WITCHES

Previous issues of “Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Witches” have taken the second part of that title to heart, but issue #3 focuses on the first. Matthew Dow Smith retells an Irish folktale about stories and their power, with the Storyteller himself bookending the issue. (Don’t worry, there are still witches involved.) It’s thematically pitch-perfect and invitingly written, but it needed smoother pacing and bolder artwork. I enjoyed this issue, but it didn’t have the extra edge to make it a must-read. Smith has chosen a perfect folktale for this series, and he does a fine job adapting it. The issue follows a sailor-storyteller who’s shipwrecked on a mysterious island where his imagination holds concrete, physical power. The dialogue is scarce, with most of the story told in captioned narration. As a result, it reads very much like a fireside story, with plenty of foreshadowing and editorializing. This approach also allows Smith to speak in broader strokes. Having a character say, “I

The beautiful first issue of “The Storyteller: Witches” by S.M. Vidaurri is both a triumph and a failure of visual storytelling. Each individual page is a gorgeous integration of text and visuals, where the sentences are as likely to have spiral shapes as the spinning wheels. Words swirl and dive into fairytale borders, dragon-sized swans and ancient trees. However, beautiful as they are individually, the pages don’t speak to or follow from one another, making the issue feel more like a series of particularly pretty posters than a flowing visual story. Still, this artwork really is stunning, and “The Storyteller: Witches” #1 is an enchanting charmer overall. The series is called “The Storyteller,” and S.M. Vidaurri really has created an issue that feels like the nicest storybook you’ve ever owned. The whole book seems to have been colored in watercolors, and the softness of it drew me right in. Though most pages stay in the same soft, bright palette, there are a few exceptions. When