GFT Retrospective #49: Cinderella - Omnibusted

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. Someone You Have Followed For A Long Time.

If you are among the three or so Ticketholders who know me from Yahoo! Groups, that means since 2004. I even put it as my username on Tumblr! If you've been with me since the beginning of my time on Blogger, that means it's been since 2012. Whether you've been reading my stuff for eleven years, nineteen years, somewhere in between, or not at all, welcome to the latest New/Old Comic Book Day entry in the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective! Also, please remember to like and comment down below, subscribe to my blog, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook for the latest news on my content.

And today, it's going to be a big one! You may recall from last week's GFT Retrospective #48: The Devil's Brother that Fenton was about to deliver a sword to “someone we have watched for a long time” (there's my a.k.a. tie-in!) before he had his origin story flashback. Well, that "special" someone is a character whom we haven't seen since the second-ever issue of the Grimm Fairy Tales series, where she barely even got a name. There's been a ton of hype, guerilla advertising, and set-up in the interim, but very few actual appearances during the forty-three-issue gap between that one and this one. So I thought I'd do a little guerilla cross-branding of my own and show her journey, Omnibusted style, with some added notes because I was exercising brevity at the time of the original writings, and hadn't yet done the "issue vs. fairy tale" comparison analysis format.

Let's get started!

GFT #2: Cinderella

In the frame scenario of this issue, we meet a sorority pledge--initially unnamed--who runs off after being driven to tears by a trio of sorority sisters.

Omnibuster's Update: These are perhaps the frame equivalent to the stepmother and step-daughters from the Disney and original versions. There are quite a few Kinder und Hausmarchen variations, which I will touch on later. 

After this, she comes across a lecture by fairy tale expert Sela Mathers, who relates a bloody, revenge-driven version of Cinderella to the gathered crowd.

Omnibuster's Update: Though we see her book in the first issue, Sela herself debuts in person in this issue. Obviously, she has since gotten much more page-time than this issue's focus character.

Following the lecture and reading, it is revealed that the girl’s name is Cindy. We also see that the fairy godmother in the Cinderella portion of the issue bears a striking resemblance to Sela Mathers, who is also in possession of the red book seen in the last issue. What’s more, like the fairy godmother did in the story, Sela ends the issue by bargaining for Cindy’s soul while a--ha-ha--murder of crows watches from the trees.

Omnibuster's Update: The version adapted here, and previously, by Disney, shares the Cinderella title, and has the dark detail of the step-sisters mutilating their feet to fit into the glass slipper. A later version adds that, after trying to curry favor with Cinderella and the prince, the step-sisters' eyes are pecked out (used for the ending panel of Sela's telling) by birds. Another variation sees the stepmother be stuffed into a barrel of boiling oil and rolled along behind the prince's carriage (because foot mutilation and blindness were apparently not savage enough punishments). Many countries across the world have lesser-known versions that pre-date the Brothers' Grimm, including a Greek telling and some of the Arabian Nights tales. Aside from Aschenputtel (the original, German title of Cinderella) and The Little Glass Slipper, there are also similar Grimm selections like All-Fur, which takes a more positive spin on the liar-revealed plot, with a beautiful cook donning three dresses (because fairy tales have to repeat their theme at least three times; it's kind of an unwritten rule of the craft) to dance with a king she has been forced to cook for by her scheming mother. The dinner scene from the end of Mrs. Doubtfire ensues, with the King eventually removing All-Fur's magical, identity-obscuring...fur, and marrying her while the evil mother gets turned into a duck and flushed down a medieval toilet.

I love it when the "dark, gritty" Brothers Grimm stop being sadistic, racist, and German (but I repeat myself?), and decide to throw wacky romantic comedies into their collection.

Of course, the sword's origin also got quite a bit of coverage, so let's shove some of that in here, too:

GFT Short Story #6: The Gift

A figure dressed in purple visits an underground orc kingdom that has been established on Earth at some point. Unsavory references are made to the orcs’ use of innocent (read: children and babies) blood to forge and power the many mystical artifacts they have produced. One such artifact (the Gift in question, I assume, as no real information is given about who the figure in purple is—except it’s probably Belinda because female and purple, and because when evil stuff is involved, it’s always Belinda—nor about much of anything else) is a crystal ball, depicting a unicorn for reasons that will come up in future issues. The orc king, whom Belinda addresses as Orcus (from the end of the Fear Not Giant-Size), talks about using the unicorn to finish a magic sword that will somehow help him get his revenge on someone.
Why Orcus calls her “My Queen” is unclear, as is who Orcus wants revenge against or how the sword factors in, but some of those answers do come up later in Volume Eight, beginning with...

GFT #43: The Last Unicorn

Two things you’ll notice right away: based solely on the title, we know that this ties in to both The Gift short story and the Nutcracker Christmas Special (which happen before and after this issue, respectively), and based on the first page, this explains where Sela and Belinda ended up after Sela got Shang’s dreamcatcher at the end of the Vegas Annual. That’s right: New York City again! And it’s still because comic books! What becomes of Sela and Belinda immediately following this resolute flashback is not yet known (except that Shang’s dreamcatcher probably had something to do with Sela’s dream sequences in the Little Miss Muffet issues, and probably Rip Van Winkle and the Nutcracker, too, like maybe it gave her the ability to become an active participant in her dreams), as it serves as a lead-in to why Sela is once again drawn to New York in the present day.

As it turns out, a local drunk has called the police to report a unicorn loose in Central Park. When Sela gets there, Shang is waiting for her, with his usual “you’re the hero but I can’t explain anything to you so just do as I say because the world might end right…about…now” dialogue. Why Sela keeps referring to him as her mentor in later issues makes my brain shit itself. I mean, Shang mentored Sela for about as long as my college game programming professor spent teaching us how to program games. Spoilers for a fifteen-year-old grudge: she taught her classes offscreen, and if it happened offscreen, it didn't happen at all.

And just to drive home the point, no sooner does Shang open his Fu Manchu-covered mouth than Belinda and Baba Yaga show up to kill the unicorn. By the way, it’s the only living unicorn, it’s about to celebrate its hundredth birthday, and unicorn horns are magic, so if they kill it, they get teleported to the bottom of the Pit stage to fight Reptile or something. But seriously, evil magic people plus dead unicorn equals bad stuff happening. So because the plot demands it, Belinda runs off to chase Sela and the unicorn, leaving Shang to fight Baba Yaga. Of course, Shang has a score to settle after the events of GFT #42, and Sela and Belinda hate each other, so you can probably guess what that means for the rainbow-farting fifth wheel in all of this. While our distracted heroes are fighting out their vindictive feelings, Fenton and a small army of goblins kill the unicorn, unleashing a big, shiny energy trope into the sky because that’s what all the movie villains were doing at the time. Also, Belinda is actually over two thousand years old; just an interesting factoid I thought I’d throw in there because it makes the continuity of her character easier to understand. I wonder again what the real significance of the book is anymore. It’s supposed to be the most important thing the villains are after so they can invade Earth, and yet Sela throws it aside after summoning her sword to fight Belinda. I guess this could be an intentional illustration of how all-consuming revenge can be, since the issue boils down to one of those “we may have lost, but you spared your greatest enemy and learned you’re not evil, so you actually won” morals. I like how the structure of The Last Unicorn places Sela in the pupil role after several issues of developing her vengeful side, but the cheese factor of the moral itself is too juvenile for the series’ intended audience.

I'm not going to reprint my Halloween or Christmas 2009 reviews here, but it's important to note that the 2009 Halloween Special featured a different character with the name, Cindy Monroe, and the 2009 Christmas Special ended with a panel of an unnamed blonde girl who may have been the real Cindy.

And with that done, we come to an issue that I remember hating because it didn't go how I expected, and it's finally time to Revisit Cinderella:

GFT #45: Cinderella Revisited

Back in issue #2 of Grimm Fairy Tales, Belinda tricked Sela into purchasing the soul of an awkward, nerdy sorority pledge named Cindy Monroe. Since then, Zenescope has used her full name as the name of a morgue attendant’s vengeful love interest in The Monkey’s Paw, and attached her last name to a child who disappeared at a Wonderland-run traveling circus in supplemental material for Escape From Wonderland. They have also hinted at her character in passing and in several final pages of past GFT issues. But now it’s time for Cindy--and Zenescope--to pay up. “Cindy’s fate is revealed,” the preview for this issue says, making the reader think that Cindy will be another Timmy case; that Sela will intervene and save Cindy from a life of homicidal servitude. At least, that’s what I expected the first time I read Cinderella Revisited. But nope. Artist Shawn McCauley and colorists Studio Cirque ("Little Bo Peep" from the Vegas Annual) lend their signature cartoonish simplicity to Cindy’s next chapter, a tale about a girl who sold her soul to the Dark One so that she could become an insane, bloodthirsty version of the very same kind of person she wanted revenge against in GFT #2: the bitchy, slutty sorority girl stereotype. She enjoys engaging in such obvious, gory behavior as making blindfolded pledges handle and eat human hearts. Why people are afraid of her is anyone’s guess at this point, as is why anyone would let a man named Fenton, who looks like Fenton, into a college girl’s bedroom unsupervised.

The far more interesting plots here are the future storyline setups. Belinda and Baba Yaga discuss their personal grudges, the fallout of The Last Unicorn, evil plan cliches, and Baba Yaga’s latest evil plan cliche: a time travel MacGuffin hunt for revenge. This will lead into the three-part GFT/Sinbad Crossover that I will cover much later, but for now we cut to Sela, whose pages are drawn by Gabriel Rearte and colored by Milen Parvanov (and therefore look much better than the rest of the issue). She’s in a secret temple in Colorado, reading a book that looks like hers and Belinda’s, except that it looks older and is…blue? Black? A darker shade of purple? For the first time (since Little Miss Muffet Part 2), we are introduced to the series terminology: the Dark Horde (written here as THE DARKHORDE because ye olde book), and the Highborn (natives of the four realms), Lowborn (humans from Earth), Pureblood (basically Highborns, but named from a supremacist, racist perspective), and Falseblood (children of a Highborn/Lowborn union--humans with powers--again named from a negative perspective) races. Once again, Shang shows up because Sela decided to learn stuff and everyone loves an exposition character. Sarcasm! Despite all she has seen and done, Sela is written here as being completely surprised that fairy tales, myths, legends, fables, and religious writings are all facts of historical record in her universe. Also, awesome surprise: Samantha is back! Not sarcasm! The art style in this Sela/Shang/Samantha segment makes her look much older and more serious than in her original appearance in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, or her brief use as a plot device in Snow White and Rose Red, which is both fitting for the tone the writers are going with here, and once more showcases how terrible the series’ concept of time can be.

On a private flight out of Atlanta, we resume the cartoonish, simplistic art style that makes everyone look like concept sketches for rejected Mulan characters, with Fenton staring at Cindy for an uncomfortably long period of time because “business reasons.” Throw in Cindy’s declaration that she would have given herself to any random person who promised to excite her and Fenton giving her the sword--he actually gives her an actual sword, but you get where my mind is going with this--and you have the most suggestive sequence of panels since Belinda pulled magical broken glass out of her vagina and used it as lipstick to kiss an under-aged serial killer. The real--and only--interesting bit of information that comes of Cindy and Fenton’s conversation is that Cindy’s sword is only made from half of the unicorn horn (further jokes could be made here about the word “horny” and how the horns of some endangered species are considered aphrodisiacs or used as third-world impotence cures, but I’m trying to be bigger than that...). The other half, Fenton comments, is in another sword “somewhere over the rainbow,” a reference to the song from the Wizard Of Oz film.

So, because blonde, bored, and bloodthirsty, Cindy’s officially evil now. But who cares? Between Belinda and Baba Yaga’s side-plotting, the return of Samantha Darren, and the nod to a looming threat in the as-yet-unconquered realm of Oz, Cindy quickly becomes the least interesting thing about her own issue. Maybe the Reaper’s focus story will be better than these last two entries.

Next week in the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective, Cindy's story briefly continues in a Short Story segment that would have been a spoiler if I had included the review in Volume Seven. And tomorrow, I do my TBT 2023 push of the Return Of the Living Dead series.

One-Shoed Pumpkin,

Out!