GFT Retrospective #72: Tales From Neverland: Tiger Lily

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

Popular fiction has rarely been kind to indigenous peoples. Whether it be something as seemingly innocuous as calling them Indians (a geographic misunderstanding from Columbus thinking he had sailed to India when he landed in North America, though ironically, the surviving indigenous population of North America can be genetically traced to northeast Asia), their depiction as red-skinned savages who speak in first-person caveman English in things like the Disney animated Peter Pan (complete with the insensitive musical number, "What Makes the Red Man Red?"), their conflation with other racial stereotypes (particularly the "lazy, stupid Mexican" stereotype), or going to the opposite extreme with the hyper-naturalist mystic portrayals we see in things like Pocahontas, Children Of the Corn II, the Poltergeist and Pet Sematery movies, and Identity (because if you needed your movie to have spooky shit in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, just say that some random residence was built on or near an Indian burial ground and cast Graham Greene as the shaman your protagonists hire to dispel the evil spirits), the popular fiction of my youth (let alone my parents' youth) sucked at accurately portraying "Native Americans."

Hell, I have a bit of indigenous blood, and my parents' birth certificates have their race marked as "Colored" because "the good old days" age like fish milk.

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And getting back to the portrayals of indigenous peoples in Peter Pan media, today, I'm reviewing Zenescope's take on the tale of Tiger Lily.

Tales From Neverland #2: Tiger Lily

I said last week that I hoped this issue would fare better as a story and from an art perspective, in comparison to the Tinkerbelle issue.

And the art is certainly a stylistic choice here. I will admit that there are parts of the Tinkerbelle issue, particularly near the end, where the line art-free style goes more on model and has genuine, visible artistic effort to it. But the art in Tiger Lily is like the line art style from Tinkerbelle, but worse.

As for the story, not only is it important to the Neverland lore, it has long-standing ripples in the greater Zenescope canon, does justice to an (albeit fictional and fairy tale-oriented) indigenous culture and its female focus character.

Tiger Lily is a kick-ass chick. She can out-shoot, out-track, and nearly out-fight any male in her tribe (the "Tawchok," which is Choktaw with the syllables reversed). She's basically Naru from Prey before that movie existed, and in a less chauvinistic tribe.

The issue opens in the midst of Tiger Lily's leadership trial by combat, which is decently paneled despite looking like a blind epileptic learned to do rotoscoping on YouTube, filtered the result through an AI program, and then had a dirty chicken walk on it. But because her people hold fertility sacred and Lily won by kicking her opponent in the balls, her father, Harkyn (who may be a direct relative of Hakan, the Realm Knight from GFT #49 and Hard Choices) chooses her opponent to be his successor as tribal chief and assigns her to guard the Sacred Child (an ancient, immortal infant encased in an emerald-like stone that gives the Tawchok "Sisters" the power to heal any injury...except for genital damage) while her opponent leads a scouting party to engage with some potential pirates.

While these groups fight on-and-off-page, looking like melted zombies, Lily is approached by Pan (who looks like a melted zombie Dee Snider) on the pretense that he was injured by the pirates and needs to be healed. We soon find out that Tinkerbelle (because this takes place between her Tale and the Neverland series proper, and because of the art style here, she looks just as sin-fugly as everyone else) knew of the Sacred Child, and that our..."favorite" dysfunctional couple recruited the pirates to help him steal the Sacred Child's power for himself, thereby causing the land to wither and die, and the Tawchok to be without a permanent home until Pan's defeat at the end of Neverland.

In a fight that once more shows how stubborn, savvy, and badass she is (and how good the paneling is), Tiger Lily does manage to get the Sacred Child away from Pan before he drains it completely, resulting in some palpably tragic images of Lily cradling the near-dead infant in her arms that hit hard, even with the shoddy art style in play.

Despite the art style and the clear "the white man ruined nature for the 'Indians'" subtext of the ending, I loved this story. Tiger Lily may be woefully underutilized (she was just an offscreen damsel in the Neverland series before getting some banter with Wendy, and we don't really see her again until around the time Grimm Fairy Tales hits one hundred issues), but this alone puts her in my top three archers in Zenescope, behind Liesel Van Helsing and Robyn Hood, and the introduction of the Sacred Child is one of those plot devices that will become majorly important down the line, and partially explains Sela's ability to use healing magic in Volume 9.

I took a peek at next week's Tale of Pan's pet crocodile, and the art definitely gets better, so please Stay Tuned for that and 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,

Out.