Grimm Fairy Tales Holiday Edition 2010

This comic sounded as though it would be a fun, undemanding read. It’s a portmanteau horror anthology with a Christmas theme, a bit like those Amicus horror movie anthologies from the 1970s. In actuality, it’s poorly written and drawn and I’d to struggle to even finish reading it, only doing so for the purposes of this review (and believe me, that was an act of real dedication).

It’s Christmas Eve in New York and the demon Krampus is handing out very unseasonal Christmas gifts. From this basic concept four separate stories are developed.

The framing story concerns a young, rather brattish young boy who goes to visit Santa Claus. His parents have split up, and he tells Santa he wants his father back. Afterwards, he discovers a parcel, at which point a large, rather super-heroic looking elf appears before him with the warning “You’d better be good, for goodness sake.” The art in this section is particularly awful, with anorexic-looking, bobble-headed women and male characters whose bodies appear to have been made out of pipe cleaners. Characterisation’s perfunctory, and it’s all rather laboured. But it gets worse.

Onto the first story proper. “Do You Hear What I Hear?” tells the story of an ex-convict who breaks into a department store. There he’s murdered by Santa Claus, who in actuality is Krampus in disguise. That’s it. That’s the entire story. Is there a point to this? Is there character development, plot, meaning? None that I can see, beyond the somewhat dubious moral that if you steal things, you’ll end up skewered by vicious-looking kitchen knives. It’s awful, awful awful, and is only partially redeemed by Anthony Spay’s artwork that at least knows how to carry the narrative, though it’s still hardly inspiring stuff.

Did you watch the film, The Box? No, neither did I. I suspect Raven Gregory did though, because the next tale, “Christmas Future”, is basically a rehash of that film’s premise. A young couple are given the gift of an iPod-style device that allows them to see into the future. As with all such presents it leads to an unwelcome conclusion, with the wife battering her husband to death with a rolling pin. Cue the appearance of Krampus to MWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH at the wife’s short-sightedness. This story at least has development, although it’s predictable, and is coupled with art that spends an inordinate amount of time focussing on the character’s faces, all of which look the same and seldom change expression.

“The Polyanna” is a variation on the same theme. A gift is given that is so desirable that a group of friends kill each other in order to obtain it, and at the very end it’s revealed that the gift was only a crumpled-up napkin. It’s reasonably well-executed by artist Dafu Yu, who gives characters some semblance of individuality, but at the same time it’s hampered by often clumsy layouts and a pedestrian script.

Back to the framing story. The young boy opens his present which is a demon mask that will give him invincible power to rule the world. But! He’s saved from this fate by the appearance of his father who gives him a present of a Captain America figurine. Yes, I laughed out loud at that moment too. It turns out young Billy has been saved by the intervention of Santa Claus who steers the comic to a happy conclusion. “See you next year,” says Santa, on encountering Krampus.

Well, he’ll be seeing Krampus again, but I certainly won’t. This really is a poor excuse of a comic that struggles, at best, to reach what I’d consider to be a basic level of competence for published work. If the regular edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales is anything like this, I’m amazed it’s survived for as long as it has in today’s cutthroat marketplace. Avoid.