Fairy tales can sometimes be a challenging source to draw upon.  While many famous story tales have an obvious moral or theme, some of the more obscure fairy tales have a theme or moral which is either hard to comprehend or outright inappropriate by modern standards.  This was in part what caused the first issue in this miniseries to be a bit of a misfire, as the choice of fairy tale was not a good match for an engaging story.  Part of that is because of the nature of this miniseries, as it identifies itself as focusing on fairy tales that deal with witches, and so in addition to finding new fairy tales to highlight that it also has a thematic challenge of finding the right material.  For the second entry into this series, the writer has gone a bit further afield and turned to Japanese fairy tales, though with an evidently better result.

Japanese fairy tales are a bit of a mystery to me.  My only exposure to them is from a collection of them that my wife downloaded to her e-reader.  As opposed to the more familiar European stories, these stories have a different presentation, and their resolution often results in more questions than answers.  That is the case here with the snow witch, a story about a wood gatherer in the mountains of Japan who meets the snow witch, and she changes his life in an unforeseen way.  While anything like morality is very ambiguous in this story, it is still well interpreted to this medium, and the writer (who is also the artist) does a good job at making the characters approachable and immediately likeable.  Though they only share a few panels, the romance between the wood-cutter and wife is evident, and it made the scenes between them touching.

As this series stands, there is still almost nothing here to tie this into Jim Henson, only using the franchise name as a boost to sell some extra issues about fairy tales.  The first issue didn’t do the man much justice, but the second issue at least captures the quality if not the content that he would be known for.  This second issue does redeem the series though, and with this more successful adaptation it makes me wonder what the series might hold for its remaining two issues.

Story and Art: Kyla Vanderklugt 
Story: 8.5 Art: 8.25 Overall: 8 Recommendation: Buy

BOOM! studios and Archaia provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review.