[T]he Skeksis will always be horribly memorable. I'm pretty sure the scene where the Chamberlain is attacked and defrocked by his sneering brothers g… - Simon Spurrier

[F]or me the brilliance of the first film — the underlying reason that I hold it so highly — can be boiled down to two words: childlike wonder. Literally every character in that movie is a version of a child we'd all recognize. From the laid-back mystics — remember that high-functioning kid in every classroom who just stares dreamily out the window all day? — to the petulant and venal bullies of the villainous Skeksis. They're all cast as utterly original monsters, but they're very recognizable tropes once you know what you're looking for.
This was a movie which introduced a whole new world, after all -- not just some lazy Tolkien-esque fantasy rip-off, but a teeming, exotic, alien reality full of impossible life and delightfully weird wonders. The little piece of genius which underlies the movie is that the central characters are experiencing all this craziness for the first time, just like we the viewers.

The original movie landed in 1982 and caused an immediate stir, being the first live-action flick which featured literally no human characters. I'm not sure the audiences of the day quite knew what to make of it. Critics expected it to fit tidily into the continuum of knowingly comedic Muppetry which had made the Henson name, and couldn't wrap their heads around this slice of totally earnest, unironic adventure which set its sights on nothing less than pure wonder. Is it sci-fi? Fantasy? A kids' flick?

Cut forward to the present, BOOM! imprint Archaia receives the license to explore the unproduced screenplay in the comics medium and asks me to be involved -- that last point entirely because they knew I'd pursue them like a hound from hell if they didn't let me. Or, worse, I'd totally sulk.