Zenescope - Omnibusted #8: Grimm Fairy Tales TPB Volume 5

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

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To recapitulate and recapture the latest re-focus of the TicketVerse, Sela Mathers is dead, leaving Belinda with free reign over the lost souls of the world as we head into the fifth volume of the first volume of Grimm Fairy Tales, beginning with this pair of milestone issues.

GFT #25 & 26: The Little Mermaid Collection

Next on Belinda's list is the mother of a college student named Sara.

After reading some of The Little Mermaid (which is not technically one of the Brothers’ Grimm’s original Fairy Tales, but instead a work of Hans Christian Anderson), Sara’s mother gets impatient waiting for her education to pay off and convinces Sara that quicker, easier money can be made by selling herself and conning rich men.

The fairy tale plays out mostly according to the common knowledge/Disney version, but for a few minor changes. When a ship is lost to a storm (perhaps the same ship and storm briefly mentioned in The Lamp short story), a group of sirens abduct the drowning sailors, except for one, whose instinctive feelings for a prince lead her to rescue him and deposit him ashore. Later, the Little Mermaid sells her voice to the sea witch for human legs and gets herself discovered by the prince, who seems as smitten with her as she is with him. The royal family is quick to provide her and us with commentary on the archaic but still prevalent view of women as animals and objects. Further compounding this, and reinforcing my suspicions that this is the same womanizing prince from The Lamp, he later chooses a noblewoman--read: a higher-value possession--over the Little Mermaid, breaking her heart and making her reconsider her deal with the sea witch.

This is another unique pair of issues (yes, I realize the multiple ironies of the phrase “another unique pair”), as the fairy tale frames the modern day story--it both begins the first issue and ends the second issue, as well as unfolding on the page alongside modern events--wherein Sara’s mother’s plans lead to Sara falling for a celebrity athlete named Stephen, who is sleeping with another woman. Whether he is married to her or just a womanizer isn’t explained and doesn’t seem to matter. The other woman doesn’t even get a name in the story, I guess to further comment on the exploitation of women as sexual objects…?

As the Little Mermaid’s siren sisters are giving her an enchanted blade to kill the unfaithful prince and break the sea witch’s contract, Belinda convinces Sara’s mother to give Sara a gun to kill Stephen. The Little Mermaid takes pity on the prince and is later captured by the sea witch, with the prince coming to her rescue. That he does this while she is in mermaid form is meant to be a sign that he truly loves her despite her outward appearance, but could just as easily be seen as him viewing her as a rare and even more valuable possession than the noblewoman was. Whatever his motives, his efforts prove to be in vain.

Sara’s efforts at revenge likewise prove to be in vain because she’s never used a gun before and Belinda is Belinda. The story ends with Sara in prison for attempted murder and pregnant with Stephen’s daughter, and the sea witch living to bargain for more mermaid souls because in Belinda’s fairy tales, the villains always win.

I enjoyed the painting-like art style of these issues, and despite the negative outcome and minimal exposure of the modern side of events, I enjoyed reading the story as well. My only real gripe (as with quite a chunk of the Grimm and Wonderland storylines so far) is the lack of care and attention to time.

We know through past issues that the fairy tales presented by both Sela and Belinda are to some degree repressed memories or past lives for those they are presented to. But in part two of The Little Mermaid, some events of the fairy tale are referred to as “Present Day” to distinguish it from flashbacks and flash-forwards that occur within the tale, which I found confusing. At one point, the focus shifts from The Little Mermaid to the real present day of the story, which is referred to simply as “Now.” Aren’t “Present Day” and “Now” the same thing? If you still own a hard copy of a Thesaurus (or you have the internet and you know how to type “thesaurus.com”), look it up.

In the meantime, keep reading for more whosits and whatsits galore.

GFT #27: Three Blind Mice

Again, this is not a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, nor is it a fairy tale, period. Like stories featured in the first two annuals (2007 and 2008), it is a nursery rhyme. More specifically, it is a nursery rhyme that some historians believe was a way of endearing young children to Queen Mary I (the farmer’s wife) and her view of Protestant heretics (the three blind mice). And because burning people at the stake doesn’t really appeal to children (except maybe Timmy in his early GFT appearances), the author of the rhyme chose to include a lyric about bodily dismemberment by kitchen utensil instead. Sounds just right for Grimm Fairy Tales, doesn’t it?

I started reading this issue, thinking that I would have to say something negative about how starting with subject material that is already bloody is a way for Zenescope to avoid making an effort, but as with their previous nursery rhyme adaptations, their take on Three Blind Mice is rather good, if not all that original.

A handyman named Tom seeks employment with a lonely old woman named Beth when her hot niece (because Zenescope) takes a backpacking trip across Europe (because cliche college student). But when things start going missing from Beth’s house--including a certain purple book of fairy tales--and we find out he’s been in league with Belinda, it becomes painfully obvious that without Sela to screw with, she’s perfectly fine with hatching next-level nefarious schemes against ordinary people.

Under the pretense of being his partner-in-crime and having never seen her own book before, Belinda starts reading Three Blind Mice, a tale of three mice who pretend to be blind as a way of scamming an old woman out of her food.

Taking a cue from the story, Tom gets his two friends in on the score, even using Saturday morning cartoon-level reverse psychology to convince the old woman to let them move into her house.

By the way, if you’re too young to remember Saturday morning cartoons, they were awesome; probably the best part of being a child of the 90’s and the early 2000’s. When the world decided that cartoon blocks on Saturday morning stunted mental growth and social skills and led to obesity, cancer, AIDS, drug use, alcoholism, school shootings, war, racism, sexual non-conformity, and more than half of the side-effects listed for any given Pfizer product, plus whatever other societal ills they could get to stick to children’s television during the last best decade of anything ever, it was like a significant portion of pop culture had given up and died, taking Blockbuster Video, record stores, and the innocent part of my soul with it.

Stating the obvious, things don’t work out favorably for the mice or Tom and his friends. The former get served one last time (Twilight Zone reference), and the latter trio learn just how empty and sightless the world can be.

Good story, but the issue with this issue (once again) is time. The plot seems to unfold in the present day, but the whole thing with Belinda and the book doesn’t make sense. She supposedly has had the book with her at all times up to now, but we find out near the end that she sold it to Beth “years ago” out of a bookstore she runs. This leaves several options.

Three Blind Mice could take place “years” after the death of Sela, in which case, why do bookstores still exist in the future? This is the least problematic solution to the conundrum, so I will ascribe to it while pondering the validity of the other options.

It could take place in the present, in which case Belinda now has the never-before-displayed ability to make herself and/or her book exist in multiple places at once, in addition to the book having possible shapeshifting powers (Rapunzel issue?) and being both a magical prison (The Piper miniseries) and a Duel Monsters deck (Snow White & Rose Red). Given the completely illogical turns the series has taken from time to time, this is as sensible a possibility as any.

The third option is that Three Blind Mice took place in the recent past, which might play into Belinda’s claims of wiping Sela’s memory, or it might negate what we think we understand of Sela’s congruity in the timeline altogether, which is also completely sensible, given Zenescope’s disregard for continuity and established mechanics early on in the series (and occasionally later on in the series, but we’ll get to that when we get to it).

The art style in this issue was interesting and creepy. Everyone is drawn to look reminiscent of Slappy the Dummy from Goosebumps mixed with the man-eating Titans from Attack on Titan, as designed by the creators of The Stepford Wives. It isn’t exactly appealing (the niece, who is supposed to be hot, has a severe and mannish face as a result of how she’s drawn, and as the only seemingly innocent party in the story, she doesn’t benefit character-wise from this art style, either), but it plays into the personalities and motivations of the other characters perfectly, which only enhances how well the story works as a whole.

Even a blind man can see that.

I had a bad joke about translating my blog into Braille when I first wrote this review, but that's in bad taste, so keep reading to get a feel for perhaps the worst Grimm Fairy Tales issue of its time.

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.

The next issue provides 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).

The last issue of Grimm Fairy Tales sucked. Badly. It was the standout oddball for all the wrong reasons; the blackest of black sheep among a mostly gray flock that is nonetheless interesting because who doesn't like animal videos?

Weird analogy, I know.
But the Ugly Duckling issue was uninspired, cliche, detached, and otherwise so noticeably bad that the proverbial Boy might choose not to cry wolf and Little Boy Blue might turn a blind eye at the appearance of said wolf among the flock, except that the wolf would die vomiting at the first bland taste of The Ugly Duckling's unsavory mutton.

Well, that was a convoluted way of saying it was terrible. Again.

But thankfully, The Ugly Duckling was an anomaly, and the next issue, which I will look back at, starting now, shows major signs of redemption.

GFT #29: King Midas

After the last issue having almost nothing recognizable of the Grimm Fairy Tales brand outside of Belinda, this issue is back to form with series veteran writers Raven Gregory and Ralph Tedesco at the helm. The King Midas tale is framed here by your average debt-and-ransom plot, with a wealthy man named David Franks (first name, Biblical king, last name, the official currency of Switzerland, the country with one of the most morally gray banking systems on the planet) who is indebted to Belinda and is secretly a hitman for hire.

Belinda reads David’s daughter, Trisha, the story of King Midas. It goes much the same as the common knowledge version, with the wish for the golden touch being granted by Belinda herself in this version (rather than a satyr or an elf, as traditionally told), and the king dying of starvation after turning all of his food--and his daughter--to gold.

After the fairy tale (which is not a Grimm Fairy Tale, but a Greek myth), Trisha is kidnapped by Mercy Dante, a woman who has some bloody personal history with David Franks. I had forgotten Mercy’s backstory since the first time I read this, and revisiting it now only makes me appreciate even more what a badass character she turns out to be. Mercy will return in her own issue later on and be featured as a lead character in several miniseries.

This is where I stopped editing this post because I thought it would be a good idea to drink a Red Bull at 8:30 at night, and my brain stopped functioning optimally around one a.m. But now, it's time for some dream sequences (because weird sleep patterns), questionable continuity (because my brain is shot and this is a Zenescope review series), and pure awesomeness (because I and the next issue of Grimm Fairy Tales are both awesome). By the way, did you know that the less awe you have, the better off you are? Just having some awe is awesome, and being full of awe is awful! I'm sorry, and you're welcome. Here's the wakeup call:

Grimm Fairy Tales #30: Rip Van Winkle is another mind-trip issue, with the reaper figure from the 2008 Annual coming to pay his respects to Sela following her death at the end of Snow White and Rose Red. Though Belinda ran her through from behind with a very long sword (Excalibur, if I remember correctly), Sela is not bleeding. Either it’s been awhile since she was killed and the wound coagulated shut, the artist was lazy and/or forgetful, or because magic. Keep that third option in mind.
As seems proper to the reaper--and it is, because this is Grimm Fairy Tales, after all--he says goodbye in the only way Sela would respect (or find blasphemous): by telling her a story from Sela’s own book.
In what he calls "Sela’s version" of Rip Van Winkle, it turns out that Robert wasn’t her first love. Long before Robert (assuming this is a flashback fairy tale and not entirely a head-trip), there was Rip Van Winkle, father to her two children and love of her life.
But when she falls asleep one day, her reprieve from duty as champion and savior of humanity is interrupted by a dream sequence that reveals a future world without her influence. In this future reality, the Jabberwocky, a knight in dark armor, a man sitting on a throne with crocodiles at his feet, the Cheshire Cat, Belinda, and several undefined other villainous figures (rendered in kaiju monster size because dreams, I guess) have taken over the world. And despite her not having aged in at least three hundred years, dream Sela has white hair and wrinkles. It reminds me of how Ash falls asleep at the end of Army of Darkness and wakes up with white hair and a really long beard, only to look perfectly normal again in the Ash VS Evil Dead TV series. Makes no sense at all. But, we’re reading Zenescope comics, so nonsense always makes sense now, even when it’s not a Wonderland title.
Whether fairy tale Sela decides to re-embrace her destiny is unclear, according to Offensive Asian Stereotype Man and what I assume is Zenescope’s sexified version of Tinkerbell, but remember how I mentioned magic healing powers? As the reaper walks away, delivering a few parting words on the final two-page splash, Sela’s eyes shoot open.

When I first saw this last collection of images back then and realized what it meant, I about lost my mind at the cool factor.
If there are any three things that have impact in comics, they are good origin stories, times when a superhero gives up or dies, and when a hero comes back from the dead. While Sela’s origin story is kind of slapped together by committee and the circumstances surrounding her fall, redemption, death, and resurrection are on par with the kind of cosmic nonsense you’d find in an old Doctor Strange issue, the defining moments themselves have been consistently dramatic punctuations, as any good twist should be.

♫Down here at the pawn shop!♫
Welcome, Ticketholders, to another Sublime issue of the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective!
'90s reference, y'all! Must stop using exclamation points! Keep reading!

The Grimm Fairy Tales Short Story #5: Pawns is about as much of a story as Wicked Ways was a story: merely a dialogue with accompanying visuals. The first page (left) displays the Snow Queen, the Jabberwocky, the evil knight last seen in Sela’s Rip Van Winkle dream sequence, Sela dressed as Snow White, asleep in a glass coffin, and what appears to be Tinkerbell (less scantily clad than in Rip Van Winkle), with a man in green brandishing a hook standing next to her. Looming above all of this is a huge, ominous hand, showing that, like the title implies, all of these figures are pieces in some elaborate board game.

The looming hand belongs to the leader of the Evil Agency, and the dialogue in question is with his assistant.

The assistant says he has information on two people in New York and hands The Dark One their pictures--those of Wendy Darling and Captain Hook--offering to contact their “friend in the third realm.”
Spotting Belinda sitting outside, they wonder if she “suspects the truth” (which will come into play in a later Halloween issue).
There isn’t much in the way of a story or action here, but a few easter eggs that set up future events or remind us of past details.

A large part of "the truth" would be revealed in January of 2009, in Grimm Fairy Tales' first Giant Sized issue, focusing on Belinda in her pre-Evil Agency days as a likable but tragic heroine, adding some intrigue and dimension to her later relationship with Sela, and showing how Belinda herself first joined the dark side. Right up front, I loved this issue. At least, that's what I said when I was doing a rapid-fire review for my Cover Charge column. But how did it stand up to Retrospective and Omnibusted scrutiny?

Grimm Fairy Tales Giant-Size #1 (2009): Fear Not

A pair of expository pages briefly recounts the events of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and The Lamp short story, also including images from the Titanic Annual and The Snow Queen. Presenting the comics for the first time as a historical account, this introduction brushes off all of the canceled and unexplored plotlines (such as what happened between The Lamp and Sinbad #7, Belinda’s possible future encounters with Sinbad and Wilhelm, and any of the countless other points of contention and mystery regarding Belinda’s past or the logic of her conveniently fluctuating power set) as stories that have yet to be found. A bit of a cop-out, but at the same time, to have over-explained Belinda would have led to her not being as interesting of a character as she has become. I’ve often criticized how overpowered, one-note, inconsistently motivated, and underdeveloped her character has been in the series so far, and how, aside from a tendency toward convoluted scheming and a few minor but powerful moments with Sela and abusive male figures in her life, Belinda has basically no dimension to her. While this trend continues for some time in the series proper, Belinda’s journey to becoming a fully realized character--not just a villain, but a character--begins definitively with this special issue.

Loosely based on the Brothers Grimm tale, Good Bowling and Card Playing (re-titled and re-presented in later editions as The Story Of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was), the Giant-Sized Fear Not issue gender-swaps Belinda into the role of the fearless youth. In the original tale, a reckless and excessively stupid boy injures innocent people and causes great property damage as he travels from place to place trying to learn what fear is, ultimately surviving a night in a haunted castle and winning the hand of the King’s daughter, though his goal of learning fear is never achieved. So the moral of the story is that hurting people and being careless can get you a girlfriend and make you rich…did Donald Trump read this one, I wonder?

As worthless and counter-intuitive as its source material was, Fear Not is over fifty pages (because Giant-Size) of romance, humor, tragedy, horror, and awesome, bloody action that comprise one of the best stories Zenescope has ever put forth. The art style is standard for what we’ve seen in most Grimm Fairy Tales issues so far, and hints at a consistent art style for the series going forward. But in keeping with the giant-ness of the issue, the artists go the extra mile; not for the sake of being new or edgy or sensational, but with the purpose of saying “this is a Giant-Size issue of Grimm Fairy Tales, and we’re going to treat it that way.” The results speak for themselves.

Story-wise, Fear Not takes place sometime after the events of Sinbad #7, with Belinda mentioning her palace in Baghdad and having been exiled by Sinbad at some point. These events were to be recounted in future issues of Grimm Fairy Tales and a 1001 Arabian Nights: Aladdin series (see my post on Sinbad for an allusion to this), but plans for the story and the Aladdin series were later cancelled. Having put her time in the lamp and her untold experiences since then behind her, Belinda is here portrayed as a badass (what is commonly referred to in neo-archetypal terms as the “kick-ass chick” character) who agrees to help a king reclaim his castle from a wraith, taking inspiration from the third act of its source material. Female empowerment messages pepper through much of the plot, as Prince Victor (the king’s son) begins to respect Belinda for her courage and strength in battle, and eventually to fall in love with her. It was nice to see Belinda get a focus issue of this caliber for once. If you want to avoid me spoiling the ending for you, stop here. But if you don’t care about spoilers, keep on reading.

Let’s just say that things in Grimm Fairy Tales are never so cut and dry. Villains don’t get happy endings, even when they get a chance at being heroic. It turns out that the king was working for Orcus, the Orc king (hurray for originality! And sarcasm! And he's part of the Evil Agency), and had planned the entire time for Belinda to get pregnant so that he and his demon-worshipping cult could forcibly remove her baby and give it to Orcus for reasons that take a ludicrously long time--like, not until Grimm Fairy Tales #116--to pay off. Worse and far more interesting, though, Orcus revives a dying Belinda (insert the usual “I’ll do anything to get revenge,” bargain for your soul plot mechanic here) and points her at the king, whom she kills before he can reveal that it was Orcus who orchestrated (Orcus-trated?) the taking of her child and the murder of her husband. It’s stuff like this that makes the Rumpelstiltskin issue so impactful.

But I wonder again about the continuity here. If Sinbad was active some time during the Abbasid Caliphate (a period of Arab rule that ran 750-1517AD), and the events of the Giant-Size took place during his lifetime (which puts Belinda fully turning evil in the year 1517 at the latest), how could she have been doing some of the things that she did for the Dark Horde (that’s the in-Universe name for Orcus, the Dark One--the owner of that floating hand from the above Pawns short story--and all associated monsters and villains in the Grimm Universe at large, which I have been calling the Evil Agency up to this point) at the times she supposedly did them? I mean, I get that Belinda has probably been vacillating between rebellious mischief and downright evil ever since she could walk and talk at the same time, but this practically retcons the whole set-up for Pinocchio out of existence, and we haven’t even seen him try to be a villain yet. So what gives? Oh, right. Comic books. Still, Grimm Fairy Tales Giant-Size #1 is probably one of the best things in the Zenescope library to date.

I hope you all enjoyed this compilation of my Volume 5 reviews, as well as my never-before-released review of the 2009 Giant-Size edition. Remember to like, subscribe (or follow, or whatever else they call it), and comment wherever you can because I'm posting these on Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, and YouTube now. I and the Dark Horde of digital arachnids that prowl the internet will thank you for the improved analytics. Oh, and click those ads to grow my revenue trickle. Did that sound dirty to anyone else...?

Stay Tuned and Fear Not, because next week, I'm dropping an entirely new Zenescope - Omnibusted, and the sixth part of "What If GOKU Was NEVER BORN?" (provided you help me get Part Five to five likes and one hundred views).

Omnibuster,

Out!