Free Comic Book Month "Tinker Bell"

Welcome back to free comic book month. This week I thought I’d break the norm of super hero books, or a book with a way past cool hedgehog, and bring you something a bit more girly. Yeah, Comic_Kathy is finally doing a comic that the market would see as girly. And which comic came out that was girly you ask? Why Tinker Bell of course. Tinker Bell was a character from J. M. Barrie’s story titled Peter Pan. Of course the more famous form of this fairy is from Disney Studio’s 1953 animation of the same name. This Tinker Bell was modeled after the end all vision of beauty, Marilyn Monroe. The personality stayed about the same from the original story, with Tinker Bell being jealous of anyone who tries to warm up to her Peter. She did so by playing jokes on others, sometimes leading to very dark ends for them at the hands of Hook or the like.

Tinker Bell, as we all know, has become sort of a main mascot for Disney on her own right. The best way I can think of her is like Bugs Bunny at the beginning of many WB animations openings. Bugs is always there eating his carrot right next to the WB logo. Well Tinker Bell is the same with the Disney opening. She is the one who flies of the castle logo every time, even if she never gets close to the camera. But Disney wanted to do more with her. And so we get Disney Fairies. 

Disney Fairies is a lot of things, but a lot of what it is can be found on their own website. Mostly it is its own little world that is not part of the Peter Pan one at all, or at least very little. Tinker Bell has adventures with her friends and they learn about sharing and friendship and all that. Remember, this is aimed at little girls. So if all you big tough guys with a wall of pictures and figures dedicated to the mane six, or Ditzy “Derpy Hooves” Doo, do not like this comic, I am sorry. (I love My Little Pony, but that is a talk for another time)

Wow I talked a lot there. But let’s finally see what kind of comic Disney can put out for little girls. This is Disney Fairies Tinker Bell.

 The cover is interesting. The characters are clearly well drawn for a more child friendly style. But I can’t help shake the feeling that they might have cheated a bit to make this. The colors and lights feel like they made the same scene in 3D (since this is a 3d focused universe) and then just flattened it in Photoshop or the like. Meh, either way it looks good, even if there is really no action and 4 of the main cast of fairies is missing. Another thing to note is on the cover, it says there are other stories in this book besides the Tinker Bell one, but I’ll talk about them soon enough.

The comic begins with Tinker Bell getting her daily batch of fairy dust. Terence, the keeper of the dust and Peter Pan look-a-like, says that Tinker Bell must be new since she does not have a special way to collect the dust like the other fairies. This makes Tink wonder what he means by that. 

We then get to see the other fairies and how they get their dust for the day. There is a make-up fairy who powders it on her face, a frog riding cowgirl fairy who just takes the dust and hops off, and a darker skinned fairy who shines light when the dust touches her, which does make sense that her skin is darker if she is exposed to that much light at once every day.

There is also a water fairy who likes it poured on her hear nice and slow, and a stuck up fairy who just seems to blow it all away. There sure are a lot of different and varied fairy folk. All these fairies getting their dust does give Tinker Bell an idea and she flies off.

She comes back the next day with a device that can make the dust either fall on her like the water fairy, or make her dust fall on her like a shower. Alright. . . .

And that is where this story ends. Yeah, 4 pages of just fast character introduction and relationship building between Tinker Bell and Terrence. Art wise this story was fine. I do like the bright colors of all the characters and the designs of them all are well thought out and not just a carbon copy of Tinker Bell. Of course the story is annoyingly short, but hey, this is something free and new from Disney. I’m just happy I got anything at all.

Now there were more stories in this book. Since this comic is one where you can flip it over I am only going to focus on the Tinker Bell side of things. Really, that means that we got 2 more stories to get through. 

The second story is titled “Tinker Bell and the Forces of Nature”. The comic opens with Tinker Bell fixing up someone’s acorn wheel. Well that’s nice of her. But as soon as Tinker Bell is done, Vidia comes to pick on her. Vidia says that she controls nature which makes her awesome, while Tinker Bell just fixes things, which makes her worthless. Um, no. Fixing things is more useful than making tornados, which is all you can do Vidia. 

Same as last page, Tinker Bell is making useful items for the fairies when Vidia comes and pushes over all of Tinker Bell’s baskets. Again, Vidia, tornados do not HELP anyone. So how are you more useful to the peaceful people when you’re power is pure destruction?

Again, Vidia comes to be a jerk to Tinker Bell. I’d ask if Vidia is doing anything to help the fairies, but I think the other fairies won’t let her since all she can do is break things and make them all mad. After, this time, attacking Tinker Bell head on with her wind powers, Tinker bell says that she’ll show Vidia that she is not useless.

Tinker Bell does this by showing Vidia all the stuff she made. Why this will impress Vidia now when it never did before, I do not know. Vidia tornados the top basket which makes it fall on her. Tinker Bell is smug as she flies off, saying that nature is uncontrollable.

So how did Tinker Bell get even when Vidia did this act to herself? Whatever, Tinker Bell wins.

The last comic is not a story at all, but just random one page gags from a comic called Dance Class. From what I found quickly on the website, it is a story about ballet and hip-hop and girls going after a hunky guy. I’ll be honest, I never really liked that stereotype but whatever. Since the comic is nothing more than 6 pages of one shot gags, I’ll just let the pages speak for themselves. 

Let’s see now, a teacher who did not do what she told the students, a boy who is treated as a girl since he does ballet, that skinny girl with an eating disorder picking on the fat kid but soon makes a fool of herself, the token black girl worrying about what she wears to dance practice, the main character girl responding with ballet moves in a math class rather than doing the problem on the white board, and finally a hip hop dance teacher who likes the street more than waxed wood.

Really, there is not much I can say about this. The art style is cartoony but can still give off character emotions well. The style also does well for poses since the characters can be a bit more loose rather than the realistic books out there.

Over all, these were some good stories for girls for once. They were not all about sunshine and rainbows and swooning over boys. The stories were nothing ground breaking sure, but at the same time it could be read by anyone really.

All Images (c) Papercutz