Zenescope - Omnibusted #25: Halloween & Christmas (2011)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Omnibuster.

I've previously reviewed and summarized today's issues in GFT Retrospective #20 and #21, when I was doing the Trade Paperbacks in a mix of continuity and publication order, including the chronologically jumbled Different Seasons trades.

Different Seasons Volume 2

As a reminder, Different Seasons is the title given to trade paperbacks that contain special issues of Grimm Fairy Tales, such as Annuals and holiday editions (Christmas, Halloween, etc.).
The first of these that I revisited in the early days of the Retrospective was Volume 2 because Zenescope bundled their issues out of order, not including the first Annual in a Different Seasons Trade until Volume 2. As for why they compiled things this way? Well, that’s like a child asking a blind man why the sky is blue. It just is, whether you can see the sky or know what the color blue is or not. I doubt they even know why.

It doesn't really matter anymore, either, but what does matter to me is that you please Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, fill my comments section with plenty of tricks, treats, and cheer, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to make deals with the Dark Horde in the desert, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

Happy Halloween 2011 from the New Comic Book Day before Halloween 2024, Ticketholders!
Isn't time travel great? You get to go thirteen years in the past, skip 2020 at least once, learn about obsolete technology and bad art, and be generally Retrospective. This transition made a lot more sense seven years ago when it was more confusing....

GFT Halloween #3 (2011)

This is more of a collection of unrelated stories than a single, continuous narrative.
Like the previous Annuals (and the series as a whole, especially the early issues), the art style varies dramatically from one story to the next.

The first of the three stories in this issue, titled “Dead Luck Desert,” looks horrible, like someone went through the ClipArt catalogue from a Windows 98 version of WordPad. That’s right; it’s not even good enough for Microsoft Word! I suppose there is something sort of effective and dynamic about using this bad ClipArt style, but in terms of brand recognition, it’s a terrible choice. The only way you can recognize Belinda is that she’s vaguely woman-shaped, has red hair, and says evil stuff. No one else in the story seems to matter that much (in context or across the series at large), and the artist doesn’t even seem to care enough to get the good parts right.
Okay, so basically, it’s 2004 and Belinda has hired the Vegas mob to find some kid named Jimmy (maybe the same guy from Jack and the Beanstalk?), who is apparently “out of [their] league.” She makes reference to her “master” several times, whom we now know to be The Dark One, although I kept things vague in the original review because the Different Seasons compilations made no sense and the Dark One hadn't been revealed in 2008 yet), and goes off like a badass to handle Jimmy.
If you were reading the Trades in order of when their oldest single issues came out, like with my re-reading for the Retrospective, this is the first time that anything close to a blatant reference has been made to characters in the Grimm Fairy Tales framework having powers or abilities (except for Sela, Belinda, Shang, Morrigan, Allexa from Legacy, and various Sinbad and Wonderland characters). In actual continuity, we'd already seen one-off characters like Dane Copper and Jack Angel from the Vegas Annual and the boy from Godfather Death get explained as having magic powers, as well as the cosmology explanation of Falsebloods in Cinderella Revisited.
Belinda dispatches Jimmy easily and reclaims some artifact (unclear what it is, exactly, because art style) that Jimmy stole from “him.” Ah, yes; IMPLIED OMINOUS CAPITALIZATION!!! So, uh, yeah…Belinda is about to execute Jimmy when his wife and baby enter the room. Belinda has a sudden and inexplicable change of heart and attempts to help Jimmy and family go on the run, telling a nearby gangster named Eddie to “let them go or suffer my wrath!” I’m paraphrasing to be hilarious and cliche, but that’s the basic idea.
Five years later, Belinda contacts Eduardo (because “Eddie’s a kid’s name”) to help her dispose of an undisclosed “she” (ominous emboldening!!!). Surprise! Belinda knows Eddie went back on his word, and “she” turns out to be Sela. Again, the only way you know is vague woman shape, dark hair, and glasses. But let’s just say that one insubordinate human gangster doesn’t fare too well against two nigh-immortal, super-powered women.
Terrible art style aside (because I can’t stress it enough), this was a surprisingly powerful moment for Belinda--basically the only real character development she’s had aside from Fear Not and the Sinbad crossover--and the only time we’ve seen good blood between Sela and Belinda. They play off almost sisterly in their dialogue, while not letting us forget that they are hero and villain to one another, each with secrets they don’t yet want us, or each other to know. Awesome.
The second story, titled “The Sure Thing,” follows a couple at a costume party who take part in a rather…”Siberian” game of roulette. The winner gets a million dollars. The bettors? They get eaten by The Dark One’s pet dragon. That’s it. We get something of a name for “Him” in this barely-a-story (that name being “The Dark One”--and no, he’s not being played by Robert Carlyle. What do you think this is, Once Upon A Time or something?). But that’s it. Done, done, on to the next one.
“The Rule of Three” is a gritty noir detective piece. It’s the usual, "grizzled cop ruins his family by obsessing over a serial killer" plot. It even has the femme fatale element (provided by Sela, who broke into his apartment to kill him but ended up…not). Who and what the serial killer turns out to be, I’ll leave for you to read. I don’t have encyclopedic enough knowledge to recall if ex-Detective Frank Danner ever shows up in any of the series again, but whether or not it amounts to anything, I enjoyed this little yarn. It’s a nice juxtaposition for Belinda’s morality arc in “Dead Luck Desert.” It also gives us another taste of the dynamic between Sela and Belinda, and further fleshes out their business relationship with The Dark One.

Merry Prelated Christmas, Ticketholders!
I currently have nothing clever to gift you with, so I'll let the Ghost of Ticketmaster Past and the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective speak for me. I originally wrote this post offline in June 2017, so here are some words of wisdom from the Ghost myself:

After introducing a culturally insensitive stereotype in an issue so bad you’d expect Michael Bay to have a production credit on it (don’t get me started on the nuclear explosion, the lack of plot, or Sela’s slutty Miss Muffet costume), Zenescope decides to be politically correct by releasing a “Holiday” edition each year. Just nutcracker up and call it Christmas, hmm-kay? It’s like having Christmas in July to be globally inclusive. It’s like Dan Whitney becoming Larry the Cable Guy, it don’t make sense. Lord, I apologize. Some crap about pygmies in New Guinea or whatever, Amen. Anyway, calling it a Holiday Edition is probably the worst thing about the Holiday Christmas Edition in any year. They’re predictable, but refreshingly so.

GFT Holiday #3 (2011)

With the exception of the first Christmas edition (which I have already beaten like a soulless nutcracker horse corpse), each following year is set around Sela doing her best to pull one over on Krampus (who made his debut in the 2010 special) and keep him from killing people. For the 2011 edition, it’s a take on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with a jaded, not-at-all-real actress named Elizabeth Sellers in the Ebeneezer Scrooge role (oh…same initials). There are a couple of product placement Easter eggs here: a nightclub called the Zen Lounge, and the license plate number on her limo is 23N35C0P3. Otherwise, it’s the GFT formula in full force, modernizing and sensationalizing classic tales.
Elizabeth gets haunted by Marla’s ghost (heh), who announces the impending arrival of three beings, the first being the Sela of Christmas Past. Christmas Present makes reference to having once been blinded by love and needing to atone for her sins, but I don’t readily recognize her as anyone important from past issues. The art style in her segment doesn’t provide much in the way of details. It’s somewhere between the styles of "Dead Luck Desert" and "The Rule Of Three." I’ll keep a lookout for a woman with brown hair who killed her son and daughter, but beyond that I don’t have anything else to go on.
Christmas Future is Krampus himself in a Death robe. I never liked the message behind Christmas Future. I get that it’s supposed to be metaphorical and relate to how, if you have friends and loved ones and a good life, you live on in people’s memories, but the presentation of the message always felt like a load of crap when taken literally. Christmas Future always shows Scrooge (or Scrooge McDuck, or Jim Carrey, or whoever else I can’t remember) that a life of meanness and selfishness leads to the grave. So that means that if you’re nice to everyone and charitable and happy all the time, you’ll be immortal, right? Sorry to break it to you, folks, but it doesn’t matter if you’re Barack Obama or Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler or Mahatma Gandhi, Larry the Cable Guy or Dan Whitney. Whether you love left Twix or right Twix, you’re going in the ground with everyone else. That’s reality, that’s humanity, that’s mortality, and that’s all I’ve got to say about that. What you believe happens beyond the grave and what you do on the way to it is completely up to you.
Bah Humbug and Merry Christmas, everyone!

And with those parting words of joy, may I remind you once more to please Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, fill my comments section with plenty of tricks, treats, and cheer, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to make deals with the Dark Horde in the desert, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

Omnibuster,

Out.