GFT Retrospective #19: 2008 Annual
Hello again, Ticketholders!
As I explained in the last post (as much as I was able to, anyway), plot elements relating to this Annual won’t play out until much further along in the main series, perhaps several volumes later. But the 2008 Annual was nonetheless one of the best contrived and most connected in Grimm Fairy Tales history.
Again adapting nursery rhymes rather than fairy tales, it mostly does away with the complete separation of framing device and story collection, opting instead to have each story occur in the same place and at the same time as its setup, and the other stories.
As it references events a year further along in the series’ publication, Sela is once more the woman in focus, though she is not the storyteller this time, either. That honor belongs to an as-yet-unnamed man who (according to the inverted color scheme of his speech bubbles and the giant, hooded, skull-faced, sickle-wielding shadow behind him) is some kind of Grim(m) Reaper figure in disguise, and who is manipulating Sela as a means of either keeping her evil or killing her at some point.
He puts on another face for an encounter with a flower-obsessed woman named Mary Setab (that’s Bates backwards), cuing a twist on Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, wherein a woman named Lily becomes jealous of her married lover and steals his catatonic wife’s wedding ring, not knowing that every woman who steals a piece of her jewelry gets turned into a flower. Or murdered by the fake-catatonic wife. Or something. The imagery isn’t very clear on that point, except that Mary Setab is the fake-catatonic woman, and she refers to the flower she had been coddling as Lily.
This concept of women being turned into flowers will pop up again in a future Wonderland series, with an issue featuring another woman named Lily. It’s doubtful this is anything more than a coincidence, but again, it’s fun to notice these things.
Putting on yet another face, the Reaper meets up with a woman named Rebekah, the wife of infamous serial killer Humphrey “Humpty” Dumpty, whom she tried to put back together Frankenstein-style after all the king’s men beat him within an inch of his life.
The final story sets up and reveals many things, including how Belinda got her book, the true setting of the 2008 Annual, and some backstory on a couple of stowaways: Mary Darling and her son, Daniel. You don’t need pixie dust to know where this is going, but I’m trying my best to keep spoilers to a minimum of six hundred or so.
If I did a good job of not spoiling things for you this time, let me know in the comments. Remember to like, share, subscribe, and click some ads to keep my revenue stream on course. Tomorrow night, we fast-forward three years for some 2011 festivities, so stay tuned.
As I explained in the last post (as much as I was able to, anyway), plot elements relating to this Annual won’t play out until much further along in the main series, perhaps several volumes later. But the 2008 Annual was nonetheless one of the best contrived and most connected in Grimm Fairy Tales history.
GFT Annual #2 (2008)
As it references events a year further along in the series’ publication, Sela is once more the woman in focus, though she is not the storyteller this time, either. That honor belongs to an as-yet-unnamed man who (according to the inverted color scheme of his speech bubbles and the giant, hooded, skull-faced, sickle-wielding shadow behind him) is some kind of Grim(m) Reaper figure in disguise, and who is manipulating Sela as a means of either keeping her evil or killing her at some point.
He puts on another face for an encounter with a flower-obsessed woman named Mary Setab (that’s Bates backwards), cuing a twist on Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, wherein a woman named Lily becomes jealous of her married lover and steals his catatonic wife’s wedding ring, not knowing that every woman who steals a piece of her jewelry gets turned into a flower. Or murdered by the fake-catatonic wife. Or something. The imagery isn’t very clear on that point, except that Mary Setab is the fake-catatonic woman, and she refers to the flower she had been coddling as Lily.
This concept of women being turned into flowers will pop up again in a future Wonderland series, with an issue featuring another woman named Lily. It’s doubtful this is anything more than a coincidence, but again, it’s fun to notice these things.
Putting on yet another face, the Reaper meets up with a woman named Rebekah, the wife of infamous serial killer Humphrey “Humpty” Dumpty, whom she tried to put back together Frankenstein-style after all the king’s men beat him within an inch of his life.
The final story sets up and reveals many things, including how Belinda got her book, the true setting of the 2008 Annual, and some backstory on a couple of stowaways: Mary Darling and her son, Daniel. You don’t need pixie dust to know where this is going, but I’m trying my best to keep spoilers to a minimum of six hundred or so.
If I did a good job of not spoiling things for you this time, let me know in the comments. Remember to like, share, subscribe, and click some ads to keep my revenue stream on course. Tomorrow night, we fast-forward three years for some 2011 festivities, so stay tuned.
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