GFT Retrospective #50: The Collection

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

Being Retrospective.

This short was originally featured at the end of the Grimm Fairy Tales Volume Seven TPB, but it featured spoilers for the issue I reviewed last week (GFT #45: Cinderella Revisited), and this stretch of issues in Volume Eight is pretty bad, so I thought it was time for more Cindy and less crap.

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GFT Short Story #7: The Collection

The Dark One is giving one of his minions (now that I'm reviewing it in spoiler-free times, I can say it's Cindy) a tour of his gallery. It doesn’t really matter that the minion is Cindy; it could have been anyone. The only thing that makes Cindy important here is that the relationship between her and the Dark One will become the most bizarre, dysfunctional, and character-ruining plot device in comics since Spider-Man sold his marriage to the devil to save his aunt and retcon the revelation of his secret identity, or literally anything involving the Joker and Harley Quinn. What does matter here is that the Dark One is characterized as the Grimm Universe’s strictly evil version of the Collector. The Dark One’s gallery features cameos from such iconic GFT souvenirs as the Puss In Boots statue (restored after the events of the Claire threequel we never got), Belinda’s lamp, a smashed mirror that might belong to either the Snow Queen or Charles Dodgson, The Mad Hatter’s tophat (which he’s keeping until it “moves on to its next owner”--presumably the Queen Of Hearts so she can give it to one of the kids at her funhouse, or after that, or something), a suit of armor, the Queen of Hearts’ dress (complete with Dorothy’s ruby slippers?), and a huge corkboard covered in pushpin-impaled fairies. The fairy collection is incomplete, however (that bonfire panel from the Nutcracker special hinted as much), and Cindy agrees to help collect the last few specimens. As with most of the short stories, there isn’t much meat to this one beyond a little fan service and shallow world-building, and while the detail about the Dark One’s curatorial hobby is an interesting one, it ultimately isn’t deemed interesting enough for the Zenescope team to mention it again.

That I know of. I pretty much stopped writing these Retrospective reviews, and reading Zenescope comics, back in 2018, so I have very little idea what plot points Zenescope have decided to come back to since then, if indeed they have done any at all. I think I saw something recently about the cancelled Inferno: Soul Collector title getting used for a special spotlight issue, but I'm not going to jump ahead for the sake of my own curiosity because the Retrospective is where it's at.

For now, 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.

Tomorrow, it's Tom-morrow because Welcome to the Dead Parade gets the TBT 2023 treatment when I promote my old review of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. Next week, the Retrospective suckage continues with more focus on Fenton...but, it's also kind of good? Stay Tuned to find out what I mean.

Ticketmaster,

Out.