GFT Retrospective #59: The Red Rose

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster,

Wishing you a Happy Valentine's Day (on the day)!

To be perfectly honest, for all my talk at the turn of the new year about planning and scheduling my content to the day and well in advance, I wasn't going to do this post until I realized that Valentine's Day fell on a New Comic Book Day (Wednesday) this year. But, as tends to happen with some of my impromptu content, things just lined up perfectly. And because roses are the flower of Valentine's Day (but also the flower we lay on caskets at funerals?), and today is Valentine's Day, and New Comic Book Day, and Zenescope did a Tales From Wonderland about The Red Rose that just happens to be the next issue up for review in the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective (after The White Knight review I did last month), that's what I'm doing today!

So please share The Love Below by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your true feelings in the Speakerboxx at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and choo-choo-choose me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest heart-shaped boxes of news on my content.

Now, let's lean a little closer to see if this rose really smells like...well, you know.

TFW #9: The Red Rose

I mentioned in my coverage of Neverland that we would see the names Elisabeth and Mary again in Tales From Wonderland, and that promise comes to pass now.

We’ve seen in some of Sela’s dream sequence issues, Return to Wonderland #6, and the Mad Hatter, part 2, that Wonderland villains are often based on infamous murderers in our world’s history: Lizzie Borden became the Lily, Jack the Ripper became the Mad Hatter, etc. That also holds true in this Tale, which focuses on Elisabeth Mary Bathory, also known as Countess Blood.

There is some dispute among historians as to her status as a serial killer and aspiring vampire, citing religious tensions with the new Hungarian ruling class of the time, and Protestant witch-hunt behavior on the part of the masses, but Elisabeth Bathory and her attendants were alleged to have tortured and killed hundreds of girls and young women, and folklore and pop culture have since adapted this to include virgin bloodletting so she could bathe in it to preserve her youth. Several video games and other modern media have even depicted her as a straight-up vampire.

Not so much with the vampire angle here, but she is shown bleeding a girl to death,, bathing in virgin (?) blood, and looking quite youthful.

Of course, this is a Zenescope publication, so the female form is proudly but suggestively shown in various states of fractional (or non-)dress, with lingerie being the garment of choice.

As for the twist to the Bathory legend, here, she has been collecting large amounts of blood so that her attendant (hooded at first, but shortly revealed to be Baba Yaga) can use it as a portal to send Elisabeth to Wonderland!

I like how this is a dark inversion of the reflecting pool from the original Wonderland Trilogy, being a blood pool to Wonderland instead of a waterway out of Wonderland.

I also like the series of twists the story takes once Elisabeth emerges on the other side (now wearing a green, plant-like dress instead of being...naked). She immediately comes face-to-face with the Jabberwocky, where she reveals that the six hundred women she sacrificed were "vapid scoundrels truly deserving of death in exchange for this one thing." That one thing actually being two things: immortality and revenge.

And the Jabberwocky is not pleased that Elisabeth came to him empty-handed and has been hiding her true motives from him, so he tears her skull open! and treats us to a flashback of her finding her parents murdered and later losing two children to what appears to be natural causes.

Following the flashback (and a sequence involving vines that you shouldn't Google at work even though it isn't that graphic or obscene), the Jabberwocky has done what Wonderland be doin', and turned Elisabeth into the Rose of the Flower Girls (we saw Lizzie Borden get turned into the Lily in a previous Tale). But then, the big reveal comes when Elizabeth's husband, Gerald, also arrives in Wonderland, and another perspective on the flashback shows that Gerald was the one who murdered her parents and poisoned her two children so he could have her to himself.

And guess what? He gets his wish now because Rose infects him with the same vines she was reborn with, and he becomes the giant swamp monster who almost ate Johnny Liddle in Beyond Wonderland.

Whether or not you account for the morally gray sex appeal of the focus character, The Red Rose is a decent revenge story with some cool twists and reveals. My only gripe is that, unlike the Tweedles, the Cheshire Queen, the Grey Knight, and the Ripper Mad Hatter, this didn't have the build-up of hope and inevitable despair for a sympathetic character to make their corruption have weight. That lack of sympathy and the heavy backloading thereof also keeps it from measuring up to The Red Queen as a satisfying revenge fantasy. Even the Monkey’s Paw of poetic justice that we see in most of the Tales From Wonderland feels kind of uninspired here because Elisabeth/Rose got the immortality and revenge she wanted, and Gerald got what he deserved, all with the bare minimum of irony or care for pacing.

Gotta love the Baba Yaga cameo, though.

I hope you are all having a great Valentine's Day, and that you please share the love by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your true feelings at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and choo-choo-choose me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest heart-shaped boxes of news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Smelling like a Rose

That somebody gave me

On my birthday deathbed.

I am Out!