GFT Retrospective #131: Unleashed #2 (Grimm Fairy Tales #85)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Retrospectre.

It's been a long time since I talked about the last part of Unleashed (two months and eighteen posts, to be exact), including perhaps a year in-Universe, but neither the establishment boxes nor any of the characters have given a concrete time frame for the modern day between Day Breaks and now, during which time the Vampires, Werewolves, Zombies, and Demons miniseries took place. Pat Shand is in the writer's seat, and the art (R.R.R. and Mike Stefan) looks good and expressive, so let's get into it!

Unleashed #2

Grimm Fairy Tales #85

There's something refreshingly surreal about Van Helsing, Sela, and Belinda just sitting in a regular bar, in full costume, casually chatting about coming back from the dead. Sela's done it (thanks to Morrigan, Shang, and maybe a magical kaiju spider), Van Helsing was presumed dead for roughly a hundred years, Shang's not there, but he's done it (yay.), and now Belinda's done it, too.

Nobody seems to know who brought her back, but even without Future Knowledge, my money would be on the Being somehow, despite what will be revealed shortly.

Even with the surreal context, though, what first caught me was Van Helsing saying she "could do with a spot of death." I don't know if Shand knew or remembered what he was doing here, but intentional or not, it's brilliant foreshadowing of a certain relationship dynamic she'll have much, much later.

As for Belinda, the mystery of her return is seemingly undercut almost immediately because it's revealed that she went to the Shadowlands when she died (which is said to be the afterlife dimension for Highborns even though Limbo, the Inferno, Tartarus, and The Place Between Dreams And Dying exist, but I guess that makes a sort of in-Universe sense with Sela not having gone there when she died because she's not a full Highborn like Belinda...but then there's that thing where the afterlife dimensions are sub-Realms, but Sela's mind-garden hinted that the Shadowlands are a full Realm on their own...).

In the Shadowlands, Belinda touched a magic-sucking stick from one of the Being-worshippers' altars, and whatever was stored in it brought her back to life, in her grave in Myst, which is why she was stalking around in the background of the Quest issue: she needed a way back from Myst to warn Sela about the Shadowlands opening, which led to her stick-blasting the ab-god and saving the day, leading to the last page of Timelost and where we are now.

There isn't much else to go into with any thematic depth; the Being has Shang captive, and yet Sela seems completely ignorant of the obvious fraud allegations (as she has always been), so she's adamant that getting him back is the only way to defeat someone that even he says he stands no chance against.

I mean, this is a big-bad who could have killed the Dream Eater and Helios without breaking a sweat, and yet he didn't because he was bored and needed a new show to watch on the Omnipotence Channel.

No one but Shang and the Being Himself knows this, of course, so Sela (who has a side-quest to do with Belinda and Van Helsing later) recruits Samantha (who is emotionally shattered by her savior complex not working out multiple times and needs to nut the fuck up because something, something, you damned Millennials had everything handed to you and you ruined it with your haxy powers and your sensory overload and the YouTubez) to collect Elijah, Roman, and Masumi from the end of their respective miniseries so the Hunters can reunite and invade Antarctica to leverage Samira (who escapes because Roman is a double-agent) for information on Shang's whereabouts.

Speaking of Helios, Samantha's failures, and black supporting characters in Zenescope events, though, whatever happened to Marcus Jenkins? I guess we're supposed to assume he got shot in the gutter by a government death squad, because he never shows up again after Myths & Legends, just like how Elijah will never show up again after Unleashed, except I really like Elijah's lore and his anime chain-sword whip is a cool weapon, whereas Marcus was just a soldier with a club who didn't even appear in his own origin issue. Hell, I'd even take Michael Lyons at this point because a Falseblood boxer is a cool idea and the only other black protagonist (and I'm using that term with an absurd amount of grace) we've gotten lately is Julian/Zagreus. As I've said before, I have the wrong ethnicity to be indignant about how an independent comics publisher treats their black characters, but I had a decent moral upbringing to where I can recognize certain things and point them out, and I'm not afraid to be woke.

Also, I'm not afraid to point out when I go off on a tangent because my main subject ran out of things for me to say about it.

The art is consistently good, banter is one of Pat Shand's strengths, and Sela knocking the Vampires' sky palace out of...the sky by doing a Dragon Ball was a cool visual, but even though the issue was twenty-five pages long, only the first five pages (at most) really did anything for me.

Please Stay Tuned for Goj-Year-ra project review of a movie that I've heard won't do anything for me, and as always, continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder (none of you have yet), leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, helping out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Patreon, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Retrospectre,

Out.