GFT Retrospective #73: Tales From Neverland - Croc
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
Those of us who grew up with the VHS re-release of Peter Pan (which is where I swear I saw the Mandela Effect of Tinker Bell spelling out the Walt Disney logo as a kid) remember not only the giant, plastic clamshells they came in, but the literally offhand story Peter tells of how his rivalry with Hook started: cutting off the Captain's hand in a swordfight and feeding it - and a clock - to the crocodile.
By the way, how unlucky do you have to be that your name is James Hook and you get your hand chopped off by an immortal, flying child, forcing you to wear a hook prosthesis? That's like if your name is Otto Octavius and you wind up with eight limbs, or if your name is Skywalker and you wind up in space, or if your name is Ripley and you die from an alien tearing its way out of your chest, or if your name is Jack Cole and you're a terrible human being. Nominal destiny sucks, doesn't it, folks?
are too scared and disloyal to risk joining Gregor as crocodile food, so Arcos and Pan team up to battle the kaiju momma (just like '98 'Zilla, Croc has eggs! Damn you, Roland Emmerich!), interspersed with panels of sinister mugging and vague threats from Pan because the first Deadpool movie hadn't come out yet to let us know what the red suit is for and we're not supposed to have read the nine-plus other comic books where Pan is one-dimensionally evil. So surprise! After getting the location of the treasure from Arcos, Pan kills him and uses his corpse as bait to kill the Croc before recovering the treasure and taking over Arcos' crew. Nob's loyalty to Arcos here places the Tales in the following order: Croc, Tinkerbelle, Tiger Lily.
a.k.a. the Ticketmaster
What a croc, Ticketholders!
It's actually "what a crock," possibly referring to an old clay pot used for spitting, vomiting, or otherwise expelling bodily waste in the days before commercially available plumbing and the invention of the toilet, and used as an expression of disbelief in response to a given sales pitch or other outlandish statement.
Speaking of false sales pitches and crocs...the shoes suck! It's like wearing a whiffle ball bath mat on your foot, and having Mario Batali as the most famous person to wear them doesn't help the brand for reasons I won't get into here.
On the bright side, a Crock Pot is a great way to use your least favorite room in the house to cook days' worth of delicious food when the summer weather won't let you have nice things. Not sponsored; I just like slow-cooker meals.
If you'd like to keep this codfish cooking slow, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, tell me if I'm a crock or if I have you hooked down in the comments, give a hand to 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.
Tales From Neverland #3: Croc
The Disney telling is similar to what transpired in J.M. Barre's original novel and play, but some major liberties are taken in the Zenescope version (which has the best art of the three Tales, and makes one wonder why the female-focused issues looked so bad by comparison or if it was merely an issue-by-issue stylistic choice by the art team).
Things open with the pirate Captain Arcos in the midst of sending his crewmen (specifically one man named Gregor, who doesn't make it past the second page) to the island home of a Lake Placid/SyFy Channel-sized crocodile to retrieve a treasure he stashed there.
Arcos is dressed in a legally distinct red pirate ensemble and Pan and Nob are on his crew, so you know immediately that his chances of survival are on par with those of a horny asshole of color in a slasher movie, but a comic book has pages to fill, so plot must plot.
Pan claims to have a plan to get around the Croc, and Arcos' crew (including a background character who looks like Sagat with tribal tattoos)
And that's pretty much it. As a non-speaking character who dies by the end, the Croc is a tertiary presence in its own story, and the abrupt ending leaves little in terms of a satisfying arc or any hints at how this affects whatever Pan's frog-ass-flat villain scheme was prior to "kidnap and sexually assault my great-great-great-great..." in Neverland.
I guess we're supposed to speculate that Pan kept one of the crocodile eggs and raised it to be his guard dog (or maybe accelerated its growth with the stolen Sacred Child magic?), hinting at some character depth for him, turning him from "evil, abusive, incestuous asshole" into "evil, abusive, incestuous asshole...who likes animals" and adding to his "twisted shepherd of lost children" MO that we've seen with Belle and (in less obvious, literal ways) the Sacred Child's power, the zombified Lost Boys, and Arcos' crew. This should have been renamed to Pan, or even followed up with a Croc part 2, but sadly, this standard betrayal story is the last of the Tales From Neverland.
As is to be expected by now, each TFN issue ended with part of an extra story (like was done with the Tales From Wonderland comics), which I will cover next week.
In the weeks that follow, I will post an Omnibusted collection of the Tales trade with new commentary content, followed by an update of Neverland with events in chronological order and new speculative content. There is a sequel miniseries, and Neverland will be featured in a couple of event crossovers down the line, and new updates will release as I cover those.
Until then, hit the first star to the right, head straight on 'til morning, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, tell me if I'm a crock or if I have you hooked down in the comments, give a hand to 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,
Comments
Post a Comment