Zenescope - Omnibusted #14: Grimm Fairy Tales/Sinbad Crossover

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Omnibuster

This might start out as a spoiler for future Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective events, but if you take a look at what the back cover of the Sinbad Crossover Trade Paperback says,

the reason Baba Yaga teamed up with Belinda for this time travel McGuffin hunt was because she wanted revenge on the Dark One for killing her family. In addition to being way out of character in comparison to what we've seen of Baba Yaga's behavior so far, not being hinted at at all in the Crossover's three issue run, and putting both Belinda and the titular, brand-featured Sinbad (who is almost entirely the main character of the trilogy, and there is just cause to argue that Acacia is as much of a main character as Sinbad at a certain point) in a supporting frame of reference, it raises all kinds of questions as to Grimm Fairy Tales continuity and the true psychological urgency and/or patience behind Baba Yaga's plan. We know from her introductory issue, the Legacy short, and various bits of Sela's back story that Baba Yaga has been working in service of the Dark One for at least two hundred years, and she's still just gathering pieces to start her revenge! At least it isn't as situationally convoluted as Acacia's revenge plot (as we'll see in the second issue).

Oh, and Omnibuster's Note: I do not own a copy of the Crossover TPB. I have a ComiXology Unlimited subscription, where I have been re-reading the individual issues (the 2011 Annual, Giant-Size, and Special Edition) in digital form because a digital Trade does not legally exist (nor does it illegally exist...or so I've heard...). The above image is cropped and PhotoShopped together from images I downloaded off of eBay. So, thanks, Random eBay Person I'm Too Lazy To Look Up Right Now Because I Have To Copy And Paste Three Weeks Of Content Into One Post And Hope It Looks Good With Minimal Effort.

Wouldn't it be crazy if that was their actual username on eBay?

I'm also letting the first post handle the call to action, so here goes:

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 comment at the bottom of this post, Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook to like and get 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.

GFT Giant-Size #2 (2011): Sinbad Crossover (Part 2)

Suddenly, we get into convoluted villain plan territory.

As it turns out, Acacia and Doc Carou hired Jake and Sinbad to compete against each other to do the sailor's version of "the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs" (a.k.a. navigating through a Goldeneye 007 Aztec Temple trap of an island group known as Ahriman's Teeth, which Sinbad was the only one to ever successfully navigate, despite Jake's claims to the contrary), then have them go to the cyclops' island where the two groups ended up having to work together to kill it and retrieve its blood, then kill whichever crew got back to Santalista first so they could reanimate them as zombies with cyclops blood and steal their ship to take revenge on Caracas, Venezuela, for exiling them to Santalista because they were running Voodoo experiments on the locals. But Sinbad killed Carou, so Acacia threatened revenge on him instead, but she really just wanted to kill him so she could have him under her control and she doesn't want revenge because she apparently just brought Carou fully back from the dead between issues, but because she failed to kill Sinbad, she still needs his crew under her control as a way of controlling Sinbad so he can sail her through Ahriman's Teeth so she and Carou can use the gem she made out of cyclops blood to trap a "baby" sea serpent so they can free and control an ancient wizard's three-headed element dragon and use it to destroy Caracas.

Good.

Now, it's time for the best part of the trilogy to begin!

While all of that was going on, Belinda and Baba Yaga continued to track down Sinbad with the help of Salome, the...brothel employee and love interest whom he was intercoursing with at the beginning of this issue. That's the kind that starts with T, as he was too distressed at the deaths of his crew to engage in the starts-with-F variety.

Belinda promises Salome that she and Baba Yaga will keep Sinbad safe in exchange for information on his whereabouts, and charm a roc (a mythical, giant bird) that gets them to Sinbad just as Acacia and Carou are about to take their awesome-looking, three-headed dragon and betray the legendary sailor to his death.

This is another great character showcase for Belinda, as we potentially see an anti-heroic side to her that we haven't seen since the last Giant-Size issue. Baba Yaga wants to go after the Cyclops Eye first, but Belinda suggests rescuing Sinbad from his zombified crew, keeping her promise to Salome, but playing it off like a strategic, calculated decision.

The battle that ensues between Sinbad, Baba Yaga, Belinda, and the zombie crew is as impressive as the last issue's fights, and features some minimalist banter between Sinbad and Belinda that is of higher maturity than the Annual's shock value prank-off dialogue, while also being palpable and mysterious and contributing to the near-timelessness of this event series.

We've gotten mentions in the exposition boxes throughout these past two issues of the death of Sinbad's father, the squandering of his inheritance, and the storied Seven Voyages (but not his fugitive status from the beginning of Eyes Of Fire or the search for the pieces of the Jericho Visor). The Annual also had dialogue mentions of Sinbad heading to Baghdad in search of a new crew (possibly placing this before the Sinbad series, as well?). But Belinda being referred to "not as a friend" by Sinbad here could imply the unseen events of the cancelled Lamp series that possibly resulted in Pots losing his voice, Belinda's meddling in Wilhelm's love life in The Three Snake Leaves, or any number of other untold stories that took place before Sinbad or during or after the cancelled, ongoing Sinbad series. Most signs point to this trilogy being set before Sinbad, but innumerably more could place it at any point thereafter.

Usually, I harp on Zenescope for not being able to nail down their continuity, or making their readers figure things out as they go, but I appreciate timelessness and mystery when they are used well, and Sinbad's brief exchange with Belinda tells so much with an intense staredown and so few words. It's amazing!

The ending panel doesn't hit as hard as the Annual's Curse Of the Black Pearl homage, and the Voodoo couple's plan is BVS: Dawn Of Justice-meets-Captain America: Civil War levels of convoluted, but the fight composition, character interactions, and the three-headed dragon made this a superior issue compared to the first part of the Crossover.

GFT Special Edition #1 (2011): Sinbad Crossover (Part 3)

This is (throwing my sailor's hat into the ring under the name of Captain Obvious) the first Special Edition of Grimm Fairy Tales, and it honestly doesn't feel very special.

We start with an exposition of the "Everybody got that?" villain scheme to recap the trilogy so far, coupled with a bit of street-level comedy and kaiju destruction in Caracas at the hands mouths of "The Shadow Of Death" (which just makes me think of this story as the plot of a Piratecore cover of "Gangsta's Paradise" even though it's the name of a multi-city-level, fire- water- and thunder-spewing King Ghidorah-alike Yu-Gi-Oh! Fusion Monster that an ancient wizard chained to the bottom of the ocean at the end of a videogame deathtrap maze).
Then Acacia reveals that she is literally the worst planner of all time by forcing a man to bring her the leaders of the city "in a time that pleases me" or she will have Coolio's Psalms 23:4 dragon destroy the rest of the city...but not giving the man a specific deadline. Even worse, she later says that the elders "took your sweet time" when they do arrive, and doesn't immediately destroy Caracas, probably to give time for the story to happen. And because most villains are written to bring about their own downfalls, when the city elder offers Acacia and Carou (who is basically just her second banana-fiddle by now) the opportunity to not torture, kill, and perform necromantic experiments upon the population so they can be allowed to live there again (you know, regain what they want revenge for losing by their own actions?), she goes for the "burn the city, kill them all, and let the gods sort it out" option.

Meanwhile, the end of the last issue (Zombie Ceor and his zombie monkey--which strikes the perfect three-way balance between "why do I have to type this absurd bullshit?," hilarious, and terrifying--aiming a cannon at the deck of Sinbad's ship) proves to be less life-threatening than advertised because splash panels are one of the "offscreen horror movie death" contrivances of comic book writing. Just show everyone leaping from an all-consuming, geography-obscuring explosion, and they can land safely wherever the plot demands! I mean, the ship is still going to sink, but the characters that need to be okay are okay, and it's turned into one of those "Namek will explode in five minutes" scenarios where there's plenty of time to discuss battle strategy (Sinbad gives Belinda and Baba Yaga permission to go all-out against his zombified crew, but still doesn't trust them, even though Belinda tries to be comforting towards him), engage in one-sided, mid-fight banter with the undead, summon the roc, and carefully board it with the sinking ship still above water.
Again, I like the small, intense interactions between Sinbad and Belinda, and the idea that she has a measure of dimension and sympathy. Granted, this was published at a later time than the main continuity it is supposed to fit into, when Zenescope was beginning to write Belinda in a more anti-heroic, hero-by-necessity light, as she was in Fear Not, and as we saw in bits and pieces in issues like The Sorcerer's Apprentice, so it does feel a bit incongruous compared to how we've mostly seen Belinda in Grimm Fairy Tales up through Hard Choices. But with or without Future Knowledge, it's still great to see Belinda develop as a character.
Our "heroes" make their way to Caracas and pair off against the villains, with Sinbad engaging in a...heated battle with Doc Carou, Belinda defeating Acacia way too easily (after some...struggling...with a fetish you don't want on your search history),

and Baba Yaga and the roc anticlimactically losing an otherwise impressive kaiju fight with The Shadow Of Death.

But then Sinbad forces Acacia to let Dratini out of the Pokeball, parent and child swim away with no thoughts of vengeance (thematically strong juxtaposition to Acacia herself, but anticlimactic from a third act battle standpoint), and Baba Yaga and Belinda swipe the Cyclops Eye from Sinbad before wiping his memory and returning to the present in a disappointing but understandable status quo reset. Kind of. Because Salome remembers Belinda and Baba Yaga, as does Acacia (though not by name), and Acacia now actually wants revenge on Sinbad for killing Carou...for real this time. And we don't know when this is set in relation to the Sinbad maxi-series, or how time travel in the Grimm Universe really works (though it's probably of the "meant to happen" variety, based on what Belinda says about his future), or the mechanics and scope of his memory erasure, so there's a very real possibility that he will move on, oblivious of Acacia's activities, until the day she catches him offguard and kills him. But then again, whether in print or not, Sinbad is still Sinbad, so plot armor and offscreen shenanigans still apply. Plus there's that whole, "event series where all the cancelled characters get brutally and existentially murdered" thing to consider, so I don't think Acacia will be the one to end him.

Wow. I didn't think I would be able to turn "fights, anticlimax, status quo ending" into so many words, but I did it! I also wrote some lyrics for that Piratecore "Gangsta's Paradise" cover, and here they are again, complete with a weird-ass, "Island Paradise" album cover:

As I sail to the lagoon of the Shadow Of Death,

I take a look at my crew and realize there's no one left

Cuz I've been mappin' and blastin' so long that

Even my daddy's dead and his fortune's gone.

But I ain't never punched a seadog

That didn't deserve it

Me, be cheated, shot, and sunk?

You know that's unheard of.

Better watch how ye're talkin'

The plank ye're walkin'

Or you and yer crewmen might be keeled and hauled.

I really need to slip, so I shoot a boat

As they sink, I watch 'em choke on the cannon smoke. (Yar!)

I'm the type of sailor little homies wanna be like

Sailing seas day and night, give my soul for that sea life.

Been sailing most our lives,

Now we're on an island paradise.

Ate and drank there, then we died,

Poisoned on an island paradise.

Foaming from our mouths and eyes,

Rotting on an island paradise.

If you've read this far, prepare to read farther next week, as I will be editing this to fit into the super-sized Zenescope - Omnibusted post for Grimm Fairy Tales Volume Eight. And please remember to comment at the bottom of this post, Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook to like and get the latest news on my content.

Omnibuster,

Out.