Aiming to Misbehave

By Michael M. JonesAugust 3, 2015

Aiming to Misbehave

Rapunzel’s Revenge by Dean Hale and Shannon Hale

THE STORY OF RAPUNZEL is pretty simple when you boil it down to its core ingredients. A couple makes an unwise bargain with a witch, who in turns steals their daughter to raise as her own. This daughter ends up trapped in a tower, grows mind-bogglingly long hair, and eventually escapes. Often a prince is involved. But let’s face it: once you’ve hit “young woman with long hair trapped in a tower by a witch,” you’ve entered Rapunzel territory.

In Rapunzel’s Revenge, Shannon and Dean Hale radically reinvent our long-tressed heroine, throwing her into a setting that’s equal parts fairy tale and Wild West. In this version, the witch, Gothel, is a tyrant who uses her growth magic to keep people under her thumb, forcing them to slave away in the mines, to pay her tribute, and so on. Rapunzel’s curiosity leads her to discover that Gothel isn’t her real mother. Soon enough, Rapunzel is locked away in a giant tree, where she spends the next four years alone. At 16, Rapunzel escapes by using her hair — now grown to over 20 feet long — as a rope. With little else to do while imprisoned, she’s gotten scarily good at wielding her braids as lariats and whips. No shrinking violet here, this version of Rapunzel is a feisty, stubborn, resourceful, quick-witted young woman who saves herself more often than not.

She eventually finds a friend and traveling companion in the form of Jack, a fast-talking con man and thief with a penchant for bad disguises, unwise choices, and stolen horses. He also has a goose, which he claims will lay golden eggs … eventually. And together, the two of them set out on a wild array of adventures. They battle bandits, rescue lost children, defeat wild beasts, and generally raise a ruckus. Jack may be good at coming up with plans and talking himself into and out of trouble, but it’s Rapunzel and her uncanny hair who kicks butt and takes names. In time, they head back to deal with Gothel once and for all so Rapunzel can be reunited with her birth mother. Jack goes along mainly because he’s having too much fun to stop now, and because despite their best efforts, the two really have become friends. It’s a great, grand adventure, and I won’t spoil the ending.

Now, it must be acknowledged that some of these elements do sound familiar. Disney’s Tangled featured a spunky young woman whose hair was more of a resource than a liability. In the animated film, Rapunzel frees herself from her captivity, with some help from the roguish Flynn Ryder, who’s more of a liability than a resource for much of their time together. The dynamic is definitely a familiar and welcome one. In both cases, we’re seeing heroines who take the initiative, who go after what they want, and who take charge of their own destinies. The male sidekick and potential love interest is secondary to their ambition — to see the world, to right a wrong, to reunite with lost family.

Rapunzel’s Revenge came out in 2008, Tangled in 2010. It’s possible that the writers might have influenced one another somehow during earlier stages of writing or production, but I’d like to think that the moment was just right for a Rapunzel who doesn’t sit around in her tower waiting for a prince to come and save her. (Indeed, Shannon Hale is best known for her various fairy tale retellings and updatings, such as The Goose Girl and Book of a Thousand Days.)

No discussion of this graphic novel would be complete without talking about the art. In a word, Nathan Hale’s work is gorgeous. Playful, evocative, whimsical, and yet realistic, it adeptly captures the mood and motion of the characters. From quiet scenes to fight scenes, from lush landscapes to blasted plains, from giant trees to dusty towns, he depicts the myriad settings of this fast-paced adventure. There’s a sense of movement and kinetic energy at play here, especially when Rapunzel is using her braids to terrorize her foes or to lasso wild sea serpents. The characters are expressive in a somewhat stylized way, emotive without being exaggerated, and easily distinguished from one another. It’s easy to fall in love with this work just for Hale’s art.

More than that, the art really drives the story from one moment to the next. The environments spring to life with a certain zest, ranging from the comfortable expanses of Gothel’s palace, to the industrialized wasteland that sprawls outside its walls, to the claustrophobic nature of Rapunzel’s tree. Every location has its own spirit and energy, and there are a lot of distinctive places that come into play. The characters all have specific identities, and Hale lets them shine. While there are any number of scenes worth mentioning, one sticks out: with two gun-toting men facing each other down on a dusty street, Rapunzel uses her braids to yank the guns right out of their hands. It’s a crisp moment of storytelling that exemplifies the cinematic, kinetic nature of the tale, while taking full advantage of the medium. Even something as little as the way Rapunzel sticks out her tongue in concentration as she practices her ability to throw a braid speaks volumes about her character and determination. The look of stubborn defiance in her eyes when she finally faces down her enemies likewise lets us know she’s through playing around. Any way you look at it, it’s some top-notch storytelling, a perfect substitute for the pages of description which would have done the job were this a regular book.

What’s nice about Rapunzel’s Revenge is how much it builds on, and grows away from, the traditional Rapunzel framework. By throwing in Jack, a trickster who can easily fit into half a dozen different tales in his own right, the authors give the characters a chance to grow, to transcend their origins, and to take things in unexpected directions. After all, the original tale rarely goes into detail about what sort of troubles and travails the heroine experiences in the outside world. Having this Rapunzel run amok through a magical Western, complete with dusty saloons, stampeding herds, roving bandits, starving coyotes, and the odd jackalope, makes just as much sense as anything else, and offers up some amazing visuals as a bonus. By the time she’s outfitted in her adventuring duds (her earlier outfits are unfortunate, as befits a girl trapped in a tree for four years), it’s easy to believe she’s capable of anything. The Hales demonstrate that once again fairy tales are universal, capable of fitting into any setting, any genre, and any mode with only a little work.

This is a Rapunzel who quite blatantly transgresses her roots. She’s constantly in motion, always moving forward, breaking all the rules, and defying expectations. She’s a proactive heroine who handles things on her terms. Her literary forebear might have been content to let down her hair so the prince could climb up, but the Hales’s Rapunzel is more likely to meet him on the ground and drag him off for an adventure or three. I can’t recommend this highly enough — for those who love fairy tales in general or Rapunzel specifically, for those who appreciate a well-told graphic novel, and for those who need a new literary role model. It’s an excellent and extremely entertaining work, with nary a flaw in sight.

And as a bonus: Rapunzel’s Revenge was followed by a 2010 sequel, Calamity Jack, which expands on Jack’s backstory as well as what happens next for our two heroes.

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Michael M. Jones’s fiction has appeared at Inscription Magazine and in various anthologies, and he is the editor of the fantasy anthology Scheherazade’s Facade.

LARB Contributor

Michael M. Jones lives in Southwest Virginia with too many books, a pride of cats, and a wife who refuses to stay locked in the tower. His fiction has appeared at Inscription Magazine and in various anthologies, and he is the editor of the fantasy anthology Scheherazade’s Facade. As a reviewer, he has read more books than is entirely wise. To learn more, visit him at www.michaelmjones.com.

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