The Muppets Noir #1 // Review
It’s not easy being green. Kermit’s in over his head before the show...again. It’s fifteen minutes to curtain and they still haven’t rehearsed Patricia Perkins and Her Piccolo-Playing Panda. When they’re finally tracked-down, the panda has eaten the piccolo. (It WAS made out of bamboo after all.) What’s worse, Miss Piggy made a pie for Kermit--evidently too focussed-in on that to remember that she needs to be in make-up. Thins are complicated for everyone in The Muppets Noir #1. Writer/artist Roger Langridge opens a Muppet-based gumshoe private-eye serial with colorist Dearbhla Kelly.
Somewhere in the midst of everything, Kermit gets hit in the head with a brick. (Don’t worry...nothing violent. Naturally it had something to do with rehearsal for the show and an errant brick.) Kermit’s knocked-out while reading a Dashiell Hammett-style detective thriller...so he’s going to fall into a dreamlike fugue in which he becomes the rough and tumble private eye Flip Minnow. There’s a pig who wants to hire him to find her daughter, who seems to have gone missing. It’s not going to be easy to track her down. Flip is going to find himself immersed in a world of weird and (literally) colorful characters who all look very familiar...
Langridge constructs the story in a fairly straightforward manner. Yeah, it's very much framed and style of the old Muppet movies. Different characters play different archetypes that all fit into the well worn noir, Detective genre. The prose style that Langridge is using for Kermit doesn’t exactly feel like a Hammet-like fusion between Kermit and Spade. That would've been a lot of fun if you'd managed to pull it off. As it is, it's pretty straightforward stuff. And there were elements of the way he's writing the dialogue but feel more or less perfect adaptation of the traditional Muppet script style.
It's really, really difficult to draw Muppets for the page in a way that feels like it's being true to the form and contours and motions of Jim Henson's creations. (Back in the 1980s, Marvel did a whole Muppet Babies series that never really managed to capture the visual of the characters all that well.) He's got the essence of the characters down, though. This is as witnessed by the fact that it's almost impossible to read the dialogue of these characters without hearing the voices of people like Henson and Oz.
The Muppets have covered quite a bit of ground over the decades and a number of different projects which continue to this day. Kind of hard to find something that would be genuinely new for them to be doing at this stage. Gumshoe Private eye spoof is likely to be a great deal of fun on the page once Langrige really gets going on it. It's going to feel a bit strange seeing things move through the traditional beats of detective fiction with so much felt, but it could be fun.
