Once upon a time, the stories from Zenescope and Grimm Fairy Tales were fairly ground breaking. While other attempts at re-imagining fairy tales have been made in the modern medium, most have focused mostly on the fairy tales character themselves. What set Grimm Fairy Tales apart was a combination of the old through the stories and the new through parables in the modern world. It would seem at some point that the writers wanted to have something stronger to bind the stories together and so they introduced the central characters of Sela and built up secondary characters that had been seemingly throwaway characters from the earlier stories. One of these was Cindy, a modern version of Cinderella though with little tying her name to the famous fairy tale. I stopped reading Grimm Fairy Tales around the fiftieth issue, as it became clear that the stories were never going to return to what they had been, but I was still an outside observer of what happened with these stories as I kept up-to-date on the fairy tales/superhero universe.
This being one of my first forays back into the main stories of the series in quite some time, I am only a bit flabbergasted by how convoluted the stories have now become. There are so many players involved now that it is even hard to distinguish friend from foe, especially as this issue focuses mostly on the bad guys. In the middle of it all is Cindy, given for the first time her own chance to shine. One of the first things that I noticed was the subtle change to the character’s background from a want-to-be beauty queen to an actual beauty queen. Also the universe has seemingly gone a bit far with the potty-mouthed insults that are meant to sound edgy, but end up sound kind of ridiculous. For instance, “Stuff it up your flabby ass,” one of the assorted villains says to one of the physically perfect female characters, in an unnecessary and inaccurate insult. Despite all of this the character of Cindy shines makes its way through, almost. There is certainly a lot of focus from Zenescope on Cindy as an image, either as a member of the yearly Swimsuit issue or as a cameo on alternate covers, and so it is too bad that given her own title that the character comes up a little short.
On the other hand, Cindy is about the only good thing going on with this issue. The Grimm Fairy Tales series is one that is a little too full of itself and would do well with a reboot. If it were to do so, the fundaments of what a character Cindy could be are visible here, only the franchise needs to practice some restraint when it attempts such large scale concepts.
Story: Pat Shand Art: Ryan Best
Story: 5.5 Art: 7.0 Overall: 5.5 Recommendation: Pass
Cinderella was the top movie the past weekend, earning an estimated $70.1 million in its first weekend. The movie had a similar opening to other live-action adaptations of Disney classics (so I’d expect more down the road). The movie had a reported budget of $95 million.
