Comics publisher Archaia today announced a partnership with the Jim Henson Company to release comics based on classic Henson fantasy franchises as well as new Henson-branded series.
The multi-year partnership will draw from The Jim Henson Company’s extensive film and television library, including Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal,Labyrinth, Mirrormask, The Storyteller and other titles. The agreement also allows The Jim Henson Company and Archaia to partner with talent in the comic book, television and film industries to create brand-new stories under a co-branded banner, building on the legacy of quality and creativity of The Jim Henson Company brand and strengthening Archaia’s relationships within the entertainment sector.
I’m not involved with Archaia, so I don’t have anything to add, but since I’ve seen comments here and elsewhere wondering what it means for Return to Labyrinth, the anwser is — nothing. Return to Labyrinth volume 4 is still proceeding with Henson and Tokyopop. As others have speculated, there is a distinction in licensing these days between “comics” and “manga,” so this announcement has no bearing on the series I’m writing.
I do think it’s a very exciting announcement as any comics + Henson projects are bound to yield some amazing stories and art, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with! Feel free to discuss what you’d like to see in a Labyrinth comic series in the comments, but I’ll be sitting this one out until the books come out when I can enjoy them as just another fan.
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Wow this is amazing! I just hope they don’t try to interfere with what happens after Sarah beats the Labyrinth.. and I hope that everything coincides with what you and Chris have created. Contradicting situations would not be a good thing. :/
I agree with Sierra. To contradict what you have already created as the official sequel would present a problem and would confuse everyone, and so I have mixed feelings about a Labyrinth comic series. As long as it isn’t totally separate from RTL, I’ll be okay with it, but otherwise, I’ll have to pass. If it contradicts the official sequel, it isn’t canon.
Wow. I’d love to see what they could do with Mirrormask or some of the Storyteller episodes. I’d welcome Labyrinth stories, but I hope they don’t contradict anything you’ve written.
I maaaaay read another Labyrinth comic if it came to that, but IDK…I fear disapointment hoping to compair to Return to Labyrinth, then having it turn out completely different. But I’ll happly read somthing on Fraggle Rock!
You know, I’m all for more Labyrinth comics. Why not make the most of what could be offered ? What they put out won’t be the same thing ( at least I think ) as RTL, but it’ll be seperate. If they do another take on a sequel, I will be curious.
Oh, no offense Jake. I love what your doing, but so many people have a diffent idea on what could happen, so I’m all for more stories. XD
That was actually my first concern. What if what they produce as a comic book contradicts Return to Labyrinth. Which do we take as canon!? AGGH! The Church of Jareth is in ruin!!!
By the way, thanks for the confirmation that Return to Labyrinth is still on track.
Glad to hear that volume 4 is still on track! I finally sat down and read what I thought was going to be the complete series last weekend, and very much liked it — and really want to read the conclusion!
As far as contradictory series, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. Plenty of fictional worlds have multiple canons, and I think Labyrinth lends itself especially well to that concept. A maze of forking paths is a common way of describing the many possible futures, after all.
My biggest concern with the new comic books is if they do their own sequel to Labyrinth and it contradicts the events of Return to Labyrinth you know that will case a rift in the Labyrinth fan base. I’ve seen it happen before to other fan bases. The Labyrinth fans will divide into factions. One group taking the comic books as canon, another taking the manga, then the desperate few trying to merge them both, and the film purists.
I can sense the long drawn out debates on the Labyrinth forums and discussion groups now.
I would believe that the Henson people have been following this creation of Jakes very closely and I think they will keep continuity in the creative process with the other projects. Perhaps the success of the RTL has sparked a new phase for them. I shall hope.
Jake should be involved, he is a wonderful , talented and creative treasure that should not be swept aside by the Henson people.
do u guys find it odd that i knew there would be a Mirromask manga (on Instinct alone) I mean way b4 Archaia like when I saw on DVD
Mandy, I hope you aren’t right about the future of fandom (And you’re usually right roughly 98% of the time, so this doesn’t bode well).
I can’t imagine how volatile the fangirls would get if everbody started fighting over what should be considered canon if more than one sequel is developed. You already mentioned Pika-la-Cynique’s less than favorable views of RtL, now multiply that 100 fold and add more capslock and emote-spamming. It wont be pretty.
I imagine that everything Archaia wants to do has to be OK-ed with the Henson company, but if they wanted to do a sequel do you think they’d get the greenlight to do it?
There’s no way Archaia doesn’t know about RtL, but would that necessarily stop them from making up their own ending? Would there be some sort of Gentlemen’s agreement that prevents them from doing so?
I can picture it happening like this: Archaia produces original side-stories about Labyrinth for a while and builds up a following. After gaining enough readership and with encouragement from fans, they decide to make up their own sequel to the Labyrinth story. Depending on how long Archaia takes to produce its comics this could occur some time after RtL is all finished. Eager to keep the Labyrinth franchise going, the Jim Henson company greenlights Archaia’s sequel, and the Canon Wars begin.
It’s hard to tell what loyalties companies have today, so I guess the only thing we can do is wait and see.
‘And you’re usually right roughly 98% of the time’
Wow, I’ll take that as a compliment. Damn that 2%.
I blame that 2% on the fact that I thought for sure that The Dresden Files would have a Second season.
Yeeek! I’m scared! It’s going to turn out like the Twilight/Original vampire fanbase/hatebase, I can tell! I hope the Henson company doesn’t let Labyrinth fall to this same annoying ruin!!!!
I hope they don’t touch any of the movies that have manga sequels already. This fandom’s already split enough because the manga, we don’t need more debate as to what’s canon and what’s not.
Admittedly the manga split is growing smaller and smaller as more fans warm up to the manga. Now there’s only a small handful left that haven’t embraced it.
Most people haven’t embraced the manga because they didn’t read it all, or they picked it up, read the first few pages, and then put it back down. They don’t even give it a chance, which is really stupid because you can’t judge something unless you are familiar with it. If you don’t even know what it’s about, you can’t rightfully say that it’s not canon, or it’s bad.
You’re absolutely right, Kendra. Most of the complaints I see about the manga are from people who only read Volume 1 or only read part of Volume 1. They rant about how Sarah doesn’t act like herself. Well, for starters it’s been nearly twenty years in our world (assuming Mizumi and Jareth’s bargain was based on the thirteen years by Earth standards) and also it wasn’t yet revealed that Sarah’s dreams were taken from her.
Another complaint I see is from people who are insistant that the Stepmother’s name is Karen. Petty, I know. Fan fiction writers have used that name so long that many thought it was canon. After I point out to them it really wasn’t (because many will claim it’s from the novel or early script and it’s not) they’ll come up with a new feeble excuse to the effect of ‘Well, fan fiction writers have used it so long that Jake should respect that.’ Umm.. yeah. Why? So a fan fiction writer can scream Copyright infringement? The Henson company would never allow that. It’s unrealistic to think they would. They’re afraid of this new fangled thing called law suits and don’t want to deal with the complications it would cause. If Karen is a fan invented name that means if Jake were to use it he’d have to track down the very first fan fiction writer who used it, find out where they live, what their full name is, and gain consent to use it and then confirmation from the Henson Company that it’s okay. It’s a legal mess waiting to happen. It’s unrealistic and petty to think that they would go through all that trouble just to appease some fan fiction writers who started an online trend back in the nineties. Irene is a decent name for her. She’s Irene.
Now me, I’m laid back. Labyrinth is not mine. If I write fiction or role play and someone uses something I’ve used sure, go for it. I wouldn’t mind credit for the original stuff but i don’t want anything for it. It wasn’t mine to begin with. But I know some fan fiction writers who aren’t like me and forget these worlds they barrow are not their own. You’ll find some passionate fan fiction writers who will argue ‘There was nothing new for almost twenty years. Tthat means it was ours for the taking. Once you make something it belongs to the fans.’ Yeah, it’s yours as a fan. You can do what you want with it in your own imagination but it’s not yours in the eyes of the law. And that doesn’t mean you can cry ‘Thief!’ if the people who really own the rights decide to do something with it.
Then there are the few who insist Jareth doesn’t act right. I played Jareth for three years on the AOL Labyrinth role playing game. In 1999 I won their Labyrinth fan fiction award for best characterization of Jareth (back when the fan base was a little more organized). I have analyzed every aspect of the character to such a degree I had a long essay once on why I suspected someone like him would probably be secretly claustrophobic. I thought Jareth was very true to character. Especially in Volume 1 when Toby says ‘You said you wouldn’t mess with me anymore!’ and Jareth replies ‘I said I wouldn’t help you anymore. There’s a difference.’ That felt so true to Jareth. Those that say Jareth was portrayed wrong in the manga have yet to give me a legitimate example as to how he’s being portrayed wrong. And I think ‘Why? Because he’s not acting like YOUR fan fiction?’ People read so many fan fictions and get attached to the portrayals in fan fiction (particularly their own) that they forget the official canon hadn’t been updated since late 1986. Some fan fictions might be popular, that doesn’t make them official, nor does it make the Henson company obligated to follow it. To follow it would cause a whole mess of legal issues.
So far everything I ever portrayed with Jareth in fiction or RP has synced up with the manga except for a few small details. 1. Until the manga my portrayal usually wore gloves because he had gloves on in every scene in the film. 2. It was just easier in role playing games to let him go to and from the mortal world at will and ignore the possibility that he might have to be summoned on prey on the wish that aperson wants someone maybe like him there. But all else seems about right. I didn’t have to change how I portray him at all after the canonization of the manga. In fact for many years I had it that he had ruled for roughly 1,300 years as well, mostly for the number 13 in there. It seemed fitting.
The manga haters are fading away as they slowly come to accept and embrace the new mythos. Look at how many bad reviews on amazon are for Volume 1 and how few are their for Volume 3. It had no negative reviews at all last I checked a few weeks ago.
I think a lot of the people who hate the manga simply hate how it clashes with their fan fiction. I never really had that issue so it doesn’t bother me.
I know… People on places like Fanfiction.net bug the heck out of me. They’re so self-righteous and self-absorbed and think that they’re so cool because of the stories they’ve written that aren’t even originally their’s. I write fanfictions, too, and though I take them seriously as practice for actually writing my own novel, I know that they do not rightfully belong to me. Sure, some of the characters are original, and what happens is relatively new, but that doesn’t mean that the world it takes place in is mine. If someone stole my original characters, that would make me mad, because I put the work into creating them. But “Karen” is just a name for a character that had already been created without one. For them to say that it’s their’s is silly. The Henson Company probably didn’t even know the name existed until some befuddled fan complained about it not being in the manga.
I agree with you about the self-righteousness of some fan fiction writers.
Oh, the WORST issue I had with fan fiction is The Dresden Files fans. I was accused of Plagiarism.
I wrote an fan fiction / Spoof called ‘Things found on Harry’s answering machine.’ A joke based on the things you might find on a wizard’s home answering machine. The original disclaimer made clear that the out going answering machine message you see at the start of the story was not mine. I forgot to put that part of the disclaimer in part 2 of the story but it was in part 1. It was all a spoof. I couldn’t recall where the out going answering machine message had come from but I remembered that I had found it funny. I had even started to think that perhaps I had picked it up from one of the original Jim Butcher novels. Now it turned out the person who wrote that out going answering machine message was a fan ficton writer / role player on Live Journal. Instead of just telling me she didn’t want me to use it she started sending me hate mail and contacted the live journal group stop_Plagiarism. It was so humiliating having to PROVE to some random stranger in a live journal group that I had a disclaimer. The case was closed but they still have a ‘file’ on me and keep me on their ‘watch list’ ‘just in case.’
I have nothing to hide so I’ve attached a link to my ‘case’ in this post. (I’m Lone_She_Wolf on live journal and JTheGoblinKing on FanfictionNet). The person who came up with the original quote I had used (which wasn’t even a big part of the story) had somehow found every forum it was posted on but they managed to miss the disclaimer in part 1 every time?!
Considering I do legitimate writing from time to time this feels more like slander by some self-righteous kids rather than anyone really wanting to protect anyone. It’s a group to protect people from having content stolen from their stories that involve copyrighted characters they technically don’t have rights to anyway!
Another issue I’ve had with fan fiction writers is there’s one group on live journal called Skull_Boy_love (not what you think). It’s for fan fiction writers who like to ship (put in a relationship) Harry Dresden and Bob (the ghost character of The Dresden Files TV series who is bound to his own deceased skull). I used to tease and mock the group from time to time and one day decided to join them and submit my own stuff but I’ve always been a fast typist and I posted a lot very quickly, most of it pre-written for otehr groups, and one of their mods decided I was a ’spammer.’ I confronted her and told her that what I was posting was legitimate fan fiction in the theme of their group and she said I was formatting it wrong but instead of just telling me how it should be formatted she went on to say my stories weren’t romantic enough. When I told her I had a few in there that did imply they were a couple she said that I was too blatant. Now this was all within the first fifteen minutes of my posting to the group. And I had over twenty fan fictions for The Dresden Files (Some several chapters long) so there was no way she had actually read them all. Also she spoke like a borg from Star Trek, kept referring to herself as ‘We’ and told me not to try to run to any of the other moderators to ‘tell’ on her because she spoke for the ‘group’ and that they would ‘decide your fate’ on Monday after they had time to ‘calm down.’ I’m like…. Yeah but no. Sorry. I have too much integrity to sit around while some teenyboppers who like fantasizing about Paul Blackthorne and Terrence Mann as a couple ‘decide my fate’ so I left.
Oh, whoops. That link was only only to part of the ‘case.’ You can find the whole thing with comments in the attachment if you want to see what a joke it turned into.
So yes, I know how some fan fiction writers can be.
Geez Mandy, you make me glad that I never got too deep into the underbelly of fanfiction. I used to have a few Digimon stories but I got tired of having to produce chapter after chapter for the two fans that I managed to get. And I only got those two fans, who I suspect to this day was actually one guy with two accounts, by adding their fan characters into my story (Rookie mistake). I guess I was lucky in that, like RPing, I was never that good at writing fanfiction so I gave up fairly quickly and never looked back.
Still, since I draw, there’s always a part of me that wonders if one day someone is either going to plagarize me or accuse me of plagarism.
Truth be told when I was younger if I saw a cool character I would pretty much copy whatever I liked about that character for my own use (Usually for something Digimon related, I was BIG on Digimon when I was younger). Thankfully after growing up I moved past this stage and have put all my focus into creating original designs and characters.
As a result though, this has made me uber paranoid about having some of my designs being stolen by art thieves. Thankfully I fly pretty low on most people’s radar, so I have yet to have a problem. Still, once you put something on the internet, even if all you’re trying to do is get an honest critique, you run the risk of being plagarised and unfortunantly there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.
No kidding. I feel sorry for you, Mandy. They can be really harsh for stupid reasons. They try to act all tough and grown-up, but they really just sound stupid, don’t they? Half the stuff they say doesn’t make sense anyhow.
And I’m also paranoid about my stuff being stolen…
I read the case. Gosh, that’s aweful. I can’t believe that you were the only one who was punished for that when she hunted you down on goodness knows how many websites just to trash-talk you and she STILL didn’t see the disclaimer? Either she’s blind or she ignored it and forged on for the sake of pride alone. No offense, but that right there really ticks me off.
Plagerism is a serious offense and people should not be accused of it willy-nilly. To attack someone’s integrity when you don’t have all the facts is just ruthless and wrong. I’m sorry that happened, Mandy. I really am.
Thank you, Kendra. I was very upset when it first happened. I really had forgotten where the quote came from. It did feel like something Jim Butcher would say so I started to think I had picked it up from one of the Dresden Files novels. When I couldn’t find the original source of the quote I put the disclaimer in part one, stating that the quote used as the answering machine out going message was not mine but something I had read and liked, I just couldn’t recall where I had read it. I neglected the disclaimer in part two mostly because usually with fan fictions you only have to write the disclaimer once anyway and I sort of rushed through writing part 2.
It just boggled my mind that she was able to find my fiction in so many places, publically attack me but never noticed the disclaimer in part 1. At one point in there she tried to accuse me of putting the disclaimer in later. That’s why I allowed the person from that live journal group access into my FanfictionNet account as to see the last time the story was edited. As well as the date stamp on the forums that tell you when a post is edited.
Sometimes I feel like that person was trying to set me up. She started ordering me to remove the quote from the story in every place the story was posted (which I started to do) and then she tried claiming that I added the disclaimer later. Once the post was edited to remove the quote anything could have also been added or removed in the disclaimer. Fortunately I caught on to this before it was too late and I had several forums not yet edited (with stamps that say when a post is edited) as proof that the disclaimer had always been there. And I showed them to the person ‘investigating’ the case before following through on removing the quote from the story.
So now I’m on a watch list for using a quote in the story when in the disclaimer of part 1 of the fan fiction I said I didn’t know where that quote came from! Fan fiction writers can be disturbing…
This is why The Dresden Files TV series wasn’t salvageable (even though I highly recommend the show for anyone who likes urban fantasy. You can find it on hulu and now youtube thanks to lionsgateTV). The fan base is shot. It has too many factions. Book purists (who hate the show), show purists (who hate the books, Those that like both and don’t understand either purist group, Dresden/Bob shippers, Dresden/Murphy shippers, Dresden/Susan shippers… And none of them seem willing to get along with the other. They’re too busy squabbling amongst themselves to do anything substantial for the thing they love.
That’s what I’m afraid will happen to Labyrinth with these new comics. I’d hate to see something so good melt away because the teenyboppers got too hot-headed over what’s canon and what’s not.
Mandy,
I feel bad for you to have to go through all that.
You are a wonderful, insightful person who adds so much to this
site. Thank you.
As far as Henson and this new alliance, let us all support it until we really get an idea about what it will become. Jake does, so we should trust him a bit about this and maybe its a good thing?
Thank you very much, Derry. I appreciate it.
I have a funny story about a Labyrinth RPer I once came across. On AOL I have the screen name JTheGoblinKing. I’ve had it since 1999. And one day a few years ago someone IMed me, asking if I did RP (online text based role play). Well, it had been a few years since the first incarnation of the AOL Labyrinth role playing game and I was a little bored of Jareth and the Labyrinth game storylines but by this point I thought ‘Ah, why not?’ She asked me if I was willing to play Jareth in instant message for her. I said sure.
We started to RP. I began to lose patience quickly. Her character was practically humping Jareth’s throne. Well, it just felt out of character to me that Jareth would find that very appealing. And I broke it to her in so many words. I was starting to lose patience actually. And her reply was ‘You just don’t get it because you’re a guy! Only girls understand Jareth.’ And I replied with ‘Actually, I’m a woman.’ And she replied to that with ‘No wonder you don’t get him then!’ No matter what I said I just couldn’t win.
Jake, it looks to me as though your surprise success with Labyrint has inspired Henson Co to finally do something with this and other licensed properties that still have cult appeal. They really owe you!
Mandy, if that had happened to me, I would have told her to quit it, too. Not as Jareth, but as myself. I can’t stand it when people ruin a good rpg with vulgarity, but then again, I’m one of those family-friendly folks, so maybe some people like that kind of stuff. But I’m pretty sure Jareth wouldn’t appreciate it, either. I mean, yeah, he’s a guy, but he also has a bit of class as a ruler of a kingdom. Not only that, he’s in love with Sarah, and I’m pretty sure Sarah would not hump his throne, either.
Exactly, Kendra. For starters she was far too easy. Jareth isn’t just interested in a quick bang. She was coming off like a desperate prostitute trying to get a customer. I RP. I don’t cyber.