NEAR MYTHS: RAPUNZEL’S REVENGE (2008)

 

Though I wouldn’t deem illustrated prose books like the Doctor Seuss canon as relevant to the comics medium, RAPUNZEL’S REVENGE is a fully illustrated graphic novel, even though the book''s credits page is reminiscent of standard children’s books like those of Seuss, announcing that REVENGE is written by “Shannon Hale and Dean Hale” and “illustrated by Nathan Hale.” But this hardbound book is just as much an all-comics sequential narrative as anything from the oeuvre of Will Eisner.

One of the most clever aspects of REVENGE is that even though it’s playing with European folktales after the fashion of SHREK and many others, the world looks like the American West, where everyone dresses in cowboy gear and the bandits wield six-guns, not cudgels. The Hales may have been intending to riff on Baum’s famed “Oz” series, and if so this particular book—which has at least one sequel I've not read—is a credit to the first major fantasy-author of American literature.

As one might expect, the authors only emulate a few basic tropes of the Rapunzel folktale. The female protagonist is like her original  also stolen from her mother at a young age, and she ends up getting imprisoned by a witch in a tower-like contrivance until Rapunzel’s locks grow long enough to reach the ground. However, the folktale Rapunzel remains in her tower until she becomes a nubile maiden, and she uses her long locks to allow her lover access to her tower. But the Hales’ Rapunzel is twelve when she finds out many unpleasant truths about Gothel, the woman she was raised to believe as her true mother. Not only did Mother Gothel (using the same name as the witch in the folktale) steal Rapunzel from her real mother, the sorceress is also a hard-hearted tyrant, enslaving many nearby communities. Because the old woman is a mistress of plant-growth magic, she can control what plants do or don’t grow in the terrain, and so everyone bends the knee to her. Apparently, she can’t grow anything in her own womb—though the story doesn’t explicitly say so—since she adopts young Rapunzel for the purpose of having a successor. When Rapunzel rebels, she gets stuck in a mile-high hollowed-out tree to break her spirit—and when that doesn’t work, Gothel abandons Rapunzel.

As one might expect in these post-feminist times, this young girl does not wait for a prince to save her; she frees herself and goes on a quest to unseat Gothel and to find her true mother. What I didn’t expect is the Hales’ adeptness with humor and drama, which keep REVENGE from reading like a dull “girl power” diatribe. Rapunzel finds that her long hair, when braided, can be wielded against opponents either as whips or as lassos, which is certainly a livelier development than we got from Disney’s TANGLED. The heroine does make a male ally—Jack of “beanstalk” fame, who dresses rather like Paul Newman’s “Butch Cassidy.” There’s a little “pre-teen romance” toward the end, though no more than a young reader could tolerate. On the whole the book emphasizes fast-and-furious adventure, as Jack and “Punzie” (as Jack nicknames the long-locked girl) visit various locales, both seeking out Gothel’s keep and avoiding such menaces as bandits, dwarves, and a pack of hungry coyotes. The action-sequences, while not a patch on the greatest fight-scenes from the history of comics, are far better than one can find in most comic books of the 21^st century.

On a closing note, the only specific folktales referenced here are those of “Rapunzel” and “Jack and the Beanstalk.” According to the theories I advanced in this essay, both of these are ‘innominate texts,” and so the crossover of these versions of the long-haired lass and the beanstalk boy would be a “high-charisma crossover.”