Jim Hensons Story Teller: Dragons, Tale One of Four
“Son of the serpent”
ARCHAIA
Story and art by: Daniel Bayliss
Script by: Fabian Rangel JR
Story Tellers is back again to bring us another set of wonderfully illustrated and narrated stories. This time, the focus is on Dragons! Coming into this book, I knew I would be reading tales that have been used as life lessons and to learn the moral of the story.
Chapter one, Son of the Serpent, is derived from a native American tale involving the Horned Serpent, Thunderbirds and a father and son pair. You can read this story many times, and each time come up with a different lesson trying to be taught through the narrative and actions of the characters.
Without getting too deep into the philosophy of the issue, there is still a wonderful comic that unfolds before us. The illustrations and coloring of this comic make for some very compelling story telling tools, as is the normal tendency of the Jim Henson Story Teller brand. This particular issue, having a tale based on a Native American story needed to have the right feeling of colors and patterns to give the original tale some form of acknowledgement.
Whatever life lesson you got out of the story, the fact still remains that this tale of a father and son who were fishing when they were attacked by the Horned Serpent (dragon) has a lot to offer from a one-shot comic. There is the thrilling suspense of surviving the serpent and being caught in a fight between the dragon and the savior thunderbirds, and then the desperate measures taken to save one’s son or even the will to stay alive in general. And eventually this story offers us a moral to understand on our own. There isn’t too much that I can elaborate on as far as what the story is about, because I feel that each person who reads this comic will look at it slightly different and see the story summed up differently than the next person. With the colorful art and griping fable taken from the Native American’s culture and traditions, I cant wait to see what other worldly legends of Dragons the Story Teller series will bring us next!