GFT Retrospective #22: A Tangled Perspective

Welcome back to the mainlilne, Ticketholders!

Now that the holidays have been over for six years and nine months (even though they will return next month), it’s time to go back ten years and let your hair down as we kick off a Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective on the first volume's Volume #4 trade paperback.

GFT #19: Rapunzel

This twisty tale is an interesting one where I don’t quite know what happened. It begins with a flash forward, wherein a seemingly dark-haired woman with her back to the reader has just finished doing her seemingly usual business of sucking a man named Eric (possibly Milly’s Eric from Rumpelstiltskin? Or Zenescope is unoriginal with their character names…) into a fairy tale and terrifying him into a change of heart. There is a familiar red book on the counter between them, leading us to believe it’s Sela that Eric is talking to.

She urges him to clean up his loose ends (hair puns!), and we’re kicked back a month to Eric and a redhead named Rita (one of three redheads in this issue) performing literal highway robbery. Rita has doubts afterward, and in steps Sela Mathers with a take on Rapunzel, wherein the titular damsel (who is also Rita) lures unsuspecting chevaliers up her tower to feed her incubus boyfriend, who attains a human form (which resembles Eric) and then kills her.

A month of unwritten pages later--following Eric’s meeting with the woman who may or may not have been Sela--Rita has broken things off with Eric and hears a news report that Eric has murdered his newest partner-in-crime.

Sela sees the report as well, and is lamenting her failed attempt at saving a life when Belinda walks up and starts talking trash.

I enjoyed the art style in this issue, mostly because it looked like actual art. But again, brand recognition suffers from this and makes the story more open-ended than it needed to be. Was it really Sela at the beginning and Eric was too much of a sociopath to seek a nonviolent resolution to his situation? Maybe it was Belinda, and he understood her perfectly.

But if it was Belinda, that means that either she can use Sela’s book (in the 2008 Annual, the Reaper said he was capable of giving Belinda the red book, so maybe the books aren’t intrinsically bound to individual people), she can make her book change form (which we haven’t seen any evidence of), or the artist didn’t feel like using purple that day.

I guess we’ll come to that tower when we climb it, but until then, Rita will return much farther down the line as one of the most obscure, awesome, and completely underutilized characters in GFT history.

Apparently, no one is watching my videos, commenting on anything, or propagating my content, so I don't see the point in asking you to do so anymore. Just stay tuned for the next post, okay?