Zenescope - Omnibusted #7: Grimm Fairy Tales TPB Volume 4
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. The Omnibuster
After the Countdown to TixMas brought you Grimm Fairy Tales TPB Volume 3 plus the 2007 Annual, and a Grimm Fairy Tales Presents: Wonderland mega-post, it's time to get back in the swing of things with the next Volume and Annual that were released in 2008. This is kind of perfect because when I was first doing the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective, I had just finished reviewing Different Seasons Volume 2, where the Annuals for 2007 and 2008, and the Christmas and Halloween editions for 2011 were collected. I don't know why they didn't just collect things in chronological order or include the Annuals in those years' Trade Paperback Volumes, but that doesn't matter because I'm going to do things in the correct order!
Now that the holidays are over, it's time to let your hair down as we kick off a "new" Zenescope - Omnibusted on the first volume's TPB Volume 4.
GFT #19: Rapunzel
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.
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 (Future Knowledge says this is possible, 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.
It plays out very similar to what I remember of watching Fantasia in my youth, with all of the iconic scenes getting a Grimm Fairy Tales treatment and placing Belinda in the title role.
The frame around it deals with a girl named Samantha Darrin (a nod to the classic TV show, Bewitched) and her pervy professor, Mr. Delroy. Before things can progress beyond obviously suggestive, Belinda comes in on the pretense of substituting for Sela, who would have been teaching the class after Delroy’s. Where Sela is when Belinda shows up to take her place is never explained despite said pretense being used many times in the future, but remember: Zenescope is pretty much flying by the seat of their magic carpet-patched pantaloons at this point in the series, so we have to abide by the “it’s a comic book” excuse for quite some time to come.
Doing basically the same thing as Sela would have done, but favoring a different outcome, Belinda has Samantha read her tale of woe.
Though it feels at times like a poor effort to make us feel sympathy for the devil, said tale in turn provides a bit of actual character development for Belinda, putting her at odds with an abusive mentor of her own and allowing the audience to do some speculation beyond the page for once upon a time. I can just picture Belinda getting this assignment from the Evil Agency, recalling these early events of her life, and smiling evilly at the chance to get revenge-by-proxy.
Both Belinda’s fate at the end of the fable and the character of Samantha Darrin will play key roles in story arcs to come, so this is a must-read for anyone wanting to keep in the know about important GFT events.
The issue begins with exposition; a tale of a demon who forged a looking glass that brought out the madness and evil in anyone who gazed into it. Could this be a reference to Wonderland?
Either way, some unknown hero shows up and smashes the mirror, thinking he has won, but instead has spread the shards and dust of evil glass (because fairy tales) all over the world, infecting people and getting them to reassemble the mirror (because an evil object that forces people to make the spread of evil less effective makes sooooo much sense) for the Snow Queen (who looks less like Elsa and more like a blue, albino Las Vegas showgirl--what, did Michael Bay write this one, too?).
In modern times, Timmy is at a new school and up to whatever childish level of evil Belinda (who is doubling as the Snow Queen because things totally make sense now) is encouraging him toward, except that a girl he has been tasked with bullying--I guess…but why? Just…why? Maybe because evil child? Has anyone ever seen Orphan or Pet Sematary or The Good Son or any movie where children who are actually evil do actual evil things like murder? Maybe Zenescope did enough of that in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, I don’t know. Ugh, rage tangent.
Anyway, the girl Timmy has been tasked with bullying has a crush on him and actually kisses him. Outside of context, this is kind of sweet because it’s a play on the traditional “girls have cooties” thing mixed with the fairy tale trope of true love’s kiss. But we also have the evil adoptive aunt dynamic with Belinda/the Snow Queen, who uses mirror dust (which, I kid you not, one panel makes it look like she pulled some out of her vagina) and a kiss of her own to mind control Timmy into the following day’s acts of juvenile terror.
Zenescope tries to minimize the whole magical-pedophilia-bondage-by-way-of-glass/ice-vagina-dust faux pas by going deep and telling us that it has become a “girls have cooties” scenario, but one where Timmy sees the girl--and people in general--as evil, and so feels justified in perpetrating evil acts against them. But all this logically does is remind the audience at large that Timmy has a magical, terminal venereal disease all over his face.
Elsewhere (such a vague term that it might as well be the name of the place), we catch up with Sela, who is wearing Zenescope’s first real attempt at a mashup between slutty Snow White costume and 1990’s exhibitionist female supersuit.
We’ve seen soon-to-be-iconic character outfits on the likes of Calie Liddle before, but this is the first time the series has hinted at being a superhero comic, and although in later issues they tone down the raunch--not by much--I find the “we do fairy tales but bloodier and sluttier” approach off-putting.
Instead of the bluebird of happiness, Sela is talking--literally exchanging English words--with a hawk, whom, given the cadence of their conversation and the fact that the boy’s name is Timmy, I will henceforth refer to as Lassie.
Somehow being both here and Elsewhere, both normally dressed and less so, at the same time (because of course she can do that now), Sela and Lassie the hawk rescue Timmy from the metaphorical well, and Sela runs off to confront her nemesis in the final two issues of what I have *clears throat* lovingly dubbed "The Song of Ice and Snow."
This two-part finale of "Ice and Snow" sort of inverts the GFT formula that has been mostly adhered to for the last twenty-two issues. Instead of a fairy tale framed by the real-world problems of one or more secondary protagonists, the focus is almost entirely on Sela, the “real world” setting is replaced by the land I call Elsewhere (which is itself a potential fairy tale reality), and the fairy tale feels more like a flashback or a past life experience than those in previous issues.
From the start, we’re thrust into the land of Elsewhere directly following the end of last issue, where Sela is in full badass mode, calling out Belinda. Belinda, meanwhile, is in full Bond villain mode, playing mind games with Sela and watching her every move on a magical surveillance system. There is a secondary protagonist in the story, but she serves as more of a damsel in distress; chained up at Belinda’s feet is none other than the Sorcerer’s Apprentice herself, Samantha Darrin.
We soon learn that Belinda has been playing with Sela’s mind all along--literally. That deal Sela made for Cindy’s soul? Wiped from her memory. Meeting her brother as an old man in Legacy? Gone. The love of her life from the Timepiece short story? Robert Who? Basically every lost life, every failed opportunity, every bad memory Sela has ever had has been erased from her mind, and Belinda is responsible. Now, you might be asking, “What about The Juniper Tree? Or The Three Little Pigs? Sela remembers that stuff.” Well, the explanation Belinda gives is that either Sela’s magic is fighting Belinda’s on a subconscious level, or she is a “naive, anal-retentive goodie-goodie” (because 90’s cartoon villain insults are apparently still a thing) “who refuses to let go of her past.”
Oh, and the giant Miss Muffet spider is back because something has to tell the fairy tale while Sela stalks around blowing up everything that has Belinda’s voice coming out of it.
The fairy tale centers around two sisters who are obviously Sela and Belinda (though their names are Snow White and Rose Red, respectively, and Belinda/Red has gray hair because irony). Snow is kind and trusting, and Red is brash and suspicious, not to mention both protective and jealous of Snow, who is soon to marry a prince. They find their horse (named Brusha, after Joe Brusha, one of the co-founders of Zenescope) poisoned by a rare snake and enlist the help of a too-conveniently nearby imp to heal the bite. Of course, Snow accepts his help and goes off on her own to do him a kindness in return, completely ignoring the fact that HE. IS. AN. IMP!!!
Waking up later, Snow is informed by the imp and his two bloodthirsty comrades that they were cursed by a witch named Belinda, and need to spill the blood of a pure soul to break the spell. Why the trio don’t recognize Red as Belinda when she comes to the rescue, I don’t know. It’s apparently not important enough to explain, and the story ends abruptly with Red offering to take Snow’s place as the sacrifice, though that was also apparently not important enough to put into a dashed speech bubble, either.
If you’ve never read a comic book before, I’m surprised you’ve read this far. I’m also offering to inform the uninitiated among you that in comic books, speech bubbles with dotted- or dashed-line borders indicate that a character is whispering.
The artist can’t decide from panel to panel or issue to issue whether Sela’s gloves are black or white, and Belinda goes through no less than three costumes in the course of the story: the Snow Queen, something that looks like a mashup of the Snow Queen and Rose Red’s outfit, and a slightly Mediterranean-inspired femme fatale number that will sort of serve as her supervillain costume going forward. All of these wardrobe changes are sudden and also seemingly not worth explaining, because of course both women can magically quick-change their clothes now. I guess it follows the mechanic of their books, seeing as how nearly every reader in a past issue has been cosplayed into their respective fairy tale, but it just comes off as “oh, suddenly they can do this now,” and whether due to inconsistent art or what I call "non-writing," it’s just lazy.
After the Snow White and Rose Red experience, Sela is ejected into Belinda’s throne room, where the three imp-men and various other fairy tale henchmen are waiting for her. Sela handily dispatches the goons and the Three Bears, and things devolve into what is basically a Pokemon battle with fairy tale creatures, with Sela and Belinda summoning werewolves, giants, Beasts, and other monsters to attack each other.
Eventually going back to a good, old-fashioned sword fight, Sela bests Belinda, but Samantha, who had been sidelined by a curse prior to the battle, is on a ticking clock. This forces Sela into a classic hero’s dilemma: kill your greatest foe or save the innocent. Following the lesson she learned from the spider’s tale, Sela offers to take Samantha’s place, giving her own life at the end of Belinda’s sword.
Despite the inconsistencies, derivative action, and (except for Belinda) lackluster villainy, I have fond memories of this story arc, particularly of being genuinely shocked and engaged by Sela’s death at the end. With the exception of Return to Wonderland, I had mostly been reading brute force, in publication order, enjoying each issue, but not really caring from one to the next what it all meant on a larger scale, like I had some mechanical compulsion to get through the whole thing for the sake of getting through it. With Sela’s death, however, I felt genuine interest and curiosity to find out what Zenescope was going to do next.
What Zenescope was going to do next was end Volume Four with a short story continuation of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. You've already read this as part of the Sinbad issue of Zenescope - Omnibusted, but here it is again for completion's sake:
This follows immediately from the events recounted in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. A raiding party, led by a lecherous prince, is sent to retrieve a lamp from the Sorcerer’s chambers. This lamp just so happens to contain Belinda, whom the Sorcerer cursed with PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER (and an itty-bitty living space) in his dying breath. Because cursed object, famous last words, and Murphy’s Law, the prince’s ship is wrecked in a storm and the lamp finds its way to shore. There’s some debate among fans as to whether this is the same shipwreck we will see in The Little Mermaid and/or The Jungle Book in the near future, but the focus of this short story is meant to be the lamp.
Long before he joined Sinbad’s crew, before he knew how to cook, before pots were anything more than headgear and a name, when he was still able to say more than “yes” or “no,” Pots was a curious young boy in Baghdad who discovered a lamp on a beach and brought it home for his father to spiff up and sell. But since they’re characters in a story, and not real people with sense, neither of them knows that you should never, ever, rub an oil lamp unless you are prepared and able to choose your words carefully.
GFT #20: The Boy Who Cried Wolf
As promised in the 2007 Annual, Timothy returns to raise some hell. Not literally; it’s too early in the series for that.
The basic idea of this issue is that Belinda is playing social worker and setting up “Timmy” with foster families, whom he either murders or tricks into committing murder themselves. That’s it. That’s the plot in a bloody nutter of a nutshell.
What makes this issue at least different is the structure. The “real world” doesn’t serve as a framing device as usual, but instead unfolds parallel to the fairy tale, with the twist ending of the latter mirroring what we knew about Timmy all along.
Maybe I’m just running out of things to comment on, but as the series goes on through the next twenty-five issues or more, you’ll see that while Belinda makes a good archetypal opposite for Sela, and her plans are deviously convoluted, she isn’t developed much as a character beyond being sexy and evil and having a large, but basically deus-ex-pouch-of-holding power set that lets her do just about whatever she needs to get the upper hand on our hero. When I get to a certain, poorly-drawn Halloween Special, my attitude will change a bit, but expect me to get negative again really quick.
I already posted this next issue as part of the Sinbad collection, along with this Volume's Short Story, but it serves as the beginning of what I call the "Song Of Ice & Snow Arc" (Game of Thrones clickbait!), and features some Fantasia clickbait, too.
GFT #21: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
If you were expecting Mickey Mouse, you will either be happy or disappointed to find the iconic Disney mascot missing from this adaptation of the Goethe poem that became a cartoon short that became part of a full length animated movie and then a gimmick to be exploited by Disney and Nicolas Cage.
The frame around it deals with a girl named Samantha Darrin (a nod to the classic TV show, Bewitched) and her pervy professor, Mr. Delroy. Before things can progress beyond obviously suggestive, Belinda comes in on the pretense of substituting for Sela, who would have been teaching the class after Delroy’s. Where Sela is when Belinda shows up to take her place is never explained despite said pretense being used many times in the future, but remember: Zenescope is pretty much flying by the seat of their magic carpet-patched pantaloons at this point in the series, so we have to abide by the “it’s a comic book” excuse for quite some time to come.
Doing basically the same thing as Sela would have done, but favoring a different outcome, Belinda has Samantha read her tale of woe.
Though it feels at times like a poor effort to make us feel sympathy for the devil, said tale in turn provides a bit of actual character development for Belinda, putting her at odds with an abusive mentor of her own and allowing the audience to do some speculation beyond the page for once upon a time. I can just picture Belinda getting this assignment from the Evil Agency, recalling these early events of her life, and smiling evilly at the chance to get revenge-by-proxy.
Both Belinda’s fate at the end of the fable and the character of Samantha Darrin will play key roles in story arcs to come, so this is a must-read for anyone wanting to keep in the know about important GFT events.
GFT #22: The Snow Queen
Either way, some unknown hero shows up and smashes the mirror, thinking he has won, but instead has spread the shards and dust of evil glass (because fairy tales) all over the world, infecting people and getting them to reassemble the mirror (because an evil object that forces people to make the spread of evil less effective makes sooooo much sense) for the Snow Queen (who looks less like Elsa and more like a blue, albino Las Vegas showgirl--what, did Michael Bay write this one, too?).
In modern times, Timmy is at a new school and up to whatever childish level of evil Belinda (who is doubling as the Snow Queen because things totally make sense now) is encouraging him toward, except that a girl he has been tasked with bullying--I guess…but why? Just…why? Maybe because evil child? Has anyone ever seen Orphan or Pet Sematary or The Good Son or any movie where children who are actually evil do actual evil things like murder? Maybe Zenescope did enough of that in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, I don’t know. Ugh, rage tangent.
Anyway, the girl Timmy has been tasked with bullying has a crush on him and actually kisses him. Outside of context, this is kind of sweet because it’s a play on the traditional “girls have cooties” thing mixed with the fairy tale trope of true love’s kiss. But we also have the evil adoptive aunt dynamic with Belinda/the Snow Queen, who uses mirror dust (which, I kid you not, one panel makes it look like she pulled some out of her vagina) and a kiss of her own to mind control Timmy into the following day’s acts of juvenile terror.
Zenescope tries to minimize the whole magical-pedophilia-bondage-by-way-of-glass/ice-vagina-dust faux pas by going deep and telling us that it has become a “girls have cooties” scenario, but one where Timmy sees the girl--and people in general--as evil, and so feels justified in perpetrating evil acts against them. But all this logically does is remind the audience at large that Timmy has a magical, terminal venereal disease all over his face.
Elsewhere (such a vague term that it might as well be the name of the place), we catch up with Sela, who is wearing Zenescope’s first real attempt at a mashup between slutty Snow White costume and 1990’s exhibitionist female supersuit.
We’ve seen soon-to-be-iconic character outfits on the likes of Calie Liddle before, but this is the first time the series has hinted at being a superhero comic, and although in later issues they tone down the raunch--not by much--I find the “we do fairy tales but bloodier and sluttier” approach off-putting.
Instead of the bluebird of happiness, Sela is talking--literally exchanging English words--with a hawk, whom, given the cadence of their conversation and the fact that the boy’s name is Timmy, I will henceforth refer to as Lassie.
Somehow being both here and Elsewhere, both normally dressed and less so, at the same time (because of course she can do that now), Sela and Lassie the hawk rescue Timmy from the metaphorical well, and Sela runs off to confront her nemesis in the final two issues of what I have *clears throat* lovingly dubbed "The Song of Ice and Snow."
GFT #23 & 24: Snow White and Rose Red
From the start, we’re thrust into the land of Elsewhere directly following the end of last issue, where Sela is in full badass mode, calling out Belinda. Belinda, meanwhile, is in full Bond villain mode, playing mind games with Sela and watching her every move on a magical surveillance system. There is a secondary protagonist in the story, but she serves as more of a damsel in distress; chained up at Belinda’s feet is none other than the Sorcerer’s Apprentice herself, Samantha Darrin.
We soon learn that Belinda has been playing with Sela’s mind all along--literally. That deal Sela made for Cindy’s soul? Wiped from her memory. Meeting her brother as an old man in Legacy? Gone. The love of her life from the Timepiece short story? Robert Who? Basically every lost life, every failed opportunity, every bad memory Sela has ever had has been erased from her mind, and Belinda is responsible. Now, you might be asking, “What about The Juniper Tree? Or The Three Little Pigs? Sela remembers that stuff.” Well, the explanation Belinda gives is that either Sela’s magic is fighting Belinda’s on a subconscious level, or she is a “naive, anal-retentive goodie-goodie” (because 90’s cartoon villain insults are apparently still a thing) “who refuses to let go of her past.”
Oh, and the giant Miss Muffet spider is back because something has to tell the fairy tale while Sela stalks around blowing up everything that has Belinda’s voice coming out of it.
The fairy tale centers around two sisters who are obviously Sela and Belinda (though their names are Snow White and Rose Red, respectively, and Belinda/Red has gray hair because irony). Snow is kind and trusting, and Red is brash and suspicious, not to mention both protective and jealous of Snow, who is soon to marry a prince. They find their horse (named Brusha, after Joe Brusha, one of the co-founders of Zenescope) poisoned by a rare snake and enlist the help of a too-conveniently nearby imp to heal the bite. Of course, Snow accepts his help and goes off on her own to do him a kindness in return, completely ignoring the fact that HE. IS. AN. IMP!!!
Waking up later, Snow is informed by the imp and his two bloodthirsty comrades that they were cursed by a witch named Belinda, and need to spill the blood of a pure soul to break the spell. Why the trio don’t recognize Red as Belinda when she comes to the rescue, I don’t know. It’s apparently not important enough to explain, and the story ends abruptly with Red offering to take Snow’s place as the sacrifice, though that was also apparently not important enough to put into a dashed speech bubble, either.
If you’ve never read a comic book before, I’m surprised you’ve read this far. I’m also offering to inform the uninitiated among you that in comic books, speech bubbles with dotted- or dashed-line borders indicate that a character is whispering.
The artist can’t decide from panel to panel or issue to issue whether Sela’s gloves are black or white, and Belinda goes through no less than three costumes in the course of the story: the Snow Queen, something that looks like a mashup of the Snow Queen and Rose Red’s outfit, and a slightly Mediterranean-inspired femme fatale number that will sort of serve as her supervillain costume going forward. All of these wardrobe changes are sudden and also seemingly not worth explaining, because of course both women can magically quick-change their clothes now. I guess it follows the mechanic of their books, seeing as how nearly every reader in a past issue has been cosplayed into their respective fairy tale, but it just comes off as “oh, suddenly they can do this now,” and whether due to inconsistent art or what I call "non-writing," it’s just lazy.
Eventually going back to a good, old-fashioned sword fight, Sela bests Belinda, but Samantha, who had been sidelined by a curse prior to the battle, is on a ticking clock. This forces Sela into a classic hero’s dilemma: kill your greatest foe or save the innocent. Following the lesson she learned from the spider’s tale, Sela offers to take Samantha’s place, giving her own life at the end of Belinda’s sword.
Despite the inconsistencies, derivative action, and (except for Belinda) lackluster villainy, I have fond memories of this story arc, particularly of being genuinely shocked and engaged by Sela’s death at the end. With the exception of Return to Wonderland, I had mostly been reading brute force, in publication order, enjoying each issue, but not really caring from one to the next what it all meant on a larger scale, like I had some mechanical compulsion to get through the whole thing for the sake of getting through it. With Sela’s death, however, I felt genuine interest and curiosity to find out what Zenescope was going to do next.
What Zenescope was going to do next was end Volume Four with a short story continuation of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. You've already read this as part of the Sinbad issue of Zenescope - Omnibusted, but here it is again for completion's sake:
GFT Short Story #4: The Lamp
Long before he joined Sinbad’s crew, before he knew how to cook, before pots were anything more than headgear and a name, when he was still able to say more than “yes” or “no,” Pots was a curious young boy in Baghdad who discovered a lamp on a beach and brought it home for his father to spiff up and sell. But since they’re characters in a story, and not real people with sense, neither of them knows that you should never, ever, rub an oil lamp unless you are prepared and able to choose your words carefully.
Plot elements relating to the following 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 a figure you might recognize from the introduction of the Ebony Blade in Beyond Wonderland. According to the inverted color scheme of his speech bubbles and the giant, hooded, skull-faced, sickle-wielding shadow behind him, he is some kind of Grim(m) Reaper figure in disguise, 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 has been a recurring theme in the Wonderland titles, even including an issue (Mad Hatter part 2) 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 (hint: it appears in one of the Wonderland titles as a refrigerator magnet), 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 dripping.
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 a figure you might recognize from the introduction of the Ebony Blade in Beyond Wonderland. According to the inverted color scheme of his speech bubbles and the giant, hooded, skull-faced, sickle-wielding shadow behind him, he is some kind of Grim(m) Reaper figure in disguise, 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 has been a recurring theme in the Wonderland titles, even including an issue (Mad Hatter part 2) 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 (hint: it appears in one of the Wonderland titles as a refrigerator magnet), 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 dripping.
Omnibuster,
Out!
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