Things I Read For Love: Muppet Snow White

First, A Quickish Intro

One of the great things about being in a relationship, or even a friendship in some cases, is that being around someone with very different tastes and interests exposes you to things that you would never have come across otherwise. Josh, my ever faithful fiance, has been introduced to things like Supernatural and Once Upon a Time, the joy of searching for Monster High dolls, and the awesome concept of Chinese food because of me. In turn, I've sat through Futurama and Venture Brothers, and learned lots of varied uses for hot sauce. So with this in mind, I'm presenting Things I Read For Love as a new semi-regular post, to appear perhaps once a month or so, in which I read and review something from his bookshelf. And what better choice could there be than a fairy tale retelling.

This graphic novel features all the usual Muppets in the roles of the Snow White characters--Miss Piggy as the evil queen, Kermit as the prince, Electric Mayhem as the seven dwarfs, and so forth. Gonzo and Rizzo play the Brothers Grimm and serve as narrators. This leads to a lot of "behind the scenes" and "forth wall" jokes, and makes for a fairly original and entertaining retelling.

Positive Comments

The Muppets are fun. Certainly this would appeal to a child audience, but it isn't limited to that. It's not so babyish that you feel stupid reading it. There are jokes and references that only long time Muppet fans are likely to get.

It's well drawn. I'm far from an expert in art of any kind, but my few prior experiences with comic books have taught me that bad art can be supper distracting. Fortunately that's not the case here.

I liked the humor. Gonzo has always been my favorite Muppet character, and he and Rizzo are undeniably amusing in this book. I liked some of the liberties they took with the story, and how they helped to enhance that humor.

Critical Comments

They break the forth wall too often, in my opinion. That kind of humor works for me in part because of it's rarity and unexpectedness. When you do it on every other page, it loses that unexpectedness and just becomes corny.

I also felt that there were way too many added characters. Pepe annoyed me, but I find that that's true in almost everything he appears in. Bobo shows up and is amusing, but also unnecessary. It felt as though the author wanted to cram in as many Muppet characters as possible, whether they would serve a purpose to the story or not.

Recommendation

This happens to be impossible to find at the moment. Occasionally a used copy will show up on Amazon for an only semi-ridiculous price, but that's about it. Still, if you do come across a copy and you're a fan of the Muppets, I'd recommend it. It was worth my time. 3 stars.

Josh's Footnote: The title character is played by seldom seen Muppets Tonight character Spamela Hamderson.