Jim Henson’s Tale of Sand Review
y bookshelf is filled with manga, but up until now my only western comics were the Scott Pilgrim books. So yeah I do make exceptions from time to time and this is of course one of them. Jim Henson is a famous guy. Perhaps you don’t recognise his name, but you may recognise some of his work, like The Muppet Show and Sesame Street. Yeah, that Jim Henson.
Tale of Sand is a comic book adaptation for a lost screenplay by Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl. The duo never got around to making a feature length film for Tale of Sand as originally intended, but years later the original screenplay was unearthed by an archivist working for The Jim Hensen Company.
Archaia expressed interest in publishing the screenplay into a comic instead, an idea I personally wouldn’t have been so sure about on paper (no pun intended), but seeing the results now I can say it was a great idea and it’s a good thing I’m not in the fucking book publishing business.
They employed the skills of Ramón K. Pérez, whose amazing art is borderline hypnotic at times. There’s very little talking in this book so Ramón’s art guides you through a story which looks like it could have just been a dream Jim Hensen once had and somehow managed to remember and write down.
It may be strange to say, but Tale of Sand really reminds me of Paprika, perhaps for the way a setting can suddenly change and you can go from a sandy desert to what I like to describe as a colour orgasm on the next page. Putting aside the gorgeous art for a moment, which by the way is about ninety percent of the book’s contents, the book starts with a foreword and ends with an afterword, which is also accompanied by short biographies for Hensen, Juhl and Pérez, topping it all off with a few sketches.
All this is packed into a sturdy, 152 page hardback cover with thick, good quality pages. I really am glad I took a chance and ordered Tale of Sand, it’s worth it and I hope this little review encourages at least one other person to check it out.
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About the Author
Mustafa Unal is a blogger and YouTube commentator living in London, UK. His distinguishing features are never shutting the fuck up and having a terrible sense of humour. Also, he runs this bitch.
