WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Jim Henson's The Storyteller: Ghosts #1, by Márk László, Patricio Delpeche and Jim Campbell, on sale now from BOOM! Studios imprint, Archaia.
When most people mention of Jim Henson, they think of The Muppets and Sesame Street, but Henson was more than just Kermit the Frog. His work with puppets extended to Fraggle Rock, The Jim Henson Hour and Muppet Babies. He also attempted darker stories. The Dark Crystal is the most famous, but Jim Henson's The Storyteller, made in conjunction with ITV's TVS Television in the late 1980s, was also a cult hit of the era. It was a series based on retellings of the old European folktales, the ones Disney had been spinning up glossy, happy endings to for a generation. Henson's series put some of the bite back into those stories.
The show only ran for one season on TVS, with a second, short-lived miniseries in 1990, The Storyteller: Greek Myths. Now, with The Dark Crystal revived in a prequel on Netflix and Disney creating a Muppet series for Disney+, BOOM! Studios imprint Archaia has brought back The Storyteller in comic book form, in a brand new four-issue series: Jim Henson's The Storyteller: Ghosts. The original Storyteller (voiced in the original program by the late John Hurt) has returned, along with his faithful blonde Pudelpointer, to relate the tales of old being lost to the mists of time.
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In the run-up to the debut of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance on Netflix, co-executive producer Lisa Henson said she couldn't believe they were doing the show with real puppets. The cost of filming a puppet-based series of this magnitude was astronomical, but Netflix was happy to spend the money. Disney+ will most likely do the same when the time comes for its Muppet projects. But for others, like The Storyteller, these massive budgets don't exist to tell endless stories. Neil Gaiman aims to bring the show back via Amazon, but until the show arrives, turning to comics is a smart move.
In terms of content, Jim Henson's The Storyteller: Ghosts #1 goes right back to the sorts of stories the TV series mined back in the day. The original series mainly focused on German fairy tales, but this first issue opens with the story of the mylingar from Scandinavian folklore. The Myling, as they are called here, were phantasmal incarnations of dead children who died before they could be baptized, forced to roam the earth until someone takes pity on them and gives them a proper burial. Ghosts #1 expands on this idea, creating a children's horror story The Brothers Grimm would be proud to stand beside.
That said, The Storyteller does lose some of its magic in the move from 3D to 2D. Not that the first issue of Ghosts isn't gorgeously rendered by writer and artist Márk László with colorist Patricio Delpeche and letterer Jim Campbell. (Seriously, the calligraphy is a work of art unto itself.) The magic of muppets is that the characters are fully rendered as real, living, breathing creatures, just made of felt and fur instead of skin and bone, but just as alive as any human being.
Still, for those who cannot get enough Jim Henson in our lives, the new comic anthology series is a lovely continuation of The Storyteller. Hopefully, it will help inspire Amazon's series to come.
Jim Henson's The Storyteller: Ghosts #2 will be available April 8.