Zenescope - Omnibusted #31: Myths & Legends Volume 2 (The Little Mermaid)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Omnibuster.

Hello again, Ticketholders and other click-bait enthusiasts! Fish puns! And I hope everyone had a happy Easter despite all of the existential rage and misery I lavished upon you in the intro to Monday's Bunny Girl Spotlight. I plan to make it up to you on Friday when I review that Crazy Music movie that the catsup bottle made about the world exploding. But for now, things will have to stay a Little...Grimm. And fishy, but only from the waist down. A pair of sexy legs with a giant fish head is just way too disturbing.

Which is why we're covering more lighthearted topics today, like confidence scams, infidelity, prostitution, murder, cannibalism, bestiality, and slavery, so remember to please Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to sell my voice to an octopus, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Unlike with the Little Red Riding Hood reprint in the first Volume of Myths & Legends (where I made a quick, last-minute decision to not re-read and re-review it for "cut for time" reasons), I had planned to give the Little Mermaid two-parter an in-depth second look to bring it up to the current standard of my Retrospective content. But as I re-read both the story and my original review, I realized that I already had said everything important that I wanted to say there. However, there are some things about the art that I want to elaborate on, minor details I wanted to mention, and some better quality visual assets are in order, so here, FROM October 27, 2017, is my review of The Little Mermaid Collection (Grimm Fairy Tales #25 and 26), when I was beginning to review Grimm Fairy Tales Volume Five:

So, to recapitulate the fallout of Volume Four, Sela Mathers was dead, leaving Belinda with free reign over the lost souls of the world as we headed into the fifth volume of the first volume of Grimm Fairy Tales, beginning with this pair of milestone issues.

GFT #25 & 26: The Little Mermaid Collection

EBas, Nei Ruffino

Next on Belinda's list (after her plays for Timmy and Samantha didn't work) is the mother of a college student named Sara.
After reading some of The Little Mermaid (which is not technically one of the Brothers’ Grimm’s original Fairy Tales, but instead a work of Hans Christian Anderson) with Belinda posing as some nondescript kind of door-to-door salesperson, Sara’s mother gets impatient waiting for her education to pay off and convinces Sara that quicker, easier money can be made by selling herself and conning rich men.
The fairy tale plays out mostly according to the common knowledge/Disney version, but for a few minor changes. When a ship is lost to a storm (perhaps the same ship and storm briefly mentioned in The Lamp short story), a group of sirens abduct the drowning sailors, except for one, whose instinctive feelings for a prince lead her to rescue him and deposit him ashore. Later, the Little Mermaid sells her voice to the Sea Witch for human legs and gets herself discovered by the prince, who seems as smitten with her as she is with him. The royal family is quick to provide her and us with commentary on the archaic but still prevalent view of women as animals and objects. Further compounding this, and reinforcing my suspicions that this is the same womanizing prince from The Lamp, he later chooses a noblewoman - read: a higher-value possession - over the Little Mermaid, breaking her heart and making her reconsider her deal with the Sea Witch.
This is another unique pair of issues (yes, I realize the multiple ironies of the phrase “another unique pair”), as the fairy tale frames the modern day story - it both begins the first issue and ends the second issue, as well as unfolding on the page alongside modern events - wherein Sara’s mother’s plans lead to Sara falling for a celebrity athlete named Stephen, who is sleeping with another woman. Whether he is married to her or just a womanizer isn’t explained and doesn’t seem to matter. The other woman doesn’t even get a name in the story, I guess to further comment on the exploitation of women as sexual objects…?

EBas, Nei Ruffino

As the Little Mermaid’s siren sisters are giving her an enchanted blade to kill the unfaithful prince and break the sea witch’s contract, Belinda convinces Sara’s mother to give Sara a gun to kill Stephen. The Little Mermaid takes pity on the prince and is later captured by the sea witch, with the prince coming to her rescue. That he does this while she is in mermaid form is meant to be a sign that he truly loves her despite her outward appearance, but could just as easily be seen as him viewing her as a rare and even more valuable possession than the noblewoman would have been. Whatever his motives, his efforts prove to be in vain.
Sara’s efforts at revenge likewise prove to be in vain because she’s never used a gun before and Belinda is Belinda. The story ends with Sara in prison for attempted murder and pregnant with Stephen’s daughter, and the sea witch living to bargain for more mermaid souls because in Belinda’s fairy tales, the villains always win.
I enjoyed the painting-like art style of these issues (the penciling of which you might recognize from the wraparound story for the 2008 Annual, as both were drawn by Claudio Sepulveda, with Nei Ruffino handling not just the interior colors for both issues, but also coloring Eric Basaldua's covers for both issues), and despite the negative outcome and minimal exposure of the modern side of events, I enjoyed reading the story as well. My only real gripe (as with quite a chunk of these early Zenescope storylines so far) was the lack of care and attention to time.

We know through past issues that the fairy tales presented by both Sela and Belinda were to some degree repressed memories or past lives for those they are presented to. But in part two of The Little Mermaid, some events of the fairy tale are referred to as “Present Day” to distinguish it from flashbacks and flash-forwards that occur within the tale, which I found confusing. At one point, the focus shifts from The Little Mermaid to the real present day of the story, which is referred to simply as “Now.” Aren’t “Present Day” and “Now” the same thing? If you still own a hard copy of a Thesaurus (or you have the internet and you know how to type “thesaurus.com”), look it up.

It was three years (2008 to 2011) before we got to experience more whosits and whatsits galore in the second Volume of Myths & Legends.

Grimm Fairy Tales

Myths & Legends Volume Two

The Little Mermaid

Ale Garza, Nei Ruffino

Remember how Sara ended up pregnant with Stephen’s child at the end of the two-parter? And how the Little Mermaid was a brunette with purple streaks in her hair?

Well, meet Erica. She's a brunette with purple streaks in her hair who has a history of blacking out and waking up naked on strange beaches where the water is dyed red from sunrise and the blood of seal corpses and cannibalized seamen.

I said what I said.

But also, Samantha is in my home state of California, investigating the wreckage of three North Island naval ships. I wonder if these two things are connected?

Anyway, it's about to be Erica's eighteenth birthday, and her rich parents (Howard and Carissa) are throwing her a party that looks more like it's for them than Erica herself. But they do invite her boyfriend despite Howard not liking him very much.

His name is Patrick (a name we saw in the previous Volume, and will see again in a later miniseries), her friends refer to him as her "Little Miss Man Stud" because smart writing is hard and they are horny cringe-mongers who yell "penis" in public for the random, juvenile fun of it, proving that while individual women may grow up and mature, groups of women will behave like toxic teenage gossip whores until they die at the nursing home bridge table with their asses covered in bedsores and bodily waste.

Apparently, Erica and her girlfriends yell "penis" loud enough for the Sea Witch and her latest water nymph servant, Magelica, to notice her, because that's how the page turn makes it look, so it seems like Samantha and the Sea Witch will be in a battle for Erica's soul (despite her not really being that important in Zenescope's broader narrative, unlike Britney) for the remainder of the arc.

Getting back to the party, Erica is so excited that her parents let Patrick attend that she neglects her years of lifeguard training by running to meet him, tripping over two random extras, knocking him down (causing Patrick to crack his skull on the edge of the swimming pool but there are no shown dramatic consequences for this), and doing a header into said pool.

And because this is suddenly an awkward coming-of-age story, Erica emerges from the pool in mermaid form...in front of everyone.

Oh, and the Dark One might be her father?

Fan Yang

Except that, no; Stephen was Erica's father (unless Malec was in a glamour as Stephen when he and Sara had sex, but that's a stretch I'm not willing to make just yet, and the opening of the next issue does something far more interesting and important, if a bit predictable).

Can you guess what it is?

That's right! Belinda and the Horde infiltrated a hospital so she could pose as a nurse, steal Sara’s newborn daughter, and give her to Howard and Carissa, who have been working for the Dark One all along, hence their wealth, overprotective nature, distrust of actual good people, and the party that was less about Erica turning eighteen than it was about staging a setpiece for Malec to come and retrieve his "sweet little princess." Creepy.

But there's retroactive character depth here, since writing a flashback with evil Belinda in a post-Dream Eater publication gave the creative team an opportunity to make Belinda vulnerable. She's working for the Horde, but because she is participating in the systematic abduction of a child (and thereby doing to Sara what was done to her long ago), we see Belinda weep with empathy before the story shifts back to the present.

Thankfully, despite being written as (and declaring himself to be) a formidable demonic force and master strategist with nearly limitless wealth and resources, it continues to be the case that the Dark One's plans don't make a shit-lick of sense, and the entry-level Horde members (private security, spies, planted foster families, etc.) are all greedy, shuddering, mindless idiots. Howard and Carissa were supposed to prepare Erica for the Dark One's arrival...but not tell her anything about the fact that she's a mermaid with the power to scream a whole building to the ground and tear Navy ships in half. They could have even done the partial truth thing and told her she was adopted and Malec is her real father. But nope.

Instead, Erica freaks out because she maybe has intuition powers, and because maybe also water teleportation powers (or bad panel transitions), she swims from the pool to the ocean and runs into Samantha.

Once again, we are reminded of the amazing (and offscreen) mentorship that Samantha received from Shang (also keeping in mind that Sela gets no mention for her literal death sacrifice to save Samantha's soul, nor any of the quality training that Shang is supposedly capable of offering because both characters have been handled poorly by people with no hands.

But of course, despite being able to tell that the guy named Malec who has a Devil reflection is bad and the nice, sympathetic woman is good, Erica still needs time to think and get closure with Patrick (who was also a Dark Horde sleeper agent all along, by the way) so the story can continue to happen badly.

Meanwhile, the Sea Witch approaches Samantha for the first time, shifting into her Esmeralda disguise before issuing a challenge in her true form. The battle of the Good Witch vs. the Sea Witch is on!

Romano Molenaar

But not yet. In a moment of stress (because she just found out that the one man she thought she could trust was part of a militaristic Satanist cult that's literally Hell-bent on acquiring her powers), Erica has transformed into this issue's chosen cover and become a mindless, sound-laser-breathing monster...so the one woman she felt she could trust had to magic-blast her into the ocean.

So now, because the newest villain of the Grimm Universe knows how to communicate with her fish-monster brain and turn her back into a mermaid through the power of electroshock therapy and tentacles (I said what I said), Erica is set on a dark path of revenge as the Sea Witch's puppet instead of the usual choices that would leave a given Falseblood charge-of-the-week floundering in obscurity - more fish puns! - as a game piece for Samantha or the Horde.

I didn't like the short length of this arc the first time around, and I thought the Red Riding Hood story was grander and better realized (not that it didn't have its own problems), and I still do. Even as a similar type of narrative with more Samantha in it (which I was clamoring for, so bonus points there), this Little Mermaid continuation feels bare and rushed so far, only having three characters of some importance in Samantha, Erica, and the Sea Witch, and not fleshing out its supporting cast beyond "Surprise! Secretly always evil!", with the exception of that flashback bit for Belinda, who isn't in this story otherwise because she's kind of dead now maybe.

All of that said, the Sea Witch as a villain is sort of refreshing. She's not in the Horde that I can remember, and she's clearly not a heroine. She's something of a malevolent neutral character with the expected manipulative tendencies and revenge motive that most Grimm villains have, but in Erica's case (perhaps specifically Erica's case), the Sea Witch literally knows exactly what she's going through, is the one person who got through to her and helped her, and rather than force her into making a moral utilitarian choice, allowed her the freedom (manupulative rhetoric notwithstanding) to make a choice for herself. I'm not saying that making selfish choices to serve one's baser needs is a good thing. Just look at what we've committed our government to for the next four years. What I am saying is that in the context of this particular arc, it makes the Sea Witch stand out as a villain, which is a good thing...for fiction.

And the sequence where the Sea Witch lets Erica track down her birth parents (ignoring the "the Horde has eyes everywhere, so why are you giving out your name when you visit the people they'd most likely be watching right now‽" plot contrivance involved) was a heartbreaking and ironic reminder of how selfish living in a greedy system can feel from the side that is hurt most. That, unfortunately, is very real at this point in time.

Romano Molenaar

Contrary to what I said about this story arc being too bare with its character development and too fast-paced, the final issue gives us almost nothing but character, further illustrating how much more practical training Shang gave Samantha as compared to the main character of the franchise, highlighting how much Samantha's duty as Guardian has turned into a savior complex after the Dream Eater Saga, and delivering a flashback origin story for Esmeralda. I've called her the Sea Witch so far, and even referred to her as Ursula (the Disney version of the character) in a few prior posts, but I'm calling her Esmeralda from now on because that's her name. And it turns out that my guess (it legitimately was a guess because I haven't read these comics in over ten years) from the Grimm Fairy Tales #63 review was right: Venus killed Esmeralda's children and cursed her to become the Sea Witch because one of the hypocritical goddess' husbands left her to start a family with Esmeralda herself. Yes, it's mythologically accurate to Venus' character (though even Hera and Artemis were said to curse the focus of their mates' indiscretions as well), and I appreciate that. But what kind of sense does it make for a rampant polyphile like Venus (the Roman goddess of the concept of love) to keep other people from wanting open or collective relationships? It's like if Ares killed people for going to war, or if Hades gave immortality to people who wanted to die. It's action that runs counter to their own purpose. I mean, war, death, and suicide are bad and STDs exist, but can religion and mythology actually make sense for once?

I think we all know the answer to that, so let's move on because there are fights, too, like Samantha magically incinerating a whole frenzy of Esmeralda's sharks down to their skeletons, and a cool setpiece where Erica (now going by "The Siren" after Esmeralda's power boost) calls up a giant tidal wave to drown her "family," who are in the process of escaping both Erica's vengeance (but really, Esmeralda was just using her as a proxy to alleviate her own bottomless wrath against other powered individuals because she is incapable of harming Venus directly as a result of the curse) and the consequences of failing the Dark One.

Ironically (and because this arc needed to end in tragedy), bargains with Esmeralda have a similar, "no harm, complete control" kind of stipulation to the Venus curse, so even though Samantha is able to intervene in time (because she made an unspecified, unbalanced bargain to find Erica) and finally talk Erica out of her rampage, Esmeralda is able to subdue her, rip the Horde sleeper family to pieces in spectacular, tentacular fashion, and retreat with Erica in her possession.

It came as an uncharacteristic surprise (given the end of the Dream Eater Saga and what I vaguely remember happening with her later) that the issue, and the Little Mermaid story arc, ends with Samantha basically calling broken eggs on the whole thing because "there are others" she can save, as Myths & Legends will move on to Beauty and the Beast in its next Volume.

But first, because it's the month of Easter and there are hares and rabbits in Wonderland (and this Volume of Myths & Legends has an ad for it in the back), I'm planning to drive myself insane by subjecting myself to the extension/sequel miniseries to the Tale Of Alice, Alice In Wonderland! Then we'll return to the single-issue GFT Retrospective reviews in May to find out what Sela Mathers has been up to.

From what I remember, 2012 had some real bangers in store, so Stay Tuned and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't have to sell my voice to an octopus, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Omnibuster,
Out.