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Jim Henson’s The musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow
Roger Langridge is the developer of Snarked! and Fred the Clown and has dealt with such comics as The Muppet Show, Popeye, and Thor: The Mighty Avenger. Now, he is working on BOOM! Studios/Archaia’s Jim Henson’s The musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow, a graphic novel based on an unproduced Jim Henson special. Westfield’s Roger Ash checked in with Langridge to learn much more about this book.
Westfield: how did you become involved with this project?
Roger Langridge: I was asked nicely! I was working on something else for BOOM! Studios (which I’m now back to working on, incidentally), but this Henson project for Archaia came up and, now that Archaia has come under the BOOM! umbrella, we moved things around. I believe I was provided the book on the strength of the previous Henson work I’d done on BOOM!’s Muppet show comics and Archaia’s Storyteller anthology – they thought I would be a good fit for the project because of my prior experience with those other Henson properties. The book has a Thanksgiving theme, which implies that it would have had to be out before November, so we moved our schedules around to accommodate an October release.
Jim Henson’s The musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow preview page 1.
Westfield: how complete is the script for Jim Henson’s The musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow and is there any development material aside from the script?
Langridge: Well, the thing is, there wasn’t a script. There was a treatment by Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl – pages of character descriptions, notes about the tone and overall approach, and an outline of the plot. So I had to write a script from scratch using that treatment as a guideline. There were also some photographs of the puppets the Henson workshop built in 1968, which I was sent to use as reference and inspiration; my designs for the monsters are pretty close to those photos, although I tweaked their bodies a bit to make them work in the comics medium a little better, at Lisa Henson’s request. After all, in the comic they’re not puppets, they’re full-bodied creatures, so they can jump and run around and all that.
Jim Henson’s The musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow preview page 2.
Westfield: What were the challenges and rewards of adapting the script?
Langridge: one of the challenges was incorporating Thanksgiving, which is such a uniquely American holiday and which I know practically nothing about, aside from its roots in America’s creation myth – that, and the fact that turkeys are involved somehow. In fact, that whole small-town American milieu is something I had to research a bit. In the end, if I was in doubt, I would default to my knowledge of small-town new Zealand life from when I was growing up, which is not all that dissimilar.
Another challenge, a big one, was finding a way to represent music visually. The original TV special was conceived with music as a huge part of it – it’s best there in the title! – so I had to bite the bullet and find some way of making that work in a comic. My service was to use color as a kind of visual metaphor for music. Our colorist, Ian “Tale of Sand” Herring, realized that idea in way that exceeded my expectations. music in comics is such a challenging thing, and there are strong reasons to avoid it entirely, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say I think we made it work!
Westfield: What can you tell us about the story of Jim Henson’s The musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow and who are some of the characters readers will meet?
Langridge: The main character is Timmy Henderson, a young young boy who befriends a group of alien creatures who land on earth inside a hollow meteor. together they have to try and stop a fiendish plan by the town’s leading curmudgeon, miser and all-round bad hat, Eldridge Sump, to take over Timmy’s Aunt’s turkey farm. Along the way, Timmy is helped by his sister Ann, his Aunt Clytemnestra, and the town’s sheriff, mayor, storekeeper and general jack-of-all-trades, Grover Cowley.
Jim Henson’s The musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow preview page 3.
Westfield: Is there a character you’re really enjoying working on?
Langridge: I loved writing Sheriff Cowley! I had to be reminded once or twice that Timmy was the protagonist, not Cowley, and tweak the emphasis a bit to reflect that. Cowley’s a great, well-rounded character – nothing to finish with me, incidentally; that’s all there in the treatment. Aunt Cly was great fun to write, too – a real eccentric.
Westfield: any closing comments?
Langridge: let me just say it was an honor and a privilege to be entrusted with bringing this project to life. Jim Henson’s shoes are mighty big ones to fill – they look like clown shoes on me! – so hopefully people will get swept up in the story enough that they won’t notice the small rainforest’s worth of newspaper wadding up the toes.
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Jim Henson’s The musical Monster’s of Turkey Hollow