GFT Retrospective #71: Tales From Neverland: Tinkerbelle

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster.

Think happy thoughts, Ticketholders!

You're going to need them for the next several weeks. As you attempt to fly, 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 never-landing content.

Ticketmaster's Note: From here onward, story becomes much more important because we're closing in on a veritable cluster of crossovers and event maxi-series, so I'll be relying more on the Zenescope Entertainment Wiki Chronological Reading Order resource than the Grimm Fairy Tales (Comics) Wikipedia page I had been using, as it accounts more for publication order than continuity.

Tales From Neverland #1: Tinkerbelle

Remember when Belle was a one-dimensional, jealous, slutty villain of circumstance and necessity with a big redemption moment that ended up not mattering?

Well, it's time for Zenescope to try making her relatable...by revealing that she killed the fairy princess on accident because she wanted the popular girls to like her, and she feels bad about it now, but not bad enough to turn on her "friends" (who threatened to feed her kid sister to the mermaid pond, which would have proven an empty threat once their guilt had been revealed, but we need a reason for Belle to be exiled and ostracized by her people, and Zenescope thought their early, Belinda-era serialized moral of "villains are made when popular girls get away with being mean" was the best way to make that happen). And finally, there's the last page leading into Belle's first meeting of Pan, whom she follows without question for most of the Neverland series despite subconsciously knowing that he "made her special" by killing almost her entire race and donating their corpses to Malec's entomology collection, including Belle's sister. This character transition would have made more sense if Belle had a more simplified motive to actually hate her people (like, if she was a mutant fairy or had some abnormal kind of magic and her people were racist or treated her poorly because of a vague prophecy or something), and ironically dimensionalized her more as a tragic villain. But instead, Occam's Rusty Razor cuts away everything that makes sense, boiling Belle down to one trait: she will reliably and unfaithfully throw herself at whoever promises to make her feel included at any given moment, consequences be damned.

Did I mention the art style is trash? It's this rushed, disjointed, sketchy-looking style that takes what should be a bunch of recognizable, scantily clad fairy designs on par with Nyssa, Belle, and the Nutcracker fire-dancers, and turns them into the kind of deformed, blurry, androgynous blobs of color and chicken scratch you get from a sophisticated cave painting, or when you prompt a long shot from an AI image generator that can't do faces.

But that said, I like the variety of what costume designs were discernible, the fight paneling was decent, and I thought the decision to make the make the male fairies look like Pan was interesting.

Let's hope Tiger Lilly fares better next week.

To keep the bells tinkering, 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 never-landing content.

Ticketmaster,

I can fly!

I can fly!

I can fly!

Splat!