Need something to tide you over until the new Muppet movie opens in theaters November 23rd? Look no further than BOOM! Kids' two Muppets comics series.
The adaptations of literary classics (to date: Robin Hood, Peter Pan, King Arthur, Snow White, and Sherlock Holmes) are more successful than The Muppet Show Comic Book stories, which serve as enjoyable companions to the TV show. Sure, literary purists will scoff at the Electric Mayhem rock band portraying the Seven Dwarfs and the Great Gonzo as Sherlock Holmes, but those folks probably won’t pick up these books anyway. Muppet completists, on the other hand, will get a kick out of seeing old friends in these classic roles. The characters retain their own quirky personalities (e.g., Fozzie Bear’s sense of humor, Miss Piggy’s diva temper), humor, and Muppet-centric cultural references.
Most of the illustrators’ renderings of the characters are passable, but a note to Roger Langridge: your Kermit (left) looks like he was stretched on the rack, and the rest of the characters are also frightening versions of themselves. The texts would have benefitted from some fine-tuning, but the venture is one I’m glad BOOM! Kids (now Kaboom! as of February 21) has undertaken. Every book acknowledges The Muppets Studio, which adds an additional level of credibility. What stories should the Muppets and Boom! Kids/Kaboom! tackle next?
Publisher BOOM! Studios usually sends review copies of their entire frontlist -- kids' and grown-ups' comics alike -- which means we get everything from Wall-E and Cars to Pale Horse and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Cindy snatched up The Muppet Show, a series she remembers fondly from childhood, but as a zombie fan I'm excited for the adult-geared 28 Days Later: The Hot Zone. (Who hunts zombies in a Catholic schoolgirl skirt? I'm just sayin'.)
What I'm really looking forward to is the Samuel L. Jackson–authored Cold Space. Starring 
Justin Bieber is stalking me.
The final straw? The biographical graphic novel Fame: Justin Bieber by Blue Water Comics, which arrived as a PDF preview in my HB inbox. As a non-"Belieber," I can't help but feel it's a bit wasted on me. Now that I'm past my teenybopper heyday, here's what I want to know: where was Fame: Leonardo DiCaprio when I needed it?
Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (adapted to the graphic novel format by Robert Venditti; art by Attila Futaki and color by Jose Villarrubia) introduces Percy, the half-human son of Poseidon, and the other inhabitants of Camp Half-Blood, a haven for young demi-gods. A feud between the gods provides Percy with the opportunity to prevent celestial war and make his distant father proud. Jackson devotees may miss omitted or compressed scenes (no Medusa in the Garden Gnome Emporium? Di immortales!), but the spirit of the original holds up well. The precise timing of panels lends extra oomph to punchlines and action scenes, while settings spanning multiple panels or full pages suggest the epic scale of Percy's quest.
The first in Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus series, The Amulet of Samarkand (adapted by Stroud and Andrew Donkin; art by Lee Sullivan and Nicolas Chapuis), follows magician's apprentice Nathaniel and his unwilling djinni Bartimaeus as they try to stop an overthrow of magician-run Parliament. Readers may wonder who's really in charge: ambitious but inexperienced Nathaniel, or cheeky Bartimaeus, who's been around the block a few thousand times. This version suffers a little from the loss of Bartimaeus’s flippant footnotes, a prominent comic device in the novel. But the smart-aleck djinni still gets in plenty of verbal and visual cracks, maintaining the book's balance of humor and danger.
