GFT Retrospective #74: Tales From Neverland - Family History

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Vacation-master.

I'm still on vacation, Ticketholders! At home! The farthest I've gone is my local coffee stand, with my mailbox at a distant second, and my dumpster coming in third. These are truly exciting times....

So, I'm going to review a Neverland comic to make it feel like I've gone somewhere. To make me feel like Just the Ticket is going somewhere, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave some good writing down in the comments, 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.

Tales From Neverland Bonus Story: Family History

Flash back to London, England on April Fool's Day, 1912, when a woman named Penelope wakes from a nightmare (but in the Grimm Universe, maybe she has precognitive abilities?) and happens upon her husband, Phillip, engaged in a mass virgin sacrifice with a robed figure. Since the origins of April Fool's Day predate these events by at least half a millennium, he could have easily claimed a holiday prank, but this is a Grimm Fairy Tales spin-off, so he and the generic hood are content to keep slaughtering "Lowborn human scum" and plotting to enslave the Nexus (which is pretty hard to do if they're all dead from slit throats and punctured hearts, but if you want to be all Laszlo Gogelak about your racist world-domination scheme, you do you, guys!).

To be clear for The Algorithm, that was sarcasm. Racism, slavery, murder, and world domination are bad things, and I do not advocate bad things (even though I just spent Monday giving qualified praise to an anime about a thirty-something suicide who reincarnates as a child, masturbates to a girl's underwear, and tries multiple times to have sex with his underage cousin because watching Mushoku Tensei is like unironically reading Playboy for the articles: you ignore the pornography and focus on the interviews and storytelling).

Getting back to the story that matters today, eight days after learning that her husband is a controlling, murderous Highborn supremacist, Penelope takes their son, Jacob, on board the Titanic, where they are followed by one of Phillip's henchmen who doesn't get named because he won't make it much farther into the page count. Several allusions are made to Jacob being a continuation of Phillip's legacy (and one reference to Phillip having a second son), which confused me in the early pages of this story because I thought it was going to follow Mary and Daniel Darling in their days before the 2008 Annual, instead of two new characters.

This is quickly remedied when Jacob "makes a new friend" onboard the Titanic (this boy's identity subtly confirmed by the pair's poses in their game of tag),

and Penelope exchanges dialogue with the boy's "strange...distant" mother. Throw in the boy's superhuman agility, red eyes, sharp teeth, and the fact that he cannibalizes the henchman off-page (perhaps the same person Daniel is shown feeding on in the 2008 Annual?), and this mysterious mother and son are clearly Mary and Daniel Darling.

Flash ahead to April 18th (three to four days after the sinking of the Titanic), and we see that Penelope (who is pregnant), Jacob, Mary, and Daniel are among the survivors, and they are heading for America. I almost gave this a Jason Takes Manhattan inaccuracy rant, but I looked up the location of the wreck, and I can kind of believe that a life boat could make it to the Northeast coast of the United States in four days, so let's move on.

Six years later, the four of them are living in New York. Penelope has resorted to "things I'm not proud of" with a fat, scummy stepfather archetype to make a living (because when your husband is a supernatural mass-murderer, the bar for acceptable male companionship is rusting into nothing at the bottom of the ocean with the Titanic), Jacob and Daniel have made a new friend named Vincent who only matters slightly more than the dead henchman because he gets a name, and Daniel pretty much confirms that he's going to be Pan when he starts telling Jake and Vince about how he's going to rule Neverland and whips out a vial of pink Provenance energy (maybe fairy dust?) that transports the three of them there via a portal in the sewer.

We also learn that Jacob's brother is named Michael (a name we previously - or later, if we're going chronologically instead of by publication order - saw in Neverland as one of the Darling boys whom Wendy comes to rescue from Pan), and a decent mystery emerges as to whether Jacob or Daniel will be Pan, when Malec approaches Jacob and offers him dominion over Neverland. There's also a few panels of a grey-skinned fairy and the rhino guard from GFT #49 (along with silhouettes of what could be Hakan and two other Tawchok extras) discussing the slaughter of fairies by the Horde and "The Beast," and ordering the closing of all portals between the Realms and the Nexus (which was mentioned in Shang's exposition dumps in previous GFT issues). Unable to visit Neverland, Jake snaps and kills his stepfather while Daniel is shown eating...something...in the sewer and Malec watches, offering Daniel a "reward" as the second part ends.

Part Three opens with Penelope attempting to kill Jacob and...Vincent? Yeah, as it turns out, that whole, "how will Jacob and Michael eat?" thing from her narration in Part Two was a lettering mistake, and Vincent was Jacob's brother, not some random neighborhood friend. Oops!

Anyway, Jacob wakes up and blasts his mother with green magic, she narrates that her own suicide will happen shortly between panels, and the boys run away to join Daniel and train with Malec, Volac, and *swallowing my own vomit* Fenton. With the diary-style narration having shifted perspective from Penelope to Jacob, and Jacob being able to levitate with green magic while Daniel growls and sneers jealously, it becomes disappointingly clear that Daniel rhymes with Paniel for absolutely no reason.

Also, Malec tricks Daniel into heart-fisting Vincent to death, and suggestively takes credit for sinking the Titanic (probably by having Morrigan do it for him), offering Jacob the usual "resources for revenge in exchange for mutually beneficial and unconditional servitude" bargain.

So...is Daniel Captain Arcos? Is he Barr? Is he Cross' great-great-great-grand-something? Does going to Neverland Rule 63 him into the kaiju Croc-mama? Does going to Neverland Animorph him into the were-croc father of the eggs? Is something else going on? This spin-off franchise at large, and this bonus story, specifically, are so "fuck you" about making their lore satisfying or their villain characters deeper than an atom of paper pulp (or treating their female supporting characters with any kind of artistic dignity or narrative appreciation - Tiger Lily being the temporary exception to the narrative appreciation rule...in an issue that looked like a rejected Walking Dead comic drawn by a tap-dancing chicken with ALS during an earthquake), that Zenescope would rather do nothing with the property for half a decade (aside from having crossover event villains cannibalize and/or slaughter everyone...twice) than explain the reasoning behind the three-year cock-tease that was Daniel's mere existence in Grimm Universe continuity.

Family History looks on par with the main Neverland series and GFT issues of its time (even giving me quality whiplash with the hard transitions at the end of the Tinkerbelle and Tiger Lily issues), and my opinion of the narrative is heavily influenced by my current, over-caffeinated state, but I absolutely fucking hate it with every ounce of passion I possess and every ounce of passion that I find lacking in the Neverland brand to this point in the Retrospective.

To keep things going beyond this point, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, let me know what you think of my level of passion down in the comments, 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,

Glad I'm done with Neverland for awhile, but dreading my trip to The Library.