GFT Retrospective #12: The Piper

Good morning, Ticketholders!

The posting schedule for the next two weeks will be far more relaxed than previously. Since each of the next two Retrospective issues each cover an entire miniseries, I will only do three posts per week: this column on Friday or Saturday, and Ticketverse Throwbacks and New Piece Offerings on Thursday. The remainder of each week will be devoted to typing out one of my old hard copy essays for NPO, compiling digital TPBs for future Retrospectives, and taking care of personal matters.

With planning formalities out of the way, let's get into this week's miniseries:

The Piper

Breaking from tradition, The Piper four-part miniseries opens with the fairy tale and lets the action flow from there. At the top left corner of the first panel, we see the familiar markings of a certain book cover. But this book is purple, not red like Sela’s.

The first issue’s cover (left, in two print editions) features the Pied Piper sitting and playing his flute alongside a certain red-headed woman, suggesting that there are in fact two books, and that she possesses the purple one. Within its pages, we learn that seven hundred thirty-three years in the past, the Pied Piper tale played out much as it had in Sela’s volume, but with more historical context and a different fate befalling the children at the end. The townspeople drown the piper out of revenge, and the miniseries moves on to present-day Florida.
At an elite prep school, a musical prodigy named Sean is being bullied by the jocks in his class (because true stereotypes). After hearing a strange melody one night, he runs into the red-headed woman, Belinda, who is posing as the school librarian and loans Sean her fairy tale book. When one of the bullies paralyzes a girl who had a crush on Sean, he reads from Belinda’s book and summons the Piper.
The next two issues play out like a typical slasher movie, with the Piper commanding various animals to kill the jocks and their coach one by one. But when the Piper sets his sights on Sean’s friends, Sean reads more of the book in an effort to send the Piper back from whence he came.
It is revealed that Belinda is at least twice as old as Sela, and that her book is some kind of fairy tale purgatory where evil souls (like the Piper) can be trapped. The surviving students and the music teacher attempt to trap the Piper by playing his melody backwards (because horror movie cliches), but the jocks read the summoning incantation, Candyman-style (because idiots).
Following a short but epic musical battle, Sean succeeds in trapping the Piper, but in a turn that is more ghost movie than fairy tale, the ending is not the end, nor is it happy. Different, entertaining, illuminating, but also derivative and consequently predictable.

What I have for you next depends on what I dig up and what Throwback post I choose to accompany it. If you have any comments, please put them in the comments section, leave a like by hitting the like button, and click on some ads by clicking on ads so I can get rich by getting rich.

Obviousmaster,
obviously, out.