GFT Retrospective #62: The Glass Coffin

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

Good morning, Ticketholders!

Today, we begin Volume Nine of Grimm Fairy Tales for the GFT Retrospective, which is where I remember starting to hate Sela Mathers as a character (not counting the time the writers killed her off, or the many times they turned her into a non-committal ditz to introduce a new love interest when Robert was perfectly fine in that role already, or the times they turned her into a helpless damsel when we know she has an entire magic book full of monsters and weapons at her disposal and can shoot magic energy lasers from her hands, or the time they wasted a perfectly amazing new lead character with unexplored lore so they could bring her back to life, write her completely out of character, pressure her into failure, and reduce her to a female comic book character because the stakes got too high and all the men got killed).

If that rant didn't clue you in, the Retrospective got me to hate Sela's character much earlier than I did on first read. The Snow White & Rose Red two-parter, almost everything after Sela died, and everything that happened after her resurrection (but especially the material leading up to Hard Choices) all contributed to tarnishing Sela as a character (with the bright side being the new dimensions that Belinda got added to her character in the meantime, so, even trade, I guess?).

If you'd like to add some dimension to my analytics, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

GFT #51: The Glass Coffin

Returning to the Brothers Grimm for inspiration, this follow-up to Hard Choices is very loosely based on the Kinder Und Hausmarchen tale of the same name.

The original is classified as a Sleeping Beauty-type tale (though it has more in common with Snow White, considering the jealous mage, the titular sleeping vessel, and the animal and blue-collar humanoid helpers), and has an "even the poor can achieve greatness with luck, kindness, and hard work" moral that feels laughably idealistic in its contemporary and geographic context, as well as in the context of the modern world and workforce. The Glass Coffin has two focal characters. The first is a wandering apprentice tailor who gets lost in the woods (because every fairy tale character ends up in the woods at some point) and has to sleep in trees, gather his own food, beg for charity from the 1800s equivalent of a crazy old man survivalist, hears the voice of God reading Mad Libs prompts to him, and somehow lives through getting carried dozens of miles over rough terrain on the antlers of an oversized stag who killed a giant bull in a fight that contributed massively to German deforestation efforts of the time. The other is a nobleman's orphaned daughter who got magically roofied when she said "no" to a horny magician who broke into her house in the middle of the night and tried to have his way with her. In addition to the sleeping curse, the mage shrunk her kingdom, turned her subjects into bottled unicorn farts, turned her brother into the stag, and transformed himself into the bull because fairy tale villains are stupid. So with the help of her stag-bro and the divine voice in his head, the tailor discovers a secret passage to an underground cavern where standing in specific places and looking at things in a specific order frees the sleeping noblewoman and her people, turns her brother human again, and returns her castle to normal size with no regard for logistics because fairy tales. And because God chose the tailor to rescue her, the noblewoman marries him and they live happily ever after, ignoring the fact that if a woman in a box tells the first man she sees that a wizard tried to rape her and God told her to marry the man who rescued her, there's a chance she might be crazy.

I feel I must qualify this by saying that one should never ignore or sugar-coat rape allegations, and that neither religious devotion nor the female gender are bona fides for insanity.

But neither are they mutually exclusive....

I only mean to highlight how fairy tales (especially German fairy tales) have a way of being darkly bizarre in their logical flow and how they arrive at their "happily ever after" moments.

The Zenescope version picks up where Hard Choices left off, with the Dark One's forces scattered across the Realms, specifically focusing on Myst, where Orcus is having a homecoming to the castle he lost (along with his evil goddess bride) in a battle with Shang and Allexa back in The Devil's Gambit. Which is funny because that makes Orcus either the orphaned noblewoman or the tailor, which is also not funny because one of his subordinates is a mage, and you know what the mage tried to do to the noblewoman in the original story....

While the magician and his ogre assistant, Gruel, debate whether to betray the Dark One and Orcus or take revenge against the "Falseblood rat" (referring to Sela and contradicting Shang's previous statement of her specialness, that she was the first pure human Guardian in history, which we also saw get contradicted back in issue #49 and Hard Choices), we are caught up with Sela, who, with Nissa dead and the Casket of Provenance and her book destroyed, is also trapped in Myst and continues to be written as a boy-crazy Disney princess with survivor's guilt and imposter syndrome. We are also reminded that Shang is dead (which I forgot even though it was one of my favorite things about Hard Choices), that Blake (the sane Realm Knight from Wonderland) is recovering from his wounds, that Thane (the Cowardly Lion's brother from Oz) went missing after the battle, and that Prince Erik (from the Nutcracker Christmas Special) is possibly dead, or at least, a body with no soul in it.

So, that actually makes Sela and Erik gender-flips of the tailor and the noblewoman (Rule 63 being a common fanservice tactic in Zenescope's world-building, and in racy, independent comics in general), with the unsavory aspects of the evil wizard's intentions in the original tale omitted for this adaptation or changed to something we may find out in a later issue.

As far as new characters and information go, we are introduced to Kozak, the Travelocity Healing Gnome, who places Erik's soulless body in stasis in The Glass Coffin, where he will remain to fuel the worst aspects of Sela’s character for many issues to come while she searches Myst for his soul. We also learn that Sela and Erik had a child during one of those Timepiece-induced bouts of amnesia Belinda hit her with back in the day.

Following an encounter with the vengeful wizard (whose name is Morgazera, and he can transform into animals like Jafar at the end of Aladdin, or like the pervy magician in the original fairy tale), which is interrupted by a group of rat-like beastmen on Morrigan's behalf (I think?) and features a sequence where Sela has once again forgotten how to do her magic pew-pews, the reaper himself appears, offering to help Sela for...reasons that I can't remember.

And that's where the issue ends.

There's some good fight paneling and decent but inconsistent artwork on display here, and from what I remember, the dialogue about Blake and Thane sets up one of my favorite early miniseries ever, and Sela’s child becomes a super-important character who was given tons of longevity in more recent Zenescope publications. But the stink of this part of Sela’s character development still lingers in my sense memory.

Stay Tuned to find out what Morrigan wants from Sela in next week's edition of the GFT Retrospective, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

Retrospective Ticketmaster,

Out of the Box.