Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas: the Shiver of Christmas Town #1 // Review
Dr. Finklestein has been tinkering for days. The Mayor of Halloween Town has arrived to see what he’s been working on. Sally’s there to answer the door when he arrives. He’s been very busy. Soldering. Measuring. Calculating. Concocting. The doctor calls for silence. Just a little bit more growth juice and Dr. Finklestein’s latest creation will be revealed in Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas: the Shiver of Christmas Town #1. Writer Torunn Grønbekk sets-up a whole new story set in the beloved world created by the influential film director back in the early 1990s. Artist Edu Menna sutures the story to the page.
A teddy bear. It’s a teddy bear. It’s all white, too. Like a cuddly polar bear. The Mayor calls it a failure. A disaster. A fiasco. Dr. Finkelstein doesn’t understand what happened. Clearly something must have gone wrong. It’s an embarrassment. Sally thinks it’s cute, though. She’s kind of cocnerned about all of the disappointment that everyone’s registering. She whispers to the bear. “Don’t listen to them. You are perfect.” And since no one else will care for it, she’s going to have to do so. She’s decided to name it Shiver. It’s about to have quite an adventure.
Grønbekk matches the style and tone of Burton’s original script almost perfectly. The plot feels like a very natural progression...not only from the original movie, but from Dynamite’s graphic novel adaptation of Long Live the Pumpkin Queen that came out last summer. The world of Halloween Town feels remarkably vivid in a chapter that includes quite a bit more time with Lock, Shock and Barrel as well. It’s a fun adventure into new territory for a world that still has a great deal of untapped potential. To her credit, Grønbekk takes the opening chapter of the new series slowly and methodically without launching into too much over-rendered backstory.
Menna renders Burton’s world with a strong sense of drama and fantasy. Burton’s original visual concepts are clearly present in the rendering. Sally continues to be quite a powerful presence on the page. She was quite a heroic figure in the film and the subsequent Pumpkin Queen sequel. Menna’s big accomplishment in the first isue is finding the right look for Shiver. He’s got a cuteness about him that fits right along with similar Haloween Town inhabitants like Zero the dog. The cuteness fosters an emotional connection with the character.
The original film had such a richly textured concept and ensemble of characters. It really DOES lend itself quite well to a longer-running serialized fiction format. It’s nice to see some of that potential being embraced by creatives like Grønbekk who have te opportunty to explore things in just a bit more detail around the edges of a story that c learly continues to have a great deal of appeal decades after it left multiplexes back in 1993. Grønbekk is such a talented writer. It’ll be intersting to see where she takes the concept in future issues.
