Everything has to be a franchise these days, which means handing out prequels and sequels to stories that 100 percent don’t need them. Given that these are unholy abominations that shouldn’t exist, they have to be spiced up to have any chance of appealing to audiences, often in ways that misfire entirely.

[subtitle]5The Labyrinth [/subtitle]

The Labyrinth raised a lot of questions re: how a human glam rock icon became the king of the goblins, and Labyrinth: Coronation fails to answer those questions over the course of 12 comic books. It reveals that Jareth was born in 18th-century Venice to a maid and a nobleman who sacrificed him to the preceding Goblin King. What follows is a fairly faithful play-by-play of the story in The Labyrinth, only with Jareth’s mother forced to solve it and losing on a technicality. That’s all well and good, but it ends deliberately ambiguously...