Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective #4: Cramming In Some Beauty Sleep

*yawn* Hiya, Tickethol--*snore* *mumble* Oh, sorry about that. I was up late last night, obsessively organizing something that meant nothing by the time I gave up on it at three a.m. And unfortunately, no one kissed me to wake me up this morning.

Not only did I feel like I had stayed awake for a hundred straight years and spent last night getting drunk (the first of which is physically impossible without dying, and the second of which is false--sometimes regrettably so--because I don't drink), but my only motivation for shaking a leg and getting out of bed was someone, well, shaking my leg. I'll have to make up for my caffeine-fueled late night last night by cramming in some beauty sleep this afternoon. Speaking of beauty sleep, here we go.

GFT #5: Sleeping Beauty

Though it is no longer than any previous issue, this feels longer because so much is packed into each page. A college student named Brett has a crush on a girl named Haley, who uses him to cheat in class and tries to get him to buy her drugs for a party she’s holding that night.
On the way to the dealer’s house, he spots Sela Mathers, who “accidentally” drops the book of fairy tales before driving off. Brett parks at a gas station and begins reading from the book.
This was quite the involved buildup at almost six pages in length, but Sleeping Beauty is no pushover, either. It stays mostly true to the common telling, but packed into the next fourteen and a half pages are a flashback story-within-a-story, a budding romance, an affair, and no less than three grisly deaths.
Tristain, the servant who kisses and wakes Sleeping Beauty, is actually Brett. No “more proof is revealed” crap here. The lettering comes out and says it; Brett got sucked into the fairy tale he was reading and became Tristain. Except in Sleeping Beauty, Tristain catches the princess’s curse and dies at the end, and Brett is shown to be alive afterward, saying it “felt a little too real.” So maybe it’s like dreams, where you automatically wake up before you die? Whatever the case, it’s revealed that Haley has a boyfriend (whose picture is in the encyclopedia directly under “stupid-looking man-gorilla”), and Brett leaves her, having decided not to buy the drugs after all.
Before getting in his car, Brett is approached by Sela, who has come to collect her book. But is it really her book? We’ve seen before that Sela doesn’t have to be present for the book to work (Red Riding Hood), and it’s subtly hinted here that maybe the book has a mind of its own, like it wanted to fall out of her hands because it sensed Brett or something. Aside from further insight into the mechanics of the book and more evidence that Sela is a mischievous force, if not an outright agent of good, this issue is basically a filler episode. That being said, it is one of the better uses of page time and one of the best written issues thus far.

Following some research, I will return to wrap up this first volume of the first volume of Grimm Fairy Tales.