GFT Retrospective #32: The Ugly Duckling?

Good afternoon, Ticketholders!

I really must come up with a new tag for you guys, since I'm not doing much movie-related stuff anymore. Oh, how the digital age sucks! But, I've harped on that particular string to the point of snapping it already, so let's just dive into something else ugly.

GFT #28: The Ugly Duckling

Here’s a "great" idea: get someone who’s never written for Grimm Fairy Tales before to write an issue! New (and as of this date, only three-time) Zenescope writer Mike Dolce presents a take on The Ugly Duckling that acknowledges few and incorporates none of Grimm Fairy Tales’ established mechanics while recycling plots that have been used at least three times before (Cinderella, Beauty & the Beast, The Little Mermaid).

At the “heart” of the issue is Robin, an awkward, plain-looking girl who resorts to magic (provided by Belinda) to make herself attractive and popular, only to become a superficially desired mean girl who spurns the one person who really cared for her and ends up paying for her gilded new life in blood.

If you’ve been paying attention to the series so far and you’ve ever seen any episode of Supernatural where a crossroads demon figures in, you don’t really need to read this issue.

If it sounds like I’ve lost faith in the series, I haven’t really. I’ve continued to read long after The Ugly Duckling, and when I am eventually caught up with the current issues, I will continue to read long after that. But I had a feeling from page one that the folks at Zenescope might have lost faith in their own work.

The fairy tale is glossed over in a single panel, whereafter we meet Robin and learn what a selfish, superficial…person…she is. In flashback, we get to know and sympathize with who she was ten years ago (this is where the Supernatural reference comes in, but while she doesn’t get herself torn apart by hellhounds, there is still that “paying for her gilded new life in blood” thing in play) and see her first encounter with Belinda, who gives her not the purple fairy tale book to borrow, but just an ordinary, Little Golden Book-style copy of The Ugly Duckling, along with a magic formula that is apparently Red Bull (“It’s your wings!”).

Waking from a Red Bull hangover the next morning, Robin reenacts the scene from Spider-Man where Tobey Maguire wakes up after the spider bite, minus the humor and spider-powers (i.e. she’s toned up, her braces are gone, and she doesn’t need glasses anymore). But with great power comes a great amount of mean, slutty behavior, modernist commentary on sexuality-based bullying and teen suicide, and the aforementioned bloody ending of both Robin and the issue itself.

Without giving too much more away, Ted (the childhood friend she rejected after drinking Dr. Jekyll’s enchanted Red Bull) will return for a sequel issue a bit later.

I know that I criticize formulaic writing a lot, but why in the name of whatever higher power they believe in, would Zenescope approve an issue where Belinda is without her purple book the entire time? Being too formulaic can be a bad thing, but there are still certain things that simply shouldn’t be replaced with a pale facsimile, even if the new formula that comes with it is magic.

Tune in tomorrow for some much-needed redemption as Grimm Fairy Tales gets back to its roots and introduces some pretty awesome twists (that I promise not to spoil too thoroughly).

Ticketmaster,
out.