GFT Retrospective #124: The Seal Skin
a.k.a. The Retrospectre.
Welcome to July, Ticketholders!
I've been back from vacation for a few days, and Sela Mathers is back from an alternate Realm, Limbo, prison, and helping save the world at least three more times (The Dream Eater Saga, Bad Girls, and The Summoning) to continue her mentoring role in the first fairy tale adaptation that Zenescope's main title has done in quite some time (so I'm not the only one who's come back to work).
But before I get into that, I promised a final view count for June, and here it is:
Grimm Fairy Tales
Volume 14 TPB (Part One)
We've seen numbered GFT and Myths & Legends issues show up in an event before (The Dream Eater Saga), but the Trades around them ended prior to the event and resumed numbering after its conclusion. With Volume Fourteen, the first three issues take place before the Unleashed cycle and the last three are set sometime afterward, into the Age Of Darkness era.
Volume Fourteen is also the first (digitally, at least; the Omnibus trilogy—collecting the first seventy-five issues in twenty-five-issue increments—did this, too) to have this style of cover, with a white background and single-character art, here by Anthony Spay & Ivan Nunes. The backgrounds of the Table Of Contents page are cropped and sepiatoned from GFT #84 Cover A by Alfredo Reyes & Sanju Nivangune, and GFT #87 Cover A by Emilio Laiso & Alessia Nocera. It should go without saying by now, but there's no bonus content to speak of, so when I get to the Omnibusted post, my Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day issue reviews will be included.
Grimm Fairy Tales #82
The Seal Skin
At their time, Selkie tales could be said to have several professional and chauvinistic purposes, such as a superstitious warning against the killing and skinning of seals or a moral condemnation of promiscuous women (keep her close in an unhappy union or she will ruin your family and move on to do the same to someone else!). However, through a modern lens, it could also read as telling women that it's healthier to be yourself than to metaphorically surrender your skin to please another. Yes, there are the abandoned children to consider in some versions of Selkie lore, but there are two ways to look at this that don't involve misogynistic fear-mongering. Firstly, even in an impoverished time like the 1800s (when the earliest documented Selkie legends can be traced), child abandonment was relatively low in Europe (plus, Icelandic culture values kinship, so efforts were often made to foster children who were abandoned, and it was common to conceive and raise children out of wedlock). And second, if the human characters in these stories (there are tales about male Selkies, too) weren't such horny, covetous simps that they'd bang a hot stranger on sight and commit false imprisonment in the name of possessive love, there wouldn't be any children to abandon in the first place. So let people be themselves, don't treat your privates like a divining rod for the gender you prefer, don't trap people against their will, and don't impose your will on a culture that already functions as it should. These are things that actually have to be explained to human beings in 2026 with America's 250th Independence Day three days away, except that it doesn't do any good because how dare I "virtue signal" in favor of human rights and "feminist propaganda," right? But if I could play Devil's Advocate for a moment,
at least I'm not committing any of the aforementioned offenses if I just go fuck myself and get on with the Retrospective....
As we saw in The Summoning, life in the Nexus has gotten complicated for Highborns and Falsebloods since Helios and Gina set the Great Wall Of China on fire, and despite being a convicted domestic terrorist and attempted kidnapper, Sela has embarked on her Kung-Fupernatural journey around the world to help guide powered individuals on a path that doesn't lead to evil or death (or both, as the case usually is in the Grimm Universe).
Guided by an annotated file she received from a mysterious source that we're supposed to assume is Shang (because he's alive again, because the Keepers always have great ideas, like inventing my sarcasm, but also because she destroyed the Book Of Provenance more than thirty issues ago), Sela heads to Rio de Janeiro in search of Melena, a Selkie Highborn who follows the call of the sea and whatever pleasures the land can provide for her temporary amusement regardless of the consequences to those she seduces because she sees humans (and Falsebloods like Sela, for that matter, despite knowing of her as the Guardian Of the Nexus and the "most famous" Falseblood ever) as lesser beings that exist at her whim. This is a unique dynamic for Sela because all of her past charges were Falsebloods like her who had yet to awaken to their true natures, and Melena is...someone we're not supposed to like. And yet, we're supposed to feel bad for her by comparison when she starts romancing a wealthy resort tycoon with daddy issues named Markos, a modern adaptation of the titular folk tale plays out between them, and he makes her "suffer the consequences of her actions" in a way that doesn't "go well" for her off-page because psychopathic domestic abuse is obviously worse than gold-digging and sociopathic promiscuity. Which makes it hard to care much about either of them as focus characters, as does the absence of a sensationally bloody and poetic ending that an issue like this would've had earlier in Zenescope’s publication history.
To be blunt, this issue is weak in both the presentation and conviction of its message, whatever that may be, and shows that Sela is probably better off as a growing, developing character rather than a tool for pandering to her own nostalgia.
Next week, Sela meets the face behind the file, and Godzilla fights the one kaiju who hasn't been korrupted by kapitalizm,
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| "SpaiezeGojira!" |
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Retrospectre,
Out.
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