Countdown to TixMas #2: Grimm Fairy Tales TPB Volume 3 (Zenescope - Omnibusted #5)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. The Omnibuster,
a.k.a. The TixMaster

Welcome back to the Countdown to TixMas! It's the second evening (or morning?) of the special, and since I referenced Jim Carrey in yesterday's post, I'd like to give you all a big Truman Show greeting before I begin finding excuses to make this content Christmas-relevant. Like awkward relationships, bells, trees, the counting of animals, dreams coming true, awestruck children, and the Naughty List. See, that wasn't so hard!

"Awkward relationships" is more than kind of an understatement, considering where we start out this volume. Just look at the couple in this two-issue story from the Grimm Fairy Tales series:

GFT #13 & 14: The Beauty and the Beast Collection

Jenna’s boyfriend, Drew, is angry and jealous, and frequently abuses her, but she stays with him because she sees the good in him (even though he’s a white boy who wears his baseball cap sideways and his bedroom looks like a rat’s nest). Sela approaches Jenna at a bar and has her read Beauty and the Beast.

There are no musical numbers, no talking furniture, and there is no Gaston to cast in the villain role. It’s a tale as old as unrequited Stockholm Syndrome, a song as old as “I didn’t mean to! It was an accident!”

Edmund (a stretch on the name Andrew, I guess?) is the prince-turned-Beast, and Jesabel (because Jenna and Belle, get it?) is the woman he takes in and nurses back to health.

When she is healthy enough to leave his castle and return to her fiance, the Beast flies into a jealous rage and kills everyone who could stand in the way of his love for her. But because of this (and because Jesabel didn’t love him to begin with), Edmund ensures that he will never have true love and is doomed to be the Beast forever (which has interesting thematic parallels to Wilhelm's backstory in Sinbad).

In the first part of this two-issue arc, Jenna decides (because she only reads half of the story) to cheat on Drew, her own personal Beast, with a co-worker named Steve. This leads into part two, where Drew has almost given into rage and decided to kill Steve, but having taken Sela’s book from Jenna, he reads the story to the end and, rather than trying to control his Beastly side, takes his own life to prevent himself from killing Jenna.
As in a few past issues, Sela laments her ineffectiveness as a counselor and savior, in part criticizing her charges for not valuing their lives enough to make the right choice. This marks the first time two issues have been devoted to the same title, and the first time the reader(s) did not show signs of being sucked into the book. Jenna at one point expresses that she is simply reading a really captivating story. Drew looks sort of dazed in the few panels after he finishes reading, but that isn’t really explained in the lettering.
Beauty and the Beast is a roughly drawn but beautifully colored pair of issues, and will have some consequences in distant issues to come.

Redemption can be a big theme for Christmas, too. I mean, It's the celebration of the birth of Christ, who sacrificed himself to redeem us all. He even has that iconic statue in Brazil that's literally called "Christ the Redeemer."
So to follow on from the first two-part story in the Grimm Fairy Tales canon, it's only fitting that we look at the first "official" story arc in that series. Up to this point, each issue had been a fairly standalone story, with only one or two recurring characters or items throughout the series' run. Zenescope has not officially named this arc, but it consists of four issues that lead one into the next, comprising a single story about (you guessed it!) redemption. Thus, I have decided to unofficially call this the "Redemption Arc." Here it is:

GFT #15: The Three Little Pigs

This issue continues a theme first seen in The Frog King and again in Beauty and the Beast: that of balancing a person’s inner self with their outward appearance.
Three young men with histories of theft, sexual assault, drug abuse, and general delinquency (who can be figuratively referred to as “pigs”) are planning to hold up a grocery store when Sela intervenes to teach them a lesson.
It is a refreshing take on the Grimm Fairy Tales formula, marking the first time the focus character(s) were sucked into the book without reading it. Not only does Sela will them into the book, she enters it herself, turns them into pig-men, and sics a werewolf on them to scare them into repenting.
This is not the same werewolf as in Red Riding Hood--which died--but the fact that she can control it or is working side-by-side with it suggests that either Sela does have some power over the book and its characters, or that she has some kind of business relationship with the man behind the werewolf, outside of this specific scenario.
This also introduces some rather shaky continuity, as we have seen Sela go from a non-presence to a passively evil force to a guide and mentor of varying morality, then something resembling human and fallible, and now as an active force of vengeance. One can suspect that everything as far back as Snow White took place after the Timepiece short story, and this issue and Cinderella took place some time after Timepiece. But this early in a newly-minted series, it doesn’t seem like even the writers have it all figured out. Later on though, this issue will prove to be a catalyst for one of the most kick-ass characters in the Grimm Universe.

GFT #16: Little Miss Muffet

A sequel of sorts to the Three Little Pigs, and a departure from formula, this issue finds an aimless Sela being drawn into a nightmare version of her fairy tale book and taking on the role of Little Miss Muffet.
Confirming my suspicions from last issue regarding the timeline of events, Sela is greeted by gory, fearsome versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the Three Pig-men, Bluebeard, the Beast, the Wicked Stepmother, and finally, the not-so-Itsy Bitsy Spider.
Escaping the spider’s web, she encounters an as-yet-unnamed, stereotypically Chinese monk-looking man who identifies himself as the person who gave Sela the book (which is either true and he’s a shapeshifter, or he’s so ancient that he’s the one who gave the old woman the book and he knew Sela would inherit it one day, or the writers had amnesia the day they wrote Legacy).
The rest of the issue is a commentary on atomic bombs, the KKK, Manson, Hitler, Saddam, Bin Laden, and how humanity as a species could be responsible for such tragedies and still be called “good.” In the final three pages, we see an unnamed woman placing a drawing and rose at the base of a tree, and Sela makes reference to an event not yet portrayed in any issue, which “continues to haunt [her] to this day.”
And so, we lead with this into part three of the “Redemption Arc….”

GFT #17: The Juniper Tree

The folks at Artmonkeys clearly hate commas. Also, I have no idea what this cover has to do with anything.
Regardless, it’s back to the old formula in this flashback, detailing the events Sela referred to in the last issue.
Carolyn has a crush on her coke-addict stepbrother, Bryan. Fearing he might hurt Carolyn, their mother Patricia hires a local thug to kill Bryan. But Patricia’s friend Sela recommends she read a story from the book.
I am not familiar with The Juniper Tree, but the characters once more strongly resemble their framing scenario counterparts, have derivative names, and interact as part of similar plots.
The stepchildren’s mother falls under the influence of an enchanted tree that makes her act on her desire to kill her stepson (somewhat like the Piper’s MO in his miniseries), and then drives her daughter to suicide.
Deborah’s (the fairy tale counterpart to Patricia) fondness for apples and unhealthy need for her daughter’s love and attention bring to mind Talia, the evil queen from Snow White. The motivations of these characters differ greatly, so I know their connection doesn’t go anywhere beyond the superficial. It’s just fun to notice these things.
Another interesting callback here is that we learn that Bryan’s coke dealer is Belinda. Yep, its more of that next-level, Timepiece-style manipulation.
Patricia may have called off the hit on Bryan, but Carolyn ended up dying instead because she snorted Belinda’s coke. And this was all so Sela would hate humanity enough to switch sides. I wonder how many other third-party dirtbags Belinda hired to meddle in Sela’s lessons?
Stay way tuned for a reappearance of Patricia in a future miniseries. In the meantime, though, Redemption continues in part four….

GFT #18: Three Billy Goats Gruff

The trip through ghosts of Sela’s past concludes with her sagacious new mentor showing her an example of how, contrary to the burden of evidence in Sela’s experience, helping one person can make a difference.
Flash back again to a boy named David, who is being bullied and extorted by an older boy who says he must pay a toll to walk through the park. Sela sits down with him shortly after to tell him the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff.
This marks the first time Sela has told a story herself without having the book. With more character development and action than the original, Sela’s version otherwise follows the telling most people know, and inspires David to fight back against the bully until he gives up.
Back in the chronologically murky present, the mentor tells Sela how David grew up and died fighting in the Gulf War, inspiring a fellow soldier named Marcus (middle name Leroy?) Jenkins to later save the life of a young man who would grow to be some famous filmmaker we’re supposed to recognize or Google or something, because butterfly effect.

I don’t know whether to face-palm about this or show some kind of awe at how inspiring this was supposed to be.

Okay…face-palm!

They should have called this issue Three Billy Goats Groan, it’s such an after-school special pile of cheese! Actually, starting in Little Miss Muffet, this whole arc has been the biggest, psychedelic, Ebeneezer snooze-fest of a moral lesson to ever be shoved between an offensive cultural stereotype and a pair of breasts. Yes, the fairy tales themselves were good for the most part. But as Zenescope’s first attempt at a story arc for this series, it falls flat.

And as far as Marcus "Leroy" Jenkins goes, I’ll get to it later, but he’ll turn out to be another Patricia-like character; a secondary player from a mediocre issue that we’re supposed to gasp about when they’re reduced to even more of an afterthought in a future miniseries due to poorly concocted character design and minimal page time.

I actually hate this four-parter more than I did the first time I read it.

Reading these four issues left me in a negative frame of mind. I know that I started out the arc commenting on how redemption is in the spirit of Christmas, and ended up hating it. I don't apologize. The last three issues of Grimm Fairy Tales did the exact opposite of redemption, and they were straight-up bad. If you've read them, you'll probably agree with me. Unfortunately, that trend is going to continue as we wrap up Volume Three proper with the following short "story."

GFT Short Story #3: Wicked Ways

No, my bad mood is not the result of some mystical projection on my soul; it’s the result of three issues of mediocre writing on the part of the Zenescope team.
But speaking of negative mystical projections, this third short story doesn’t have much to it. Basically, it’s just some creepy voice-over saying how awesome Belinda is at being evil and how Sela doesn’t know what she’s getting herself into despite supposedly being more powerful than Belinda.
Meanwhile, all Belinda does is walk around what I assume is New York (because comic books), bringing out the negativity in everyone she passes by. In other words, she’s doing her own version of the whole “possessed priest walking around the church and making the crosses invert” thing with people’s moods.
There are then-timely references to Britney Spears shaving her head and “Hannah Montana” being “so unbelievably down to earth” gag-inducing, but that’s basically it. No character development, just that Belinda can make people act negatively.

This is supposed to lead into the first Annual issue somehow, and we'll find out the connection right now....

GFT Annual #1 (2007)

As promised at the end of Wicked Ways, the 2007 Annual focuses on Belinda, supposedly following directly from her negativity-spreading stroll through New York.

Sela, because plot convenience and grasping at straws, apparently takes time out of her busy schedule of reading fairy tales to milennials and college students—and trying to save the world one person at a time—to read fairy tales to kindergarten kids. But of course, Belinda arrives first and starts reading her own set of fairy tales. Except four of them are technically nursery rhymes, but whatever.

We have Jack and Jill reimagined as a Telltale Heart infidelity ghost murder revenge story, The Old Woman In the Shoe as a child labor cannibalism revenge story, Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater as a serial killer bondage jealousy revenge story, and Little Boy Blue as a jilted lover revenge story. What is it with nursery rhymes and revenge stories, huh? I mean, it’s cool that Zenescope is taking these classic nursery rhymes and fleshing out actual plots for their lyrics, but to make them all bloody revenge fantasies is too much of the same.

The fifth story is Pinocchio, or rather, the prelude to Pinocchio. Somewhere, at some time, Belinda plants a tree. Sometime after that, Adam and Eve investigate the tree, which ends badly for Adam. Sometime after that, a lumberjack fells the tree and delivers its wood to Gepetto. That’s basically it for the Pinocchio story. No timeline, no real plot or character development to speak of. Just more of Belinda being evil and a half-hearted take on the Garden of Eden story as a setup for future issues.

Back in the classroom, Belinda’s storytelling has reduced most of the children to tears, except for a boy named Timothy, who is apparently a sociopath. After Belinda leaves, Sela walks in to find a room full of tiny tantrum-throwers, and she seems to know for sure that Belinda is behind it. Timothy will get fleshed out more in issue #20, but that's it for now.

I'm done stretching for Christmas connections and grasping for straws, and it's time I stopped clacking away at my keyboard and got some sleep. Stay Tuned and wait smart for a Ticket Stubs edition of the Countdown to TixMas as I trot out a retro-view of Be Cool, because it's winter.

Omnibuster,
TixMaster,

Rudolph,

Olive,

Dash away, dash away, dash away all!