Comic Book Reviews: Grimm Fairy Tales

Grimm Fairy Tales is a comic book series written by Ralph Tedesco and Joe Tyler. The premise is that Sela, who poses as a high school teacher, can help people change their lives around by having them read fairy tales. The tales, however, are twisted from their original versions, often with a violent and bloody end.

The first few issues of Grimm Fairy Tales read like an after-school special with a bit more blood. The framing device is awkward, involving completely unrealistic dialogue and annoying teenager problems. In addition, the stories don't always relate to the real-life situation except in the most oblique way. (The story for a young pregnant woman with boyfriend troubles, for example, is Rumpelstiltskin.) adparams.getadspec('c_billboard1');

With issue #16, "Little Miss Muffet," however, an interesting ongoing story begins to emerge. Sela's background is revealed; she is no longer just a constant in the comic's framing device, but the main character of the story, who has been given the power to help people change through fairy tales and must use it wisely. The introduction of a nemesis with similar powers, Belinda, increases the story's intensity, making the framing device at least as interesting as the stories themselves.

The retold fairy tales - about one in each issue - vary in quality from annoyingly predictable to mildly clever. Rather than emerging organically from the story's premise, the twist endings mostly involve what the TVTropes wiki calls a Space Whale Aesop: a moral based on an action receiving a completely unpredictable punishment to scare readers into certain behaviors, along the lines of "save the whales or a space whale will destroy earth."

The Space Whale Aesops in Grimm Fairy Tales are meant to look like deserved come-uppances, but instead look like completely random occurrances. As an extreme example, in the Grimm Fairy Tales version of Rumpelstiltskin, the lesson ends up looking something like "don't let your father lie to the king, because then your child will turn into a goblin." The most bizarre twist is in their version of Bluebeard, in which the moral is "don't fear for your life when you see dead bodies in your husband's castle; it's just an illusion to test your faithfulness!"

So I suppose, in hindsight, the moral is really "don't try to test your wives' faithfulness by showing them a room of pretend dead bodies; you're an idiot."

While the frame story of Grimm Fairy Tales has an intriguing premise, most of the twists on the fairy tales have been done before and done better. The focus seems to be on adding violence and depressing endings for their own sake, rather than for the sake of telling a good story.