A new miniseries based on the classic board game gives us another reimagining of the characters and their murderous story.
Clue: Candlestick 1
Written and Drawn by Dash Shaw
I have an admitted and unabashed love for CLUE. Not the board game, mind you. I’ve never actually been able to get into the board game. But the 1985 comedy starring Tim Curry and Christopher Lloyd is one of my favorite movies of all time. I’ve probably seen it a couple of hundred times. And while this IDW miniseries – or the PREVIOUS one – don’t have any connection to the film, the spirit of the comedy is there.
The second CLUE miniseries, which debuted this week, is being crafted by cartoonist Dash Shaw. While I’m not familiar with his work, the first issue has made me a fan. Focusing on Professor Plum and his relationship with the eccentric Mr. Boddy, a collector of odd antiquities, Shaw gives a new perspective to the murder mystery. And speaking of changes, Mr. Boddy isn’t even the first casualty of this mystery miniseries!
CLUE‘s main characters were never really fleshed out in the original board game, which makes coming up with a new story, new motivations and new histories for them all the easier, without any real baggage while keeping a familiar tone. It is, after all, a story about a group of strangers trying to figure out who among them is a murderer.
A comic book is the perfect medium for an adaptation like this. With all the rumors of a new theatrical release over the last couple of years, I would much rather pay over and over again for new CLUE comic book stories, done by different creative teams flexing their artistic muscles on a new mystery. So far, this one is a lot of fun.