I may have said this when I reviewed issue 1, but I like that this comic aims for as many jokes per page as possible. Many of them are fourth-wall-breaking, at least one of them is totally Muppet-geeky, and best of all, only a few of them are pop-culture riffs. There are so many Muppets doing amusing things that I didn’t even realize until just now that Kermit doesn’t even appear in this issue.
I really only have one complaint, and I don’t know if it’s a writer thing, an editor thing, or a letterer thing:
Argh! Superfluous apostrophes! Oh well. I’ll let it slide… this time.
As for the art, Shelli Paroline continues to be a great match for the tone of the book. I especially like her Gonzo… In fact, it might be my favorite Gonzo of all the comic book depictions we’ve seen so far. And I bet it’s pretty hard to draw a stiff puppet like Bobo being expressive, but Paroline pulls it off admirably.
The issue ends with a promise of impending doom for the lead character, so I guess next month Spamela is going to go into the story’s poison-apple-induced coma, and she’ll need a kiss from a prince to wake up. Boy, it’s going to be weird to see Kermit kissing Spamela… but then again, maybe that’s not what the writers have planned. So far, Muppet Snow White has managed to surprise me as well as entertain me, and I’m looking forward to the next two issues, not to mention Spamela’s eventual induction into the Disney Princesses franchise.
Click here to tell me to lighten up about those apostrophes on the Tough Pigs forum!
by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.com
