GFT Retrospective #53: The Good Witch, Omnibusted
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
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 Darren (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 Dark One, 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 Darren 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.
This two-part finale of "Snow and Ice" 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 Darren.
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 into the Retrospective. 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.
Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered, and Omnibusted.
In a recent GFT Retrospective post, I took an Omnibusted approach to the history of a long-neglected character (Cindy Monroe, a.k.a. Cinderella). But she isn't the only blonde, female Zenescope character (nor will she be the last) to have a long hiatus in her series appearances. Today, I once again get Omnibusted with the hair color/gender combination that has had many jokes made at its expense (are dumb blonde jokes still a thing, or have they gone the way of racist caricatures, body image shaming, homophobia, transphobia, spectrum-shaming, and slut-shaming?) despite claiming to have "more fun" than an unspecified other-group, whoever that might be. Anyway, if you've been following the Retrospective or reading the comics (ComiXology has a super-affordable monthly subscription with access to all the trades, and new single-issue releases, or you can go to Zenescope's website and buy individual issues, collectible covers, board games, clothing, and other merch), you know I'm talking about Samantha Darren, whom we haven't seen very much of for about twenty issues. So as I did with Cindy, I'm going to cover her appearances in the series so far, including unconfirmed and brief appearances, as well as possible connections to other characters in the franchise continuity.
But first, I'd like to talk about something that I didn't address in last week's review: the tale of "The Lord's Animals And the Devil's Animals" ironically only makes biblical sense from the Dark One's perspective, considering the old proverb (more ironically, it is biblical in origin, but not from the book of Proverbs) about false prophets being wolves in sheep's clothing. Goats are related to sheep, and true prophets, priests, and even the Lord Himself, are frequently referred to as shepherds of the people. So (in Germany, at least) having God create wolves and the Devil create goats makes no narrative sense despite the common, old-world association of goats with Satan. But in The Devil's Gambit retelling from the Dark One's perspective, where the creators of the animals are switched, the "sheep/goats are good, ravening wolves are bad" angle of the proverbial not-a-Proverb lines up much better.
Hopefully, once I stop covering issues with "Devil," "Death," and "Witch" in the title, The Algorithm will like me a bit better. It also helps when my Ticketholders 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.
Let's get things started with Samantha's original appearance in Grimm Fairy Tales #21:
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 Darren (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 Dark One, 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 Darren 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.
Retrospective Note: In light of Cindy's character arc, I find it interesting to point out her juxtaposition to Samantha, in that Sela (the series' protagonist) read to Cindy, who turned evil, and Belinda (who is Belinda, and needs no further elaboration because Belinda) read to Samantha, who (we learned in the Cinderella Revisited issue) probably did not. Samantha and Cindy are also good parallels and juxtapositions to Timmy and Jacob, as both Timmy and Samantha were set on positive paths following Sela's intervention (as we know, at the time of Cinderella Revisited, Pinocchio, and The Devil's Gambit, Sela was dead, emotionally compromised, or otherwise indisposed). Samantha's next appearance was as a bit of a plot device in the two-part Snow White and Rose Red, where Sela's intervention, and aforementioned unaliveness, would also be featured.
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 Darren.
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 into the Retrospective. 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.
Retrospective Note: What they did next was continue the formula with Belinda, and it lasted longer than it needed to, was soul- and hope-sucking, and still kind of is, even after Sela resurrected, because the bad guys keep winning, and they're not very interesting. Sufficiently creepy and evil, but not interesting for the most part; just your average, soulless CGI army with a handful of standouts.
As for Samantha, some references were made to her continued presence, such as the freezing curse that Sela/Snow White is shown trapped in in Pawns and Little Miss Muffet Part 2, the nameless blonde (who turned out to be Cindy) at the end of The Nutcracker Christmas Special, and Samantha's brief reintroduction in the middle of Cinderella Revisited. I also alluded to the possibility that (because blonde witch), she might be a descendant of Anna Williams from Salem's Daughter.
And now, we get to see where she's been all this time and what was supposed to be done with her character.
Samantha was such a promising character. She had a decent, multi-issue introduction, a potentially interesting power set, and one of the least exhibitionist costume designs in Grimm Fairy Tales’ early publication history. Like Cindy, she hasn’t been featured in the series for awhile (and as a matter of fact, she and Cindy were officially re-introduced in the same issue), and now, two issues from a series milestone, Samantha gets her own development story. The Good Witch doesn’t stem from any traditional fairy tale that I can find, but feels like a fairy tale that should have been written or passed through oral tradition a long time ago among pagan cultures. It opens, as many of the recent issues have, with character interaction that leads to a flashback. Here, Samantha is training with Shang. She looks older and more mature than in her original appearances, and her costume is reminiscent of an amalgamation of Storm’s two most iconic costumes. Her flashback briefly summarizes her involvement in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the final moments of Snow White and Rose Red before a dying Sela sends her through the mirror in Belinda’s Snow Queen cave with the promise of a return home and a chance at a new beginning. But instead of being transported home, Samantha finds herself in another snow cave (perhaps in a mountainous region of Wonderland?) inhabited by creatures that aren’t quite lizards or insects, one of which is larger than the others and wears a red jewel like a crown (the same jewel that serves as Samantha’s cape clasp--I like that they made such a little piece of her costume design make sense). Speculation and imagination could lead one to surmise that these cave creatures were grown from the lizard-worms that burst out of Brandon near the end of Escape From Wonderland, and that the cave they live in is the abandoned Cave of the Jabberwocky, now frozen over since his death. Just speculation, but Wonderland’s funky accelerated time mechanic makes it entirely possible, as does the use of the mirror. Samantha answers a riddle posed by the lead creature, Abadon, which dredges up some past memories about her father being a Mystic and her mother going insane (but that can just be chalked up to her knowing about the dangers Samantha would face as a Falseblood and the ignorance of the Lowborn world regarding such things). Her second trial is another riddle, posed by a soul-collecting dragon named Tiamat. This one, she also solves, and is given a wand that supposedly belonged to her father. After navigating a treacherous, frozen lake and climbing a mountain, Samantha is faced with another riddle, this time posed by a giant hawk with tentacles. No name for the creature, no flashback, and no magical item, only directions to her next destination. On the way, she fights a wendigo-looking thing, using her wand for the first time and learning that she has telepathic or empathic abilities that allow her to grant the creature mercy. Her final destination is, of course, a house out in the middle of nowhere, inhabited by Shang, who proves to be more of a mentor to her than he has been or will ever be for Sela. More than kind of a dick move, since it’s quickly revealed that Samantha was trained to be Sela’s replacement.
GFT #48: The Good Witch
Yeah. Let’s allow our main character to screw up several times, get killed, resurrect her, tell her she was chosen hastily, give her no training or advice beyond her own life experiences, dump a bunch of exposition and pressure on her shoulders, and then tell her that someone else has been given actual training and chosen to replace her already because she’s almost certain to fail and die again. Nice job, Shang, you offensive Asian asshole!
Ahem.
Another bit of intrigue enters the picture with the question of who Samantha’s father really is. We know he’s a Mystic who used a magic wand, but that’s pretty much it at this point. So, who is Samantha’s father, really? It’s built up to be a big deal, but I don’t remember anything coming of this little teaser yet. Maybe I’ll be surprised, but given all of the other plot threads Zenescope has dropped so far, probably not.
And speaking of dropped plots, a text box at the end of the issue announces: “For more on Samantha’s journey, see the brand new ongoing Grimm Fairy Tales series: Grimm Tales #1.” But like the Sinbad spinoffs, this series was also canceled. Maybe it was Zenescope getting overconfident in their early years, or not having enough substantive material to justify a new series, but I think there was probably fan backlash at the writers trying to replace Sela with Samantha and they had to course-correct to bring the focus back to where it belonged. Still, I think Samantha deserved better than she got in the long run.
Next week, a blessing and a curse as I release my Retrospective review of the first Grimm Fairy Tales issue to not have a title. Sure, there won't be any mention of devils, witches, or death in the headline, but will Grimm Fairy Tales #49 be enough to quell the ire of SEO?
To find out, Stay Tuned, remember to like and comment down below, subscribe to my blog, follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook for the latest news on my content, and
Retrospective Omnibuster,
Out.
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