Return to Labyrinth, a Henson Company\/Tokyopop manga, should be considered a companion, rather than a sequel, to the 1986 fantasy film Labyrinth, about 15-year-old Sarah’s coming-of-age journey to save her half-brother, Toby, from the Goblin King’s Muppet-laden Labyrinth. 13 years after his older half-sister’s adventure, high schooler Toby doesn’t know that the Goblin King, his former kidnapper, now thinks of the boy as his heir. When Toby learns that Jareth has been granting his wishes \u2013 “meddling,” as Toby puts it \u2013 he enters the Labyrinth in an attempt to get Jareth out of his life. <\/p>\n
Motivated by personal annoyance instead of a need for maturation [the way Sarah was], Toby makes a bland, uninteresting protagonist. His companions \u2013 sharp-tempered Faery Hana, her playful, piss-happy steed Stank and the groveling goblin Skub \u2013 provide much more color. Other plot strands, like a Cinderella-like subplot involving Moppet, the human servant to Goblin City’s mayor, and negotiation between Jareth and the neighboring Queen of Cups about Jareth’s line of succession [?!], come in suddenly with some confusion, but will certainly be resolved in later volumes. [Return to Labyrinth is the first of three manga.] <\/p>\n
Geared toward teens and thus a new generation of Labyrinth fans younger than those who saw the movie’s theatrical release, Return\u2026 pays homage to the original with a similar punny, potty-mouthed sense of humor. Those familiar with the movie will also enjoy picking out continuity nods, old favorites [hey, Hoggle really is “prince of the Land of Stench!”] and plot parallels. <\/p>\n
Devout Sarah fans will be disappointed, since blockily drawn, bespectacled [?!] Sarah has only a small role in this volume. Devout Jareth fans will probably object to the portrayal of the Goblin King as a long-fingered, smarmy figure whose interest in Toby seems predatory [when giving some royal garb to Toby, he assures the boy that he “won’t peek”]. Taken for what it is, though \u2013 a lightweight supplement to a cult favorite \u2013 Return\u2026 is an amusing curiosity. Just don’t expect it to show you your dreams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Return to Labyrinth, a Henson Company\/Tokyopop manga, should be considered a companion, rather than a sequel, to the 1986 fantasy film Labyrinth, about 15-year-old Sarah’s coming-of-age journey to save her half-brother, Toby, from the Goblin King’s Muppet-laden Labyrinth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}