The most interesting things come from the most unlikely places, meaning you might grow a massive shared universe from your one-shot retelling of an ancient allegory. Your Major Spoilers Retro Review of Grimm Fairy Tales #1 awaits!

GRIMM FAIRY TALES #1

Writer: Ralph Tedesco/Joe Tyler
Penciler: Joe Dodd
Inker: Justin Holman
Colorist: Lisa Lubera
Letterer: Kris Feric
Editor: J.C. Brusha
Publisher: Zenescope Entertainment
Cover Price: $2.99
Current Near-Mint Pricing: $75.00
Release Date: May 31, 2005

Previously in Grimm Fairy Tales: Initially teaming up to write screenplays, Ralph Tedesco and Joe Brusha transitioned into comic books in the hopes of taking the medium to the mainstream. (There’s also the classical conundrum of comic books serving as perfect springboards/storyboards for movies and TV, but that’s just a cool side-effect.) The first publication from Zenescope Entertainment sets the tone for what is to come, beginning with a sexy pin-up style cover by Al Rio.

The interiors are a completely different story (literally and figuratively), where we meet Chad and Britney, in the midst of a makeout session. Of course, they have different ideas of how their evening should end.

Britney (who, oddly enough, is never named in these pages, but is retroactively identified in later stories) runs to her room, trying to calm herself, only to find a strange bound volume lying on her bed. She opens it to find a favorite story from her childhood: The Tale of Red Riding Hood.
The transition from reality to fairy tale is, honestly, a little bit hard to parse as a reader. One panel, we’re watching Britney reading, the next she is leaving home to take a basked to Gramma’s house in the woods. Along the way, she meets Samuel, a boy who has designs on her, and apparently convinced her to do some very unladylike things on a previous date. She shakes off his advances, walking deeper into the forest, where she is startled by what seems like something following her. A woodsman named Jacob greets her, warning her that it’s not safe in the woods and giving her a knife to protect herself.

It comes in handy when she is menaced by a werewolf, but ends up being less positive for Jacob when she arrives at Grandma’s house and finds him already there.
Thinking that she has stabbed the Big Bad Wolf, Britney/Red flees, only to find the REAL beast waiting for her. Jacob arrives just in time to put the axe in its back, leaving Red Riding Hood to watch her suitor bleed to death. Wait, sorry. I meant to say SUITORS.
The art throughout this sequence puzzles me. Jacob is drawn as brawny, heroic, and protective, while Samuel has a strange, rat-like face and ears that almost look pointed, making me immediately distrustful of him. The decision to stab the Woodsman feels very arbitrary and the art doesn’t seem to quite have the storytelling chops to add any ambiguity to what should be a shocking reveal.

Suddenly, Britney awakens with a start!
On the one hand, the dream or not-a-dream ending fits the nature of the one-shot story being told, but on the other, it’s one of the oldest narrative tricks in the book, and one that is seldom done well. Still, the stage is set for what Grimm Fairy Tales would become, with the first appearance of Sela Mathers’ mystical tome, if not Sela herself, and the first of many downer endings couched as metaphors. As introductory chapters go, Grimm Fairy Tales #1 provides the foundation for the dozens of public-domain revivals to come (including Britney’s run as a vigilante Riding Hood) with workman-like art on the interiors and a salaciously misleading cover image wrapping up to 2.5 out of 5 stars overall. Honestly, the fact that a series of unrelated retellings of folk tales and stories turned into something like the sprawling Zenescope Entertainment line of comics is as impressive as it is unlikely.

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