Pages and Panels

For those of you who’ve been forced to suffer my rambling about comics in real life and not just here, it comes up in conversation about my less-than-typical fangirl origins. Other than the Sunday funnies, (they were only ones in color, which I preferred), I didn’t really grow up with comics at my fingertips. 

However, I was a voracious reader. My favorite kinds of books were ones that were way out of my age range, and comic books seemed too mundane and easy for me. But I was obsessed with illustrated and illuminated fairy tales My favorites were basically any Grimm’s version of a Disney movie. I loved the darker versions of what all my friends saw as these cheerful stories.

While I was browsing this week at The Comic Store, I wanted to expand past my usual superhero fare. I was looking for Saga, as it’s been recommended to me several times, but then noticed a slim black hardcover next to it. I picked it up and suddenly, I felt like a little girl in my elementary school library reading about Snow White making her stepmother dance in iron shoes again- utterly enthralled. 

Neil Gaiman’s Snow, Glass, Apples turns the classic Snow White protagonist into a hauntingly ethereal antagonist. Snow White’s stepmother- known as the Evil Queen in the Disney version- leads her version of this dark tale. Rather than begging her magic mirror for compliments, the queen is a soothsayer who told fortunes and saw the future in reflections. She saw the widowed king coming to her, and bits and pieces of their life together, but not the actions of Snow White. The reason our Queen hates her step-daughter is not jealousy. Instead it’s fear, after the princess attacks the Queen and drains the King of his lifeblood. Because she’s a vampire. 

In this version, the Queen cuts out the young princess’s heart, and it still beats, hanging from a rafter in the queen’s chamber, though Snow White’s body lies in the forest. As the forest folk begin to disappear, the queen knows the vampire Snow White is behind it. So she poisons apples with her blood and that’s when the heart finally stops beating. Of course, the prince finds the princess and brings her back to life (although with a little more activity than just a kiss), where she returns to the palace and takes back her heart before having her stepmother thrown into a kiln. 

The story, while a darker turn on the tale, is made all the more enthralling by the gorgeous art of Colleen Doran. Greatly inspired by vivid stained glass art deco and art nouveau work from Irish artist Harry Clarke, Doran’s style feels like an illumination more than an illustration. The free-flowing transition to each “panel” creates a sense of movement and time not unlike the way sunlight filters through a stained glass changes the tone of the piece. Focusing on rich colors and opposing color pallets to frame the opposition of the Queen and the Princess while also telling the story of how the princess would one day subvert the words and actions of the Queen and turn her into the “villain”. Being able to do so mostly in the visuals allows for the written story to focus on the story we don’t know- the Queen’s side- but also hinting at the fairy tale as we do know it. 

It’s a fairly short read, coming in at just around fifty pages of story. But there’s something to be said for any version of a fairy tale that tells the story in a way you’ve never heard before, and shows it to you in a light you’ve never seen before. I will say, it’s very much adult. This isn’t just the Grimm’s version of the story. It’s much darker, with hints of incest and necrophilia, as well as lots of nudity in the art. Don’t expect to be reading this at any bedtimes. But there’s a reason it won an Eisner Award for best adaptation in 2020. It’s a damn good story, with incredible visuals. 

It was one of those splurges that I picked up on a whim.  Seeing it on my bookshelf alongside my collection of fairy tales has given me a sense of self-clarity I wasn’t expecting this week. I’ve spent a lot of my time in the past year trying to validate my love of comics since I didn’t grow up on them. But seeing this graphic novel next to all my illuminated fairy tales has made me realize that maybe it’s not such a shock I’ve ended up here after all. They’re basically the same story- just told with a lot more color than the Sunday funnies.

Snow, Glass, Apples is available in hardcover from Dark Horse.