Welcome to A Townsville Fairytale!

This strip is basically a summing up of all the tropes and ideas that get used on a regular basis in this comic. If you’ve read this, you now know how things work here! If you already knew, now you’ve got a pretty good confirmation.

I also used this strip to move continuity forwards slightly (the Prof is now on holidays, which plays a little bit into the next story), and to clarify some ideas that maybe weren’t 100 percent clear before — like where Thomas gets his enormous strength.

Special thanks to Hobart for reading the rough and giving me a critique on this one, because it sure as shit wasn’t working as a comic strip at ALL until he told me what was going wrong with it.

–Andrew S.

Last week’s strip was an exercise in creating something that barely anyone would ever get — you’d have to know both Giggle and Hoot and Game of Thrones.

This week I decided to go even more esoteric. Since I’m learning Korean I drew this strip as a piece of gift art for my Korean teacher, to say thank you for the lessons. But… there’s stuff in here that really only I would get.

Well… and the handful of other people in the world who read my comic, know who Dooly is, and have read about roadside cabbages in the Black Jack comics (which are Japanese).

So yeah, this strip is, in the end, for about the smallest audience possible! So… uhh… I better enjoy it!

–Andrew S.
(So… uhhh… yeah…)

So… uhhh… here we are, me being a complete hypocrit. How many times have I told people I hate the internet’s stupid obsession with mash-ups?

BUT THIS IDEA JUST WOULD NOT GO AWAY.

Arrrrgh.

Oh well, enjoy the first ever colour strip of the comic. Well, partially colour. I really struggled to decide whether I’d make it full colour, whether I’d leave it black and white, or whether I’d make it become black and white again when you realise it’s the characters watching TV. I think that’s the best choice in the end… but… I dunno.

Hoot just needed to be in colour.

–Andrew S.
(I tried to at least be more clever than, “It’s Star Wars, but now it’s Doctor Who too!”)

My thoughts on another take on Rapunzel.
Okay, so we’re here at the very end of this story. Thomas has defeated a witch, met a girl, and if you remember back all those weeks ago he met another girl, one he already knew very well (it’s Ruth, I’m talking about Ruth). But let’s talk about something completely different to all that.

Let’s talk about Tangled.

Tangled was an okay movie. The animation was nice, the characters were generally engaging. It was an okay movie, but it wasn’t a great adaptation of Rapunzel.

People talk about the Disneyfication of things. Things like changing the ending of The Little Mermaid so it’s a happy ending instead of a horrible tragedy… or giving the seven Dwarves personalities and quirks when they’re MEANT to be ciphers for the story to even make SENSE symbolically. (We’ll talk more about Snow White one day I’m sure.)

But I don’t think Disney usually guts out the main character like they do here.

It starts with her family. So of course Disney needs Rapunzel to not just be the daughter of some selfish parents who sell her up the river. They want her to be a PRINCESS. So of course she has to have two loving parents who don’t want to give her up at all. In fact… they basically just lifted Rapunzel’s origin from Sleeping Beauty.

Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty are both girl-in-a-tower stories, so it’s not surprising that elements from one might creep into the other. But… dammit… Rapunzel isn’t Sleeping Beauty.

My real problem with Tangled, of course, is that Rapunzel isn’t really the protagonist of the story. This story is about the roguish Flynn Rider, an updated version of the Prince from the original tale. Because they decided to give the prince more agency in the story they basically rob Rapunzel of all her agency. She’s not able to be an active participant in the story she’s just dragged along wherever the Rider takes her.

Rapunzel is my favourite of all the really famous fairy tales — I mean, it’s not as good as the White Snake, or some of the less well known tales. But it’s far better than Goldilocks, or Cinderella or goddamn Beauty and the Beast. We’ll get to Beauty and the Beast, eventually — suffice to say I’m not a huge fan of the stories which are endorsements of arranged marriage. In fact Rapunzel is basically a rejection of that idea altogether. Certainly neither her original parents, or her new guardian have a part in deciding who her suitor will be. (And she’s not sold to her prince like a prize the way Snow White is.)

But, of course, Rapunzel isn’t a perfect story. Its morality isn’t modern, and it needed updating, that’s for sure.

But couldn’t she have been less of a passive little snit in Tangled? I guess that’s something I’m going to have to watch out for myself. After all, just like Tangled the protagonist of MY story isn’t Rapunzel either. And yeah, she did lose a lot of agency because Thomas had to do the fighting. But dammit I’ll watch for it. You might notice last time I made Rapunzel be the one who suggested leaving behind the grappling gun, rather than letting Crogan or Thomas do it. That was deliberate.

Rapunzel is not the first princess in one of my stories — but damn if she hasn’t been the one I’ve agonised over her position in the story the most. I don’t think I’ve been entirely successful at paying homage to the aspects of the original tale that I most enjoy — but, well… at least, in the end, I’m not goddamn Tangled.

–Andrew S.
(Disney needs to go back to adapting and sanitising Hans Christian Anderson. Let’s see them tackle The Little Match Girl.)

Hobart’s been asking me since this story started how the hell Thomas was going to get through it with his “Poo For You” shirt intact.

And now you know.

–Andrew S.
(And Hobart does too.)

Did you notice some minor changes? I changed the font size I’m using in the comics from 5mm to 4mm.

Yup.

Even I didn’t notice.

Oh, and on this page I spared you the shots of the witch screaming in horror as her innards are sliced apart and rent asunder by a guy cutting his way out of her. You don’t have to watch her bowels expunge as her body desperately fights to overcome the horrendous pain of being torn apart from the inside.

That probably wouldn’t have been very funny.

–Andrew S.
(It might have been a LITTLE bit funny.)

Wouldn’t this be a great place to just end the comic? I’d love to do that, eventually. Just have the main character die in the middle of a fight. The end.

It’s not the end, though. Just so you don’t get worried or anything.

–Andrew S.
(Also, I went to Groovin’ the Moo on the weekend — but I can’t talk about it here because Hobart chose a costume based on a property we don’t talk about on this website.)

So… uhh… yeah.

Sometimes something happens when you’re creating a story that you didn’t intend, but which fits perfectly in with that story. So here I was creating the design for the witch’s transformed state and I realised, “Hey, where did that tail come from?”

Mix that with the sort of conversation me and Hobart often have and you have my favourite single page strip from my own comic in a long time.

Oh… and by the way, I now have a Tumblr. Those things aren’t related, but I didn’t know how to segue.
http://townsvilletale.tumblr.com/

Right now it’s just beard-related fanart.

–Andrew S.

Hats make mouths.

One of these days I’m going to stop resolving my stories with a big fight at the end.

But not today.

–Andrew S.
(I enjoy drawing the big fight at the end far too much.)

And so here we are.

There’s a thing about retelling the story of Rapunzel in a pre-existing comic. At some point that comic is going to intrude in on your retelling.

And this is the point where the story of Rapunzel gets interrupted by the story of Thomas.

See… Rapunzel, the original Rapunzel, is a story about the girl in the tower. The girl in the tower is actually an active participant in her destiny. Her fortunes are changed when the prince climbs up into her tower — but it’s Rapunzel who hatches an escape plan; the moment she has a chance she takes agency in her own story. In fact in the end of the story when the prince is blinded and wandering in the wilderness it’s Rapunzel’s love an compassion for him that saves him!

(Compare that to the other really famous girl-in-a-tower story, Sleeping Beauty. The princess in that story is so removed from any of the actual action of the plot that she might as well be a dog, or a treasure chest for all the difference it makes.)

But… in the end my version isn’t Rapunzel’s story. It’s the story of Thomas accidentally intruding on Rapunzel’s story. So here we are at the point where we’re most decidedly in A Townsville Fairytale territory.

Thomas gunna fight himself a witch, with the help of a gnome.

I bring this up by way of apology. Rapunzel is a very famous fairy tale, and it’s one of my favourites of the very famous ones. It’s certainly a lot better than Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty or goddamn Snow White or Goldilocks. But… well… (spoilers, I guess) Thomas isn’t the prince from Rapunzel, so at this point in the story he’s kinda gunna rob her of some of her agency. I’m sorry guys — but Rapunzel doesn’t get to confront the witch.

Hopefully I’ll be able to make up for this diminishing of Rapunzel at a later date, because she is going to be a semi-recurring character, but for now she’s… well… she’s just the girl in the tower that everyone thinks she is. Sorry.

–Andrew S.