GFT Retrospective #57: 2011 Annual (Sinbad Crossover Part 1)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

Spontaneously Retrospective.

After plans to make an entire Arabian Nights franchise (beginning with Aladdin and a Belinda-focused Lamp series) and an ongoing Sinbad series were canceled, all it took to get more Sinbad stories was a year of publication time (the last issue of Sinbad's City Of the Dead arc was released in 2010, and the trilogy up for review today was released in 2011), a company-wide event series that killed off all of the canceled Zenescope characters (which we'll get to much later in the Retrospective), some vaguely vengeance-fueled time travel, and giving a fictional character whom we've never seen before lots of gold and alcohol.

I don't have high expectations when it comes to gold, and my alcohol days are mostly behind me. But please remember to like and comment down below, Become A Ticketholder if you aren't already, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter for the latest news on my content.

GFT Annual #4 (2011): Sinbad Crossover (Part 1)

It isn't immediately apparent that this is a time travel plot, unless you remember by publication time that an author's note in Cinderella Revisited (which was a year and sixty-six issues ago if you were reading everything in real time) told us that was what Belinda and Baba Yaga were going to do.

I realize I'm saying "time" a lot, and there's nothing I can do about it without a time machine, so instead I'll throw in a little sidebar about a plot hole gripe that I've brought up several times in my main Grimm Fairy Tales reviews about the Dark One's plan to invade Earth not making sense, in part because he's after Sela and her book specifically, even though he already has someone with a magic book on his team. And the reasoning that I've come up with has to do with this crossover and the ways that I've mentioned in previous reviews which differentiate Sela and her book from Belinda and her book. Sela's book is said to be a Provenance Relic (a gateway between Earth and the four Realms Of Power), which explains why she (and more often, the book itself) can send people into fairy tale Realities, summon creatures from it, and have first-hand experiences of her own past memories through it in conjunction with the dreamcatcher. On the other hand, Belinda's book is shown to be specifically tied to her own history, and has more of a demonstrative, less...interactive...effect on those she reads it to, possibly making it a Temporal Relic, which would have no tangible impact in the Dark One's scheme against Earth.

I can't recall if this reasoning will hold up in the future, but that's what makes the most sense to me, and it fits well with the Sinbad Crossover.

We cold open in Madagascar with a drunken sailor by the name of Captain Jake Crane (a possible Pirates Of the Caribbean nod, or he's a distant ancestor of Ichabod Crane, as there will be a Sleepy Hollow miniseries later, or I'm giving Zenescope too much credit) and a double-half-ass closeup of Belinda and Baba Yaga, who are looking for information on Sinbad.

Belinda calls him a "dear friend" and Jake's greatest rival (referencing events we may never get to see in print), and asks him to tell her and Baba Yaga about "what happened in Santalista."

The aforementioned bribery ensues, and the story begins in flashback.

Gone is the sharp, sinister, highly contrasted art style that gave the original volumes their edge, in favor of a more GFT-congruent style (such as there was one at the time). There are also hints that this takes place prior to (or long after?) the events of the original, thirteen-issue run, as the ship has a different name, and Sinbad has a different, but not as cool, crew. There's Ceor (the monkey-trainer and possible religious figure), Mang Tao (the Asiatic muscle-man), Erik (the ginger-bearded Viking with a sledgehammer--or an axe or a sword, depending on the panel), Ahmet (the Middle-Eastern one who points things out, drinks tea in the background, and is rarely drawn in any detail), Barbala (the female Barbarian because original names are original, who has an axe and is the recipient of the third, half-ass shot in six pages), and Vulkor (the skinny, perverted lookout who's good at running, climbing, and seeing stuff).

On their way to an unnamed island, the group banters about another Sinbad story that we'll never get to see, in which they save most of a princess from a tribe of cannibals and the king having the "nerve" to not proportionally reward them for the amount of princess they returned. This was as disturbing to read as it was hilarious.

Once ashore, Sinbad and crew battle Crane and his pirates in a pretty well-illustrated series of one-v-one fights that are accompanied by such witty dialogue as "I fucked your mother," "I'm going to bathe in your blood," "I tricked you into sleeping with a trans prostitute," "LOL, I got you arrested and sentenced to death," and "you smell bad" before a cyclops forces them to join forces and kill it for its blood, which they were apparently competing over to begin with, but this is all left for the reader to put together along the way, as the setup feels almost like the writers wouldn't come up with a reason until the next issue....

The ensuing ship battle between the two parties is pretty well paneled, too, and ends with Sinbad's group retaining the cyclops blood and going to claim their reward on the island of Santalista (possibly a combination of Sandinista and Santeria?).

But because Sinbad can't stop doing a Bubsy in this issue,

when they leave their ship completely unguarded to have a drunken, orgiastic feast on Santalista (which is run by a Voodoo priest named Doc Carou), all those new characters we definitely learned the names of earlier and totally got emotionally invested in after...about twenty pages? Damn, that's actually a lot of page time to spend with new characters who just get poisoned to death halfway through the issue.

Oh, sorry; SPOILERS, but Sinbad's crew is all dead now, and Doc Carou and his minions have the cyclops blood, which he can use to turn them into his own, private, zombie crew with which to sail and conquer the world.

Thankfully, even though he can't keep his jinxed mouth shut, Sinbad is still Sinbad, and easily dispatches Carou's henchmen before beheading the witch doctor himself.

Two interesting possibilities come about from this character.

First that he is a practitioner of Voodoo and necromancy, which could make him an ancestor of Letitia from Salem's Daughter: The Haunting.

Second is the woman who emerges to tend to Carou after his death. This pale-skinned, dark-haired, bikini-clad woman is later revealed to be named Acacia (possibly re-named Alicia in future Grimm Fairy Tales appearances, or is a different, but identical-looking character from Alicia, who is the Queen Of Limbo and the second of at least three Death characters in the Grimm Universe). It is also possible that Acacia/Alicia is the feminine figure who made a deal with Anna Williams at the end of The Haunting, but there's no confirmation of this that I know of.

Acacia vows vengeance on Sinbad for killing her lover, forges the cyclops blood into a ruby-like gemstone, and revives the dead population of Santalista (which has been verbally blacklisted among the nautical community in quick order) to serve as her crew and army in her campaign against Sinbad.

Back in the bar, Captain Jake has finished his tale of "Sinbad & the Other City Of the Dead," and Belinda and Baba Yaga decide to play Sinbad and Acacia against each other so they can steal the gem.

Yeah, I was going to release this all as one post from the start, but at the end I decided to split it up first and then release the Omnibusted version before folding it into the Volume 8 Omnibusted, so there's plenty of opportunities for me to exploit The Algorithms and get more content out there over a longer period of time. Part 2 of the Sinbad Crossover Retrospective is coming at its usual date and time next Wednesday, so Stay Tuned, remember to like and comment down below, Become A Ticketholder if you aren't already, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter for the latest news on my content.

Retrospective

Omnibuster,

Out.