The Muppets Noir has a gloriously straightforward central premise: Kermit is a trenchcoated gumshoe, on the case of a missing pig with dreams of stage stardom.

Read that sentence again, it will tell you the kind of experience of joy and genius you’re about to have. It’s the stuff of memes – if you could put the Muppets into any given situation…

The tricky thing about that is that because it’s so easy to imagine, it’s incredibly fraught with potential pitfalls, because if you even remotely under-deliver, every Muppet-fan and reader will immediately be triggered into disappointment and the entirely unfounded notion that they could have done it better themselves.

Muppets In Orbit

When, as Roger Langridge does here, you commit to both writing and drawing the whole shebang yourself, you turn that pressure up to 11 and then some.

So without further ado, let’s play the music, light the lights, and announce that Langridge absolutely knocks the inaugural issue of The Muppets Noir not only out of the park but into geostationary orbit.

This is what happens when someone absolutely gets the brief and performs above and beyond expectations to meet it.

In the first instance, Langridge takes us from a standard behind the scenes panic at a Muppet Show, with Kermit getting stressed and snappy, and Piggy offering him pie by way of a spirit-calming pre-show treat. When he snaps at her, Scooter makes him sit in a relaxing chair with a favourite detective novel to calm the heck down before he endangers his own life.

Unnnnfortunately, a guest act whose speciality is brick juggling manages to do that for him, knocking our favourite furry frog spark out, while he has a head full of Noir novel –

Annnd cue the gateway to the premise of the arc.

The Best Traditions

It’s delicious that Langridge takes the time to set up how we get into a Noirish world with the Muppets, because it distances it from the straightforward memery of “What if Noir detective fiction… had Muppets in?”

Time taken on this makes the reader feel taken care of, which is in the best traditions of the best Muppets-Do-Literature movies, like The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island. It makes you welcome to a standard fictional Muppet world, and then gives you a pathway into the kind of material that they’re about to Muppetize, which makes you relax, feeling like you’re in good hands.

Spoiler alert: You’re in damn good hands.

Once Kermie is in his Noir dreamland as gumshoe Flip Minnow, there’s a subtle change in colour palette towards black, white and grey, as you’d expect from Noir content, but it doesn’t go entirely monochrome. That’s a solid decision for this kind of story, where the black and white harshness of true Noir would be irritating – and besides, it would be much less easy to be green in that sort of world.

Who Ate All The Pies?

There’s a mashup of everything you could want from glorious Noir tradition and glorious Muppet tradition – giant shaggy Muppet Sweetums making contact with Flip on behalf of his employer, Dolores Crustworth, Queen of Pies. Her niece, Meringue, who bears a striking resemblance to Piggy, has gone missing, just days after she tried to make her club-stage debut. Dolores, though she’s furious with her niece for shunning the family business, wants her back in safe trotters, rather than running around with the seedy clubland lowlifes that make the city thrum.

Sweet but bizarrely Muppety note – Flip Minnow reacts poorly to the presence of pies. They give him a funny turn, in which quite apart from anything else, people seem to be talking in rhyme as though the whole thing has turned into a musical.

Did we mention? Bizarrely Muppety but perfect.

Taking the case involves Flip following in the tracks of all the great gumshoes – to the police station, to meet Officer O’Bear (Yep, Fozzie’s the classic Irish cop) and Officer Eagle (Sam the hardass, giving kids parking tickets on their rollerskates), then popping down to see Rizzo the Rat in the police morgue. You’ve just got to love internal logic like that, it’s the law.

The Great Gonzini

A trip to a silent reading restaurant which employs Rowlf the pianist dog to play absolutely no notes at all (keep up, it’s a double-folded gag) leads Flip to a bar run by “Gonzini,” and the great cabaret star-turned publican puts him on what looks like a promising track before the issue ends on a pleasingly sinister note of deception, again underlining the great Noir flavour of the piece.

What marks this out as an absolutely slam-dunking Muppetfest is the variety and the hit rate of the seemingly throwaway gags. These come at you sideways and in unexpected ways, both literal and graphic, so you find yourself laughing often and a lot, but never enough to break the dynamic tension of the scene, unless that’s what Langridge wants you to do, as in Flip’s experience of Dolores Crustworth outlining his case, which turns into a bright pink cabaret number, or an unexpected pie-fight for information at Rowlf’s place.

Your favourite of these gags will depend on your own personal sense of humour. The point about which is that this issue is packed with gags right to the crust, meaning it has something for everyone, and quite a lot for… well, for everyone. 

Don’t Trust The Crust

My own personal favourite? A joyous throwaway with Crazy Harry (the Muppet that always blows things up) as a conspiracy theorist with a grudge against “Big Pie,” giving out “Discover the TRUTH!” pamphlets, with a list of crazy claims about the industry. 

Just pure Muppety satirical joy, woven neatly into the Noir genre and the backbone of this particular story.

The Muppets Noir, Issue #1 is the comic book you need right now, in a world which increasingly can feel joyless and uninspiring. Spend some time with your favourite rag-bags in a Noirish adventure, searching for a missing pig. You know that’ll cheer you up. The fact that it’s delivered note perfectly will just be a bonus. Tony Fyler

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