GFT Retrospective #105: Swimsuit Special (2012)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The August Animeister.

Anime August rolls on, Ticketholders, and although the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective and Anime Spotlight don't intersect on the Time Drop Publications Venn diagram very much, nothing says "anime" like a pseudo-canonical beach episode full of fanservice and waifus using their powers to turn a simple summer game into a fight to the death for reasons that Sigmund Freud would have a field day with.

And speaking of things Freud would have a field day with, that immediately reminded me of the time I watched competitive beach volleyball and there was a player with the last name of Hooker (I don't remember what year or if it was the Summer Olympics or not, so I'm not sure if it was Destinee or Chloe). So of course there was a male sports commentator talking about her ball-handling skills, and saying things like "Hooker goes to her knees!" and other such phrases that made my inner thirteen-year-old burst into laughter while my outer thirty-something was wondering if I actually heard what I heard on local television at a family-friendly hour of the day. Let me know in the comments if you remember any details that I don't.
Anyway, back to what's important for today.

GFT Swimsuit Special #2 (2012):

The Game

I feel like over the past few months of reviews, I've gotten into a rut of listing off the cover artists and snarkily describing the art because it's mostly consistent. Look at enough covers, and barring a new artist, you can pretty much tell who's drawn what. You can expect Mike DeBalfo to draw his characters a little Asiatic and pouty with extra butt. You can expect Jamie Tyndall's art to be unnecessarily detailed in ways that don't entirely make sense (like a Disney-colored steampunk Tinkerbell helping Sela build a sand castle, for instance). You can expect Belinda to be on a cover even though she's dead. And you can expect two or more covers to feature Anonymous Blonde Syndrome in this era because there are enough blonde women in Zenescope's canon at this point that without a distinct facial marking or hairstyle, it's near impossible to tell Samantha, Alice, Britney, and Cindy apart (as I mentioned in my review of The Return). My point is, each returning artist's style is consistent (and consistently good, for the most part), and while that's an artistic positive, it's a critical negative because it doesn't leave me with anything new or interesting to say about it. It's promotional, mostly work-safe gooner material that also happens to be drawn and colored well. Enough said.

I could even say a lot of the same things as in my first Swimsuit Edition review because the talking points are basically the same (me riffing on the concept of comic book Swimsuit Issues for a length of time relative to your reading speed).

But I am not entirely disillusioned with my own efforts, Ticketholders, because there are a few things worth talking about here.

As with the previous Swimsuit Edition and its inclusion as the Volume Eight Short Story, the 2012 Swimsuit Special (yes, they vacillate between Edition and Special, and that's not granular or confusing at all) was included as a "Bonus Story" in Different Seasons Volume Three, minus its opening twenty-seven pages of original "Zenescope ladies in swimsuits" art and reprinted exclusive covers with characters in swimsuits, because Trade Cover Gallery confusion, production costs, and income-based redundancy. This could be a ComiXology problem, but the Different Seasons version of this issue doesn't even have a cover page!

Once you get past the aforementioned fanservice, it's time for a fun, dynamically paneled game of beach volleyball between the forces of good and evil, drawn by Marco Cosentino (The Immortals) and colored by Sean Forney (A Drink And A Tale). But what really stands out here is the GFT Retrospective writing debut of Patrick "Bolder" Shand (fire nickname, for obvious reasons), who is perhaps the biggest reason I came to love Zenescope's street-level heroines (like Robyn Hood, Britney, and Van Helsing) so much. Even in this short, single-location, almost-nothing story, he gives every character and character relationship its due on an "if this was the first Grimm Fairy Tales comic someone read, would they know who these people are?" level. Like, it's not deep or lore-heavy (Mercy Dante shoots things, Samantha is a Guardian because she says so, Sela is the leader, The Queen Of Spades is lazy, the villains all hate each other, etc.), but it gets the job done commendably well.

Even the justification for Sela, Samantha, Mercy, Britney, Blake, Bolder, Elden (?—Anonymous Blonde Syndrome because she barely contributes and only has one, generic line of dialogue), Malec, Jack, the Bad Girls, and Esmeralda to be Mario Partying it with some Dead Or Alive Beach Volleyball is kind of decent. It's one of those, "every century, Good and Evil stop trying to kill each other and agree on a way to test their strength in a mundane mortal contest" things (apparently, it was boxing last time, and the laws of neutrality got lost in the brutality of the sport...oops!). Of course, the male supporting cast are backgrounded immediately and the "no powers" rule goes out the window almost as quickly (just imagine the RWBY food fight, but less messy) before Esmeralda shows up to spite Venus by taking the ball and forcing the contest to end on a draw (because giving the heroines the victory according to the rules of the actual game they were playing is unthinkable to the villains, I guess). But wait; they kept playing after Mercy shot the ball on two separate occasions, one of them when powers weren't allowed, so it's not like they only had the one volleyball and someone repaired it with magic. So technically, they could have gotten another ball and kept playing, right?

Whatever; I can't be mad with Pat Shand writing, the interior art and paneling were good, and like the Cosplay Special, this isn't meant to be taken seriously. It's never mentioned in the main series and has that "harem anime filler episode status quo reset" vibe to it. Hell, the only thing it's missing is some blindfolded watermelon smashing. Fun is fun, and this was some surprisingly good fun.

What isn't fun is tomorrow's TBT '25 push reminding of the time I lost my entire digitized childhood to a hard drive crash the same week I watched a movie about an old man lost at sea. But I still have the guts of my old hard drive in my closet somewhere, so please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can recover my lost data, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Out to Sea.