GFT Retrospective #40: Little Miss Muffet, Part 2!

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a Fairy Tale Fan,
sitting on his tuffet,
writing his words and ways.

I have a decent opinion of comic book spiders, so don't expect one to frighten me away unless it's of the giant, nuclear accident variety.

Besides, I've dealt with more inconvenient and genuinely scary things as of late. Like an attention-seeking, manipulative father with an expensive seizure disorder, a mother with an injured shoulder and an attention-seeking, manipulative husband who gives himself seizures, and my own infected pancreas, alcoholism, gambling addiction, credit card debt, make-or-break academic deadlines, work-life pressures, weight management, and the sociopathic paradox that is my antipathy toward humanity and overwhelming desire for their digitally distanced affection.

So remember to like this post down below, leave a comment or forty, subscribe, follow, and click up my normal-spider-sized ad revenue because I and the digital spiders that crawl cyberspace for cool stuff to enjoy will thank you. Also, since I've discussed realistic fears and mentioned spiders several times, let's distract ourselves with the first issue review from Grimm Fairy Tales TPB Volume Seven:

GFT #37: Little Miss Muffet Part 2

Like the original Little Miss Muffet issue, this one is another morality lesson head trip, wherein Offensive Asian Stereotype Man and Sela have yet another conversation about her powers and her purpose in the world (worlds?). It takes place prior to The Ugly Duckling Part 2, which ended with Sela’s first official return to action following her death and resurrection.
It opens with Sela in her Snow White coffin (which I just realized is made of the same freezing curse Samantha would have been trapped in had Sela not traded places with her at the end of Snow White & Rose Red), getting kissed awake by a man she refers to as Robert. But the art style here is so bright and simple in contrast with Timepiece that brand recognition fails once again, beyond the use of familiar names. This version of Robert is part of a dream, of course, but he’s dressed in a fairy tale period costume, which had me revisiting the Timepiece short story and thinking about a few things.
Sela and Robert’s first encounter might not have been their first, after all. When they hold hands over the timepiece, the artist makes it look as if the watch—along with Sela and Robert—is glowing. Robert then expresses a feeling of having met her before, which, in the context of him kissing Sela awake in this issue, makes Belinda’s scheme in Timepiece that much more evil.

Consider, as I have, that this portion of Sela’s dream was based, as dreams can be, on a repressed memory. Consider also, that Sela’s reference to her dream in the Rip Van Winkle issue isn’t just to recall the relevance of Asian Stereotype Man here, but to draw the completely plausible conclusion that Robert is (or rather, was) Rip Van Winkle. That would mean that part of that dream was also based on a repressed memory of Sela’s: that of the first time she fell in love with Robert “Rip” Van Winkle (who possessed a limited degree of immortality either by virtue of being born of another realm, or by his then-constant proximity to Sela) and had to put her personal life behind her to answer the call to duty. Enter the Timepiece short countless years later, when Belinda gives Robert the now seemingly enchanted timepiece, which activates when both he and Sela touch it, not only partially jump-starting his past memories of her, but transferring the bulk of his immortality to her already impressive accumulation of years so that she can watch the man she didn’t remember having loved before grow old and die.

Mind blown yet?
Good, because it’s origin story time!

Once upon a time (as these things tend to begin), long before Snow White fell in love with Vanilla Ice (his real name is Robert Van Winkle; look it up), five realms were created. Who did the creating is something that will get its own event series down the line, but for now, what matters is what the realms are and what they have to do with Sela’s powers. Myst, the realm of magic, is where Sela’s book originally came from. Neverland, the realm of wonder and imagination (confusing, considering that Wonderland is the realm of dreams, but that’s coming up next) is the “third realm” mentioned in the Pawns short story, and is associated with such familiar names as Captain Hook, Wendy, Mary, and Daniel Darling (the latter two of whom were the mother and son who stowed away on the Titanic in the 2008 Annual), and an image featuring the Jolly Roger, a crocodile, and a mermaid hint at a possible connection to The Little Mermaid. Wonderland, we have already seen in three different volumes, so the only image we get in this issue is of a generic jungle, hinting that it might be the setting of the Jungle Book trilogy that is to come. Oz is identified as the realm of virtue and hope, which makes sense, and is associated with characters we have seen, but have yet to be identified (the dark-armored knight first shown in Pawns, for one). Like Wonderland, Neverland and Jungle Book, Oz has its own series, which I will get to in time. At the center of everything (because that’s just how these origin myths go) is Earth, the Nexus realm. Typical elements of creation myths progress the story forward, such as divisions between humanity and the god-like, immortals struggling for power and control, and the inevitable degeneration of mortal society in the name of progress. We get properly introduced to The Dark One—the Grimm Universe’s Satan figure—for the first time (I've mentioned him before, but this is the first time we get an actual image of his full, non-human character design), and find out that he is responsible for driving Wonderland to madness, conquering Neverland by proxy, and keeping Myst in a constant state of war. At the time of this issue, Oz had not yet fallen, but we’ll get to the temporal inconsistencies of that when we get to them. Enter another brief commentary on how the conflicts in the other four realms are causing our world to suck more and more each day (take it as an allegory for the xenophobia-based human desire for warfare), and we get back to why Sela is Sela. Turns out she’s the only fully human guardian of the Nexus to have ever existed, and Belinda, though a similar kind of character for the evil side, is half human, half Mystic. A narrow panel depicting Orcus (the Orc King from The Gift short story) with a baby is unclear in its meaning. It could be a reference to the Grimm Fairy Tales Giant Size #1, or it could suggest that Orcus is secretly Belinda’s father. Whether one or both are true, it makes for some awesome potential.

This issue would have been more awesome—or awesome, period, to be honest—if Asian Stereotype Man hadn’t just basically told Sela that “you got your powers because the old guardian of the Nexus was about to die, and I’m exposition-dumping on you now because you almost died and the world is going to end in, like, five, four, three, two,…. And BT-Dubs, no pressure. Now go get ‘em!” These kinds of issues have never been my favorites in the series, but this one was slightly more necessary, I guess.

I did not include the first Little Miss Muffet review here, unlike what I did with The Ugly Duckling, because while the Ugly Duckling issues shared a common character in Ted, Little Miss Muffet was more tied to its original story arc than to this sequel issue.

Hopefully, by the time of this release, I will have completed the papers for my Content Marketing class and moved on to my two Values-Based Leadership papers for WGU.

Remember to like, comment, subscribe, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook for the latest news and updates on my content, including tomorrow's look back at the first Horrible Bosses and the impression-laden British comedy, The Trip. Next week, the Volume Seven Retrospective continues with an interesting mix of Aesop's fables and Creed.

Omnibuster,

Out.