Zenescope - Omnibusted #15: Grimm Fairy Tales TPB Volume 8

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Omnibuster.

Long readings and New Comic Book Day greetings, Ticketholders!

Welcome to one of the longest and most unique editions of Zenescope - Omnibusted to date. It's unique for several reasons, including the fact that it is the first OG Volume collection to begin with an Annual review, as well as being the first Omnibusted to include another Omnibusted collection.

While Volume Eight may be among my least favorite group of early Grimm Fairy Tales issues for its focus on disposable, unlikable villains, we also get more insight into Sela's past, some character development for Belinda, and the return of a few fan-favorite characters. And most importantly for the story (at the time), we get to see the cogs turning as the series builds toward its next big, all-is-lost moment (no, I'm not going to insert appropriate Family Guy meme here, because I need to fit in the Vegas Annual cover and a Spaceballs meme without the post layout making my readers vomit).

So before we begin, 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.

When I was first reading through these comics at a marathon pace, while also trying to be a completionist, I got to issue #43 of Grimm Fairy Tales, and saw that it opened with some dialogue between Sela and Belinda where they are talking about how much "fun" Las Vegas was, with a little editor's note referencing the Grimm Fairy Tales 2009 Annual.

So in my completionist frenzy, I went down an internet rabbit hole (appropriate, as there was a Wonderland Annual that year) in search of the GFT 2009 Annual, only to come up with...nothing but frustration.

Not only was there not a 2009 Annual, there was no Annual between 2008 and 2011 with a numbered year designation. So what was supposed to be the 2009 Annual was actually the 2010 Annual (another early Zenescope typo?), and the 2010 Annual was instead listed as the Las Vegas Annual. So the true referenced issue from #43 was the Las Vegas Annual, which takes place before #16, and was compiled in GFT Different Seasons Volume One, before the 2007 and 2008 Annuals were compiled in Different Seasons Volume Two.

Good. You'll see this meme much later in the post, but for now, let's move on to the Grimm Fairy Tales Las Vegas Annual.

GFT Annual #3 (2010): Las Vegas

Like previous Annuals, this installment does a decent job of adapting nursery rhymes to fit the Grimm Fairy Tales formula, using different artists and art styles for each segment. Its events take place prior to the first Little Miss Muffet issue, which explains why Sela is once again partnered with her nemesis, Belinda. We learn that the Dark One’s assistant is named Fenton, and that he is as slimy and creepy as any driver you might meet while hitchhiking along a trucking road in the middle of the night. It makes me laugh and shake my head how menacing the artist makes the Dark One look here (not to mention how powerful, resourceful, and formidable a villain he has been built up to be in the series up to this point), considering what a joke he gets reduced to in the near and distant future. After sending a henchman to see someone named Steiner, Fenton--even his name is slimy--takes the girls to the Sapphire Garden, which could be the name of a senior living facility, but because it’s in Vegas, it’s a strip club, where the cartoonishly drawn "Little Bo Peep" takes place. The title character is a promising dancer named Heidi who gets sent to Hell as revenge for having her former boss (who is a demon) arrested on prostitution charges and taking her place as owner and manager of the Garden. Not much else to the story, if you could call it that.

"The Gingerbread Man" is heavily shaded and barely recognizable as anything, its art style only marginally better than that of a story from the 2011 Halloween Special (which I already reviewed, but I'm not going to link to that here because I'm trying to conform to the Omnibusted order, which is a mix of chronological, publication, and TPB order). After having sex with the wife of a bookmaker known as The Fat Man, football star Mercury Mason (who could have been the Grimm Universe’s take on the Flash, and who, like the Flash, does everything fast--wink, wink) is tasked with running, running, as fast as he can, through a desert--perhaps the same desert as in the aforementioned, unmentioned story--while being pursued by the Dark Shaman (a villain who won’t be positively identified until his own miniseries much later on) and his bloodthirsty pack of wild animals on his way back to The Fat Man’s house. Mercury survives his run back to the mobster’s house, only to nearly be killed by Belinda. But true to Belinda’s nature, she renegotiated their partnership on behalf of Sophie, the mobster’s wife, and uses Sela’s book to drop the Fat Man and his goons into the clutches of the Dark Shaman. But now, Sophie owes Belinda something. From the terrible art style to the similar setting, the spotlight on Belinda’s treacherous nature, badassery, and sympathy toward the focus couple, The Gingerbread Man is an obvious spiritual predecessor of the Halloween 2011 story. And where it counts, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I just wonder about this story in light of recent issues. If the Dark Horde are supposed to be struggling with Sela for possession of her book, what was this unidentified Steiner person doing with it? How was Fenton’s dreadlocked henchman able to take it from him? Why not just give the book right to the Dark One and have done with it? And how is it that Belinda can suddenly use it now? I mean, I know that the Reaper said in the 2008 Annual that he could have just taken Sela’s book from her and given it to Belinda, and that in Rapunzel, someone who could have been Belinda was using Sela’s book, but this was the first time we’d ever actually seen Belinda use Sela’s book and known it was her. Maybe the colorist just ran out of purple that day, but I’d rather be confused, intrigued, and speculative than disappointed. 

"Jack Be Nimble," true to the Las Vegas spirit of the issue in a way none of the previous stories had been, follows prominent stage magician Jack “The Freak” Angel (because it was still too early in Zenescope’s existence to pay for the name or likeness of the real Criss Angel, “Mindfreak”), who begins the story by trapping fellow magician Dane Copper in a burning car so Belinda can capture his soul and Jack can still have the power to do real magic (because symbolically murdering David Copperfield and marking his brand of magic as an artifact of a bygone era was a…good…idea??).

Two years later, Jack has discovered that he didn’t get his powers from his deal with Belinda, but was born with magic, and tries to back out of the Dark Horde, even challenging Belinda. Even though she literally has a book full of magical powers, creatures, and weapons, plus her own magic, beyond-human fighting abilities, and roughly seven hundred years of life experience to draw upon, Belinda ropes Sela into helping her negate his magic on the pretense that Jack is a super-powered serial murderer (which is technically true, since he’d been collecting souls for Belinda for at least six months). And so, during a levitation walk over “The Candlestick,” Jack’s magic fails him and he burns to death.

The next day, a child gives Sela an address and a dreamcatcher from Shang, and Sela tells Belinda that there’s somewhere else she needs to go before returning home. This ties into the next issue up for review, and has some bearing on the Little Miss Muffet and Rip Van Winkle issues because dreams (though the logistics of the dreamcatcher not being noticed by Belinda or Morrigan, Sela carrying it on her, and other "we didn't think of that McGuffin until later" retconsistencies raise more questions than they answer because those questions didn't really need to be asked or answered to begin with).

The Annual as a whole feels like a derivative slog to get through. Sure, it is the first mention--in chronological publication order--of a character other than the series main cast being born with abilities, and there is that spiritual connection to the story from the 2011 Halloween Edition, but the rest of the Las Vegas Annual is just kind of there, not doing much of anything.

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.

This mismatch of juvenile morals and teen-to-YA demographic can probably be attributed to the source material that this issue was adapted from, that being The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, which was adapted into a 1982 animated musical film featuring the voices of the late Christopher Lee (a legendary villain actor, including Hammer-era Dracula, Saruman, and Count Dooku among his roles), Jeff Bridges, and Mia Farrow as the titular unicorn. The comic is obviously more condensed and action-focused than either the novel or its feature-length film adaptation, stripping away the personality of the unicorn (or perhaps putting a bit of it into Sela's character?) and reducing it to a mere MacGuffin animal. Fenton and the Dark One fill the King Haggard role (voiced by Lee in the film), and Shang is appropriately assigned the "bumbling wizard" role held by Schmendrick (Bridges) in the source material. I don't know if it was intentional, but I love the dig at Shang either way. Zenescope will try to make him cool again further down the line, but in general, he sucks as a "mentor" and a "guardian."

Next, Fenton gets a backstory. Yay.

GFT #44: The Devil’s Brother

Fenton sucks. He’s the least likeable secondary villain character since Charles Dodgson. He exists in the Grimm Universe for the sole purpose of looking, sounding, feeling, acting, and generally being the embodiment of every gerunded verb that could possibly have the word “disgusting” after it. That said, it’s only “fair” that in a series--and a medium at large--that is known for objectifying the freezer-bait population of its character base, the fat, cowardly pervert gets his own origin story?

So, it turns out that Fenton was a soldier in the American Civil War prior to taking Sela and Belinda to a strip club, playing Stratego with Satan, and ordering goblins to murder an endangered, magical horse on its birthday. Wow. He really…moved up?…in the world. While delivering “the sword”--presumably the sword forged from the dead unicorn that Orcus mentioned in The Gift short story--to “someone we have watched for a long time,” Fenton has flashbacks to the day he first met Death and the Dark One. After his childhood friend brow-beats a half-hearted confession of loyalty out of him and then abandons him to be murdered by Confederate soldiers (because apparently not even long-standing friendship and the spirit of Army brotherhood are strong enough to make Fenton likeable), he makes the old “I’ll do anything!” mistake and ends up at the beck and call of the Dark One. But because this is Grimm Fairy Tales, there has to be a fairy tale attached.

The fairy tale, told in an abridged format here by the series Devil himself, is a Brothers’ Grimm selection titled “The Devil’s Sooty Brother.” The original is one of several versions included in the brothers’ Kinder Und Hausmarchen publications, each of which has some variation on the following plot: A poor or abandoned soldier (sometimes a trio of soldiers) encounter a Rumpelstiltskin-ish man who identifies himself as the Devil and promises the unfortunate protagonist(s) that they will have all that they require to live, so long as they serve him in Hell for seven years. There is usually a temptation or limitation presented to them by the Devil, such as not interacting with the damned souls that they are tasked with watching over in the Devil’s absence, not grooming themselves for the duration of their servitude, or only agreeing to speak certain words in a certain order regardless of the consequences. In nearly all of the stories, the main character(s) are true to the agreement and end up with great wealth, power, and/or love. On the surface, these might seem like unsavory, pro-Satanic parables to the effect of “serve the Devil, get rich,” but I think the purpose behind them is much more profound and beneficial; that these stories are not about serving the Devil, but about being true to your word and resisting temptation and sin. For example, in agreeing not to bathe or shave themselves, the protagonists are resisting their impulses toward vanity and pride. In the case of the three soldiers who must only speak certain words, in following the Devil’s instructions, they are almost hung for thievery and murder before aiding in the capture of the real culprit, which serves as sort of a test of faith for the trio. Even in the case of the original “The Devil’s Sooty Brother,” wherein the soldier gives in to curiosity, as well as thoughts of vengeance and mercy towards the souls he finds in the Devil’s furnace, serves to show its audience the consequences of un-Christian living. The soldier is still rewarded in the end, but to have the wealth and power he needs, he must sacrifice his identity and is cursed with a life of loneliness, devoid of the truly full experience of living.

In service of the Grimm Fairy Tales plot, however, the Dark One’s abridged version takes the shallower, more literal approach to interpretation, and involves Fenton orchestrating a mass killing of Cheyenne natives (perhaps ancestors of the child with the dreamcatcher?) and burning his childhood friend to death in exchange for wealth and immortality--more “souls for awesomeness” nonsense. We find out that the Dark One’s other henchman--the huge, dreadlocked man from the Vegas Annual--is Volac, a legionnaire the Dark One recruited through the course of his telling of the fairy tale.

A nice bit of depth to an otherwise depthless presentation of an unlikable goon’s rise to fleeting power. 

Next, we finally get to see why the Monroe name has been getting so much hype lately.

Another sarcastic yay.

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 in a bit, 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.

But first, 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:

GFT Short Story #7: The Collection

The Dark One is giving one of his minions (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.

I've got no turntables, a microphone that sucks, and a Sinbad Crossover Omnibusted to Inception in here, so let's use time travel magic to turn this Beck reference into a Coolio reference!

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 2011 Giant-Size).

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 Crossover trilogy 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.

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 Realms, 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 because the Omnibusted suckage resumes with more focus on Fenton...but, it's also kind of good?

GFT #46: Godfather Death

Like The Devil’s Brother before it, Godfather Death has its origins in several tales from the Kinder Und Hausmarchen collection by the Brothers’ Grimm, among them The Godfather, The Strange Feast, and (the closest to Zenescope’s version) Godfather Death.

Each of the original stories involves a farmer or some other destitute character with a ridiculous number of children (the Brothers’ Grimm were fond of using the number twelve in such stories) who searches for a rich godparent to care for his thirteenth child. In some versions, importance is placed on the reader learning the piety of God, the treacherous nature of the Devil, and the impartial certainty of Death. In others, the man simply decides to ask the first person he meets, who happens to be Death.

Death gives the thirteenth child a vial of herbs or a potion that he claims will cure any illness, instructing that the boy become a doctor, and that if Death appears at his patient’s feet that the child should not use his medicine and thus let Death claim them. This magical quick-fix cure draws the attention of a local ailing king (because in fairy tales, kings always get greedy and concerned about their own mortality when they hear about impossible, magical things happening).

Feeling sympathy for the king and his daughter, Death’s godson uses logic from old Bugs & Daffy cartoons to make Death stand at the king’s head--and later, at the princess’s head--infuriating Death so much with his disloyalty that Death snuffs out his life-candle. And I thought tribal council on Survivor was intense….

Other versions have the godson visiting Death’s house and discovering that it is haunted and that Death is the Devil in disguise.

The Grimm Fairy Tales version has Fenton visiting a young boy at his parents’ funeral and relating a tale very similar to the original Godfather Death, with the godson, Christian, rendered an only child who is believed by his family and some locals to be cursed (a clever adaptation of his original status as the farmer’s thirteenth son), as people seem to die suspicious deaths around him. Death’s potion and the “heads, you live, feet, you die” mechanic are reimagined here as a “magic” ring that shows a black skull in its gemstone when someone is meant to die. Christian uses Death’s ring to revive his brother, Brand, and the story progresses pretty much the same as originally told. Christian betrays Death, saves the king’s life, and falls in love with the princess. When Death (presumably the Reaper figure from the Titanic Annual and minor appearances in the Wonderland trilogy and several other GFT titles) hires his future shipmate Belinda to poison the princess, Christian again defies his godfather, saving his love at the cost of his own life. The twist to the tale is one we’ve seen before in the Vegas Annual’s "Jack Be Nimble" story, and leads into the “this puppet is dead, let’s find another” plot device used at the end of many villain-focused GFT issues up to this point, with Fenton passing on the ring to the boy who had been listening to the Godfather Death story.

While formulaic in its structure, Joe Brusha’s writing successfully eliminates much of the chance and campy idiocy that were present in its source material, providing an engaging story accompanied by the rough, but dramatic and intense art style of John Toledo and Jason Embury. I don’t recall anything important coming out of this issue, other than establishing a connection between Fenton and Death, but it was still a good read.

And now, Pinocchio hype!

And more sarcasm!

GFT #47: The Devil’s Gambit

Breaking tradition, this issue doesn’t focus on only one fairy tale. In keeping with Grimm Fairy Tales tradition, however, Cindy now wears a slutty, blue, French maid costume. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view of slutty supervillain costumes, or your view on the use of the word, "slutty" to describe female clothing in this "modern," "woke" era), she’ll still be wearing it for at least another eight years of publication time. And even though its power and importance have been downplayed significantly in the years since The Devil’s Gambit, her magical, dead unicorn-powered samurai sword (named Carnage, apparently) makes her a badass fighter. Since her Revisited issue, Cindy has been trained to a level that lets her kill a dozen skilled goblin ninjas in a matter of seconds (and makes me have to type ridiculous bullshit like “unicorn-powered samurai sword” and “skilled goblin ninjas”), but I’ve always thought that Cindy would be a significantly less badass fighter without Carnage in her hands. After Cindy kills the Dark One’s personal guard (the aforementioned goblin ninjas) in what was supposed to be a sparring match, he seems more turned on than pissed off, and Zenescope’s most dysfunctional couple is born.

The Dark One invites Cindy into his Vegas home--yes, the Devil of the Grimm Universe lives in Sin City, imagine that--for a tour, providing context for The Collection short story and a lead-in to the first of the issue’s two fairy tale adaptations, "The Lord’s Animals and the Devil’s Animals." Included among their fairy tales, animal tales, and fables--as well as a couple of anti-Semitic tales that are just uncomfortable to read--are a few regional creation myths explaining why certain plants or animals look as they do. Apparently, beans have seams because the first bean laughed too hard when his friends almost drowned in a river. I guess that’s 19th century Germany for you: teach children how to behave by telling them stories of murder, dismemberment, bludgeoning, drowning, strangulation, cannibalism, and evil Jews getting torn apart by thorn bushes. Perhaps some of this schooling bled over into certain events of the 20th century??? But it’s okay, kids! Everything is God and magic! I’m being cynical and generalizing to make the point that not all of the Brothers Grimm’s collected tales are the Disneyfied happy ending vehicles that the last forty-plus years of animated cinema have colored them to be. There are some (like the Devil stories mentioned a few posts back) that have profound messages buried deep inside them, and others that are just plain entertaining to read. And then there are stories like “Good Bowling and Card Playing,” the “Simple Hans” variants, and “The Jew in the Thornbush” that exist solely to provide social and historical context from an academic perspective because they are otherwise morally reprehensible and mentally and emotionally damaging to get through in spite of their brevity. Getting back to "The Lord’s Animals and the Devil’s Animals," the original is an explanation myth like “The Straw, the Coal and the Bean” (briefly summarized above) that sees God creating every animal but goats, and choosing wolves to be his “dogs.” So the Devil creates the goats himself, but they keep getting their long tails caught in thorn bushes (yes, those again), so the Devil goes around and bites off all of their tails (which is why goats have stubby tails). Free to roam, they chew on everything, pissing off God, who has his wolves slaughter the goats. A conversation ensues between the Lord and the Devil about how even when the Devil creates, his destructive nature is so prevalent that his creations have the capacity to destroy. I liked this aspect of the tale because it came across as sort of a cosmic interpretation of old human nature fables like Aesop’s “The Scorpion and the Frog.” Perhaps there were some Greek and Roman influences that affected German culture throughout the years?

After this, the Devil asks the Lord for compensation for killing his goats, and the Lord tricks the Devil out of said compensation using cartoon logic (because fairy tales), enraging the Devil so much that he gouges out the eyes of the surviving goats and replaces them with his own. This is supposed to explain why goats are widely associated with the Devil in likeness and nature, but on its own makes no sense. It’s just one of those simple “x happened because why? Because I said so” explanations that these kinds of myths end up having. In the Grimm Fairy Tales version, as told by the Dark One, the animals are switched--God created goats and the Devil created wolves--with the Devil painted as a gracious but vindictive trickster figure. Otherwise, the story progresses much the same while serving as voice-over to Belinda (in her purple cloak from The Gift short story) turning Jacob into Pinocchio (which he had already been doing at the end of the Pinocchio two-parter, but Early Zenescope will be Early Zenescope...), who looks like a nightmarish version of Groot.

From the shadows, Orcus has been watching Pinocchio transform and listening to the Dark One’s tale, and is reminded of this issue’s second Kinder Und Hausmarchen selection, “The Seven Ravens” (three ravens in most versions). The original has many similarities with other tales in the collection, such as “The Twelve Brothers,” “The Six Swans,” “Brother and Sister” (which in turn has some similarities to “Hansel and Gretel”), and “Little Snow White.” Like the “Godfather Death” variants, it involves a poor man with too many children. For some act of ungodliness or another, the male children are cursed by their parents to turn into ravens and fly away, driving their sister to go out into the world to search for them. Her epic journey takes her past the cannibalistic sun and moon to the stars, who give her a chicken bone to unlock the gates of the ravens’ palace atop a glass mountain. She loses the bone on her way to the glass mountain and has to use her dismembered pinky finger to open the lock (all of this ludicrous, bloody nonsense because German fairy tales), after which she goes through a “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” sequence before meeting her brothers and returning home with them for a happy ending. The GFT adaptation begins with a poor farmer who makes a deal with Orcus’ bride to save his crops in exchange for seven flowers that will grow among his crops and be the most precious and beautiful he has ever seen. Of course, the “flowers” turn out to be his children--all daughters in this version--and the evil goddess returns every year for the next seven years to claim and sacrifice one of the farmer’s daughters and trap her soul in the body of a raven for some reason. What follows the seventh year is an epic fight between Shang and Orcus and his bride, an origin story for Allexa (see the Legacy short story and Baba Yaga for details), clues that she and Shang were more than student and mentor, and actual motivation and direction for Orcus’ revenge (see The Gift short story for the first reference to this). This turned out to be my favorite part of the issue, thanks to its original interpretation of the “Seven Ravens” tale and the numerous tied up loose ends from previously inconsequential story threads. The art style in this section of the issue was decent and as close to standard for the series as it could get, delivering a good design for the goddess character into the mix. Overall, the issue fast-tracked a bit too much in an effort to close in on the series’ first big to-do since Sela’s death, and the art was literally sketchy until the "Seven Ravens" segment brought a measure of human interest--and interest, in general--to what otherwise felt rushed and forced as both a narrative and a production. Way to bat cleanup….

Speaking of batting cleanup, before I get to the next review, I'd like to talk about something that I didn't address in The Devil's Gambit above: 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.

The next reviewed issue focuses on the return of Samantha Darren, who was first introduced in Grinn Fairy Tales #21: The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and has some notable comparisons to her fellow neglected blonde, Cindy Monroe.

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.

Following Sela's death, Zenescope continued their usual 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.

GFT #48: The Good Witch

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.

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.

GFT #49 (The Untitled One)

This is Grimm Fairy Tales’ first untitled issue, partly because there is no accompanying fairy tale for it. It does begin with “Once upon a time,” as we have come to believe all fairy tales start, though in most cases, a simple “Once” is commencement enough.

This particular “Once upon a time” leads in to some exposition, most of which is slight elaboration on information given to us in Sela’s dream sequence issues. The most interesting bit of this world-building regards world-building in a literal sense: how fairies (like council member Nissa--the current Tinkerbell of the Grimm Universe), inter-realm portals (like the energy vortex behind Henry Allen’s basement wall, perhaps), and the five realms themselves were all formed from the same energy. It’s a nice, unifying principle that subtly sets up future events (chiefly the Unleashed crossover, which is several Volumes coming in the Retrospective). But it also falls into the same pattern of flawed logic as Wonderland getting stronger by assimilating and/or murdering people whose dream energy makes the realm exist to begin with. Apparently, fairies are the only Mystical creatures--the only creatures in any of the realms--who can open the portals between the four realms and the Nexus, and the Dark One (who wants more than anything to open the floodgates and invade the Nexus from all sides) is making it his personal mission to cause fairy genocide. See what I mean about these villainous plans not making any sense?

Well, just before we can start complaining about how the exposition is nonsense, Prince Erik shows up (you know, the puppetmaster nutcracker prince from that WTF Christmas special, whom Sela decided she wanted to make babies with after five seconds of uncharacteristic, swooning damseltry?) to come to the rescue by retconning the previous six pages of exposition with…more exposition, including a splash page of Bebop and Rocksteady guarding the One Basket of All Eggs. I joke, but seriously, there is a MacGuffin called the Casket of Provenance, comprised of plot convenience and every remaining ounce of portal energy left in the four realms, and it is being guarded by two people, one of whom is an anthropomorphic rhinoceros, so that’s how I came up with--and promptly ruined--that particular piece of low-hanging wit.

We also finally get an explanation for why Sela can so freely lend out her book--even to her enemies--or toss it aside in the midst of battle. It’s bound (book puns!) to her SOOULLLL! Also, her book has Provenance energy in it, which explains why she can send people into fairy tales and summon creatures and weapons from it, but not why the Dark One couldn’t just use Belinda for his invasion. For that, see my above speculation in the Sinbad Crossover trilogy.

We learn that after inheriting the book from Allexa, Sela was put in stasis in a world between realms--perhaps the same world Samantha journeyed through in the last issue?--while it bonded with her. At one time, there were other Provenance relics, including a ring, a staff, and what might be Samantha’s wand--although only the handle is visible. Good, subtle knot-tying and cause for speculation, but also information that could be retconned or forgotten by anyone at any time as the story requires or the writing staff changes, so hold it in awe, but not for very long.

Next, we get introduced to the rest of the Council Of the Realms: Thane (the Cowardly Lion’s badass older brother), Blake the knight (one of the only sane Wonderland characters, who will feature prominently in a couple of cool miniseries and standalone issues in the distant future), and Hakan (a tribal native from Neverland).

Again overwhelmed by information, responsibility (as the deciding vote on whether or not to destroy the Casket like Blake suggested--by the way, I like that the guy from Wonderland is the only one talking sense in this issue), and being a female comic book character, Sela decides to engage in some plot-convenient procrastination that leads to more cheesy swooning and romantic time with Erik, more time-inconsistent detail-cramming and memory wipe nonsense, and Sela waking up with the sudden returned memory that she and Erik had a child (see Rumpelstiltskin for early hints at this), just in time to find that an unexpected enemy has emerged from the Council’s ranks to murder Bebop and Rocksteady and claim the Casket for the Dark Horde.

Awesome twist ending leading into the big milestone issue, but otherwise it’s another exposition dump, with emphasis on the dump.

To be continued next, with a title!

GFT #50: Hard Choices

So it’s finally here.

After something like a hundred issues of Grimm Universe awesomeness and nonsense, the main series hit fifty issues, and it is huge in both page count and implication.

It starts with a flashback to Germany in the year 1806, with two children who are clearly Sela and Thomas. Sela is a little girl again, now wearing glasses because continuity is not Zenescope’s strong suit yet. This puts Sela’s age in the present at roughly 205 years (assuming in-Universe present is the same as year of release), but again, details don’t matter because Zenescope. Speaking of continuity problems, Sela addresses the man with them as “father” before he leaves them alone in a cart in the middle of the woods to meet with some business associates who turn out to be the Dark One and Baba Yaga. We learn that his name is Drago, a.k.a. Freidrich (Mathers?), and that he is a Mystic and former member of the Dark Horde. There are any number of ways to explain this away, since Shang clearly told Sela that she was the only pure Lowborn Guardian in the history of the realms. Maybe that’s what Sela believed was true. Maybe she and Thomas were adopted. Maybe Shang knew about Drago and lied to spare her feelings and/or make her feel more special. Or maybe everything is true and Zenescope really, really sucks at remembering their own lore and continuity. Whatever the case, it’s a decent setup for the title and theme of the issue. Baba Yaga sends one of her knight avatars to head them off and drive Drago’s cart over a cliff, putting Sela in the middle of a dilemma: save herself and let her (foster?) father(?) fall to his death, or try to save him at the expense of both their lives. We won’t get to see the outcome until the end of the issue, but you can probably guess what happened from Sela being alive for the next two centuries (give or take a death).

Picking up where the exposition last dumped us, Sela watches as the recently discovered love of her life handily kicks Shang’s ass and murders a bunch of good knights (termed "Realm Knights" as both a group and an offshoot Zenescope brand) in front of her and magicks her into her Snow White costume so he can kill her in it for some kinky reason. But a few panels and Sailor Moon tropes later, it’s revealed that the Piper had been controlling him all along. So, after being a manipulative hero figure in the Christmas special, Prince Erik makes a sudden, ironic transition to puppet before the Piper magically renders him unconscious, reducing him to a plot device for the next twenty-five issues, and disappears through a portal he makes with stolen Casket energy.

In Los Angeles, we breifly catch up with Belinda and Baba Yaga, following the events of the Sinbad Crossover, vowing revenge against an ominously unnamed “Him” (probably the Dark One because that's what the Crossover's back cover told us) with the Cyclops Eye they recovered.

Then focus shifts again, this time to my least favorite characters--Cindy, the Dark One, Fenton, Pinocchio--and their slightly more interesting associates--Orcus and Death--who are still in Las Vegas because getting actively involved in your own world-domination scheme is no way to succeed.

Sarcasm….

While the Dark One stands back and does nothing, Fenton observes everyone with a slimy, suspicious look in his eyes, Death (introduced here as Morrigan for the first time) exposits to Cindy about the Dark One’s generic villain plan to invade and enslave the Earth, and Cindy predictably expresses childish boredom until there’s a chance she might get to kill people. So, basic one-dimensional villain writing.

Back in Myst, the heroes are finally taking steps to destroy the Casket of Provenance--which takes some plot-convenient magical weapon, which takes some plot-convenient time-wasting fairy magic to build--while Sela distracts everyone unnecessarily by brooding over Erik’s unconscious body like a first generation Disney princess, just in time for the Dark One to have used the rest of the Piper’s stolen Casket energy to transport himself and his Vegas crew to Myst, round up his army, and storm the Realm Council’s stronghold. With Sela still acting hopeless and helpless (even though she’s saved a bunch of lives, beaten Belinda in a Pokemon battle, almost beaten Belinda in two sword fights, helped defeat an army of giant rat demons on Christmas, and survived human stupidity for two hundred-plus years), it’s time for the person who’s supposed to be ritualizing a Casket-destroying magic sword into existence to engage Sela in a lengthy dialogue about…you guessed it…Hard Choices. Except that when the choice is between crying over an unconscious man you’ve only known for ten minutes and taking up arms against the Devil’s army to prevent your entire race from being enslaved and murdered, the only thing hard about the choice is the skull of the person who thinks they have a choice to make at all.

The other heroes (Thane, Blake, Hakan, and Shang) manage to hold their own against Morrigan, Orcus, Cindy, and Pinocchio…until the Dark One summons bugs. 

Really?

You’ve got Death, a demon king, a bloodthirsty tits-and-assassin with a magic katana, and a shapeshifting tree monster working for you, and the tide doesn’t turn in your favor until you summon bugs?! That’s just stupid.

On the other hand, Pinocchio murdering Hakan gives Nissa the time she needs to finish magicking up a Casket-smashing sword for Sela to, well, smash the Casket of Provenance with. Which she does. And nothing happens.

But remember: there are two other ways to make a portal to Earth. One is Sela’s book, which is supposedly bound to her soul, so if anyone destroys it, she could die even though she’s the heroine of the series, but hey, Sela? Umm. We’re stupid because writing and things are getting desperate, so if you could possibly risk killing yourself--again--and save the world for us, that would be super-great, ‘kay? Thanks!

Omnibuster's Note: This review was written in the late 2010s, at the peak of Presidential idiocy, but not yet in the depths of global viral tragedy, so the following analogy is a bit of-its-time. It is fitting, and I couldn't come up with anything contemporary that is as good, so I'm leaving it in. Enjoy, or otherwise express your feelings on the subject in the comments down below.

Here’s an idea: how about just killing off Shang instead because--again--calling him a mentor is like calling…Donald Trump the President of the United States. It might be true, in that these are titles bestowed upon them by other people, but they’re both inherently terrible at exemplifying what their respective titles actually mean, everything they say or do has the potential to--whether inadvertently or on purpose--cause the destruction of the human race, and the main thing they are good at is allowing massive collections of words to come out of their mouths, many of which don’t make sense or aren’t realistic until someone else either retcons or analyzes their meaning in a cynical, sarcastic way. Huh. I guess that makes me the late night talk show host of the Grimm Universe. Cool.

Getting back to the ways Grimm Fairy Tales supervillains can invade the Earth, there’s the Casket of Provenance, which Sela unceremoniously smashed, there’s Sela and her book, and there’s Nissa and that whole “fairies are one with the fabric of the Universe” business. So Sela, being the hero while also being maybe a bit suicidal, stabs her book with the Casket-killing sword, which unleashes a splash page of blinding yellow light that…does nothing.

Except give Cindy a chance to be useful for the first time in forty-eight issues. Not only does she stab Shang in the back so Orcus can cut off his head (alright! Shang’s dead! Time to sing and dance with the Lion, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lollipop Guild! Ding, dong, everyone!), but it conveniently turns out that her sword (which was supposed to be super-powerful and instrumental in the end of the world, but really just made Cindy into “white-washed martial arts bimbo with sword” up to this point) actually was instrumental in this one, highly specific instance of the bad guys trying to end the world. When she touches Nissa with her sword made from one half of the horn of the last surviving unicorn who was murdered on its one hundredth birthday, it turns Nissa into Smoke or Noob Saibot or something--again, I joke--because she gets infected with dark energy and the Dark One uses that influence to make her open a portal to the Nexus, promising Cindy--in that half-manipulative, half-serious, half-infatuated way that pretty much covers all Satanic aspects of his character--that she will be the "Queen of Earth."

Just. No.

No, not just no.

No and why?

But before we can fully witness the end of the world that is my brain, we cut back to Sela, who enters into yet another dialogue about Hard Choices with the now-tainted Nissa before running her through with the Provenance-breaker sword and shutting off the portal. Cindy and the Dark One make it through with a few monsters and nondescript lackeys, leaving Morrigan/Death, Orcus, Pinocchio, and presumably Fenton (though I don’t immediately recall him showing up again in the series’ future publications beyond what I will review for the next Omnibusted), stuck in Myst. With his forces severely depleted, the Dark One lashes out at the city around him, only to be interrupted by Belinda and Baba Yaga, who use the Cyclops Eye to suck up the Dark One’s army like a Master Ball in Pokemon. What is it with this series and Pokemon references? Following a predictable, defeated villain monologue by the Dark One, we return to Sela, whose new default pose seems to be kneeling with a dead, dying, or unconscious person in her lap, as she ponders the latest of her Hard Choices this issue and flashes back to that moment on the cliff with her father(?). It, and the issue as a whole, end as expected, while tagging on the series’ recurring message about one person’s ability to make a difference in the world by sharing their goodness (in this case, by making the right choices--or at least, the best choice possible when said Choice proves to be Hard) with others. An impactful issue on first read, with plenty of action to hold interest--and plenty of content to switch between when interest wanes or a tonal shift is required. But from an analytical standpoint, its plot relies too heavily on convenience, stall tactics, one-dimensional characterizations, and highly specific situational action of the kind you might have to slog through when completing an escort mission or uncovering a secret boss in a video game. And that made the issue feel like a slog upon this second reading.

Next week, Volume 8 wraps up with a Short Story, which was also the story from the 2010 Swimsuit Edition. Perfect for summer! Just not perfect. But what is perfect anymore?

GFT Swimsuit Edition #1 (2010): Pool Party At the Rock Hard Hotel

The Swimsuit issue is a double-edged sword (a weapon with which many characters in the Grimm Fairy Tales series are familiar as of late). It is widely considered the best Sports Illustrated entry of the year, while often being rated as the worst source of content in any comic book series ever printed. 

Criticized as shallow, unnecessary, and existing for the sole purpose of providing fan service and eye candy for the young, dumb, and full of *ahem* crowd, the comic book Swimsuit issue is typically a feast for the eyes, but a low-calorie snack for the brain. That is also true in the case of the Grimm Fairy Tales 2010 Swimsuit Edition, appropriated into the Grimm Fairy Tales Volume 8 Trade Paperback as its short story.

But because this is to be expected from Zenescope, I’ll not be as harsh a critic from here on. The swimsuit art (cut from the paperback version to avoid redundancy and confusion with the trade’s cover gallery, and to make people spend more money on redundant story content by purchasing the Swimsuit Edition separately because avoiding redundancy while being redundant makes so much sense) is as tasteful as fairy tale comic book masturbation material can get, and in many cases can rightly be called art for its lighting, mood, and atmosphere. Some are just re-captioned art prints of previous Zenescope covers, chosen here because the characters in them are wearing swimsuits of various stages of completeness, but most are original pieces created especially for the Swimsuit Edition, and these latter are the best of the bunch.

The story itself, titled “Pool Party At the Rock Hard Hotel” because Zenescope’s fifth-year money still wasn’t good enough to afford licensing fees for the actual Hard Rock Hotel name (perhaps because they symbolically murdered Criss Angel and David Copperfield the last time they set a special issue in Las Vegas), is another Sela/Belinda outing, with Belinda yet again trying to convince Sela that humans are selfish and evil by nature, and so easily manipulated that they deserve everything that’s coming to them. That’s easy enough to prove in a city where porn, drugs, gambling, and getting married by a professional Donald Trump impersonator are the orders of the day. But look almost anywhere else in the country and you’ll find more than enough people willing to stand up for right (though since I originally wrote this review, "right" has become more of a fringe-subjective concept, and Belinda is looking more and more objectively right as the years go by, which is a sad, disturbing thought to have).

And just when Belinda is about to finish making her thin, obvious, Saturday morning cartoon villain argument, a crew of incompetent demolition workers (or were they only paid to look incompetent?) screw up an implosion, causing a building to topple over sideways, trapping many of the so-called selfish, self-destructive, future pawns of evil beneath the rubble. As in the aftermath of 9/11, survivors and distant observers come together to rescue the trapped and injured. One man lifts a sizable chunk of rubble by himself to free the woman beneath it, hinting that he might be a Falseblood--or simply an avid steroid user running on adrenaline. Whatever the case, Sela stays behind to help the relief effort, while Belinda claims to be bored of “the sheep” (a term now more commonly used by the aforementioned fringe right-fighter crowd) and walks off to whatever act of malice is next on her checklist.

This story builds upon the early Sela/Belinda dynamic, and shows off Zenescope’s inspirational side, but doesn’t really offer anything new or deep as far as lore goes.

For something that is rich in lore, Stay Tuned for next week's Zenescope - Omnibusted on a series that's been over a century in the making. Also, it's been awhile since you saw that call to action, so please remember to comment down below, Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, help out my ad revenue, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook to like and get the latest news on my content.

Omnibuster,

Out of Internet Space.