Everyone likes fairy tales, right? And even if it’s not part of your cultural gestalt, you’ve probably heard the tale of Goldilocks, that tired old chestnut about the delinquent minor who vandalizes the domicile of three innocent bears.
Now, it’s not a crime to retell the story. It’s not even a crime to republish a story, once the copyright limitations have run out, 70 years or whatnot, you can go look it up. Where my objections arises is when someone decides to put out a substandard piece of crap in the hopes of pulling a fast buck out of someone’s pocket by cashing in on the reputation of a childhood favorite.
Completely at random, let’s take this little gem, for instance:
I suppose that for a buck-fifty, you can skip the suspense of reading this visceral whodunit and get right to the part where they find the girl in bed. Honestly, what a joyous moment it seems for the Bear family. “Dear me”, Mama bear seems to say, “Papa bear left his Beastiality Betty Blowup doll in the bed again!”. “And she’s full”, notes Baby Bear. Papa bear joins in with a hearty belly laugh, “time to get me a new doll”.
On the inside front cover, each little precious cherubic owner of their Very First Goldilocks and the Three Bears Story Book gets to sign their name and forever doom themselves and their parents to ridicule. On the following page, manically hilarious Papa bear points into the void at some hallucinogen-induced vision that has caught his fancy while Mama bear waves a dreamy benzodiazepam high-five, wedged as they are into an altogether entirely too-tiny-for-breathing window. The copyright disturbs be the most. 1992 must have been a calendar year for the Can You Draw This Clown Face? Matchbook Correspondence School of Fine Arts.
Anyhow, onto the story. As two suns rise in this obviously alien universe, baby bear gamboles merrily along shirtless and shoeless in his bright orange smock vest while Mama and Papa trail along in the latest Victorian springwear and stark white pimp converse sneakers. If Mama weren’t poking a spear through her umbrella, I might stop and question their collective taste in clothing, but I remind myself it was the ninties and try to get over it. After all, Dad is cross eyed and obviously ready to crash from last night’s drug binge as he spasmodically waves away phantom insects.
Ah yes, to the thick of the plot, then. The door was closed a moment ago, but Goldilocks shy little vixen that she is, still sporting the blowup doll motif, has managed to jimmy the lock on their abode. Or, if you’re on her side, you can assume that they just left it open, country yokels that they were and assume that they deserved a little early-morning B&E. Obviously, she’s cased the joint before. Rushing over to the breakfast table to see what’s for breakfast, G smartly steers away from the obviously psychedelic fumes coming out of Papa bear’s bowl. On the other hand, violating both a sense of anatomy and perspective, she somehow wraps her opposable thumb backwards around the spoon in an attempt to cleverly emulate the bears, perhaps to mislead them into blaming each other as she locks her knees as tightly as possible and leans against the badly built table which appears ready to hurl the bowls downwards at any moment. Violating conventional thermodynamic laws, she finds that the small bowl has somehow retained more heat that the middle bowl (possibly feeling that it was too ‘cold’ because of all the downers Mama Bear has laced it with) and downs that sucker in a trice (that’s a word used in fairy tails, kids. It’s a little like ‘nonce’, but less risky than ‘hey-nonny-nonny’, which will only get you murdered in a back alleyway at school or worse if you try it these days). Note also that her fashion sense is well in tune with this world as her Lolita bow matches her bright red booty-ass skirt and ankle-high Doc Martens cowboy boots.
Eating Baby Bear’s porridge has apparently given G a horrible case of electric flatulence coupled with massive hip displacement, too bad it must have been the one laced with speed. This explains a lot about the japanimation velocity lines back in the first outdoors scene. Now we can see how the litte tyke was able to keep up with a bird in flight, he was on uppers. In the meantime, what little is left of G’s central nervous system is trying to tell her feet to move as quickly as possible away from his crazed dwelling before her brain hemmorhages, but she seems disinclined to do anything about it. Best guess here is that the barbituates in Mama’s porridge are the fast-dissolving variety you only get if you’re a vodka-drinking veteran of the daytime soap-opera watching crowd. Mama’s chair appears to further knock her spine out of whack as she enters a general petit-mal seizure, eyes wide and sightless, hands and feet twitching, celebratory party streamers streaming as the house itself appears to celebrate her incipient demise. The Flintstone’s-like grace with which this chair is drawn only calls attention to how G is really just emulating a real girl when in fact she appears to be deflating even as we read, a large yellow spike puncturing her and releasing all her air.
Once recovered, but still reeling under the combined effects of Papa’s porridge fumes, Mama’s debilitating downers and Baby Bear’s amphetamine-laden treats, G decides to throw herself from a great height at the final chair as the great green downward Background Velocity Arrow (that the artist blatanly ripped off from Sega's 1988 classic "Altered Beast") would have us believe. The Bear-tested, Mother-Approved seat breaks apart in a cataclysmic shock of pastel Powerpoint arrows and matching lens flares, so as to indicate the obvious seriousness of the issue. In the next panel, the amphetamines wear off and the mathaqualone kicks in, so G makes a desperate rush upstairs, bending her knees mightily from their locked position. The artist must have worked with one of those wireframe mannequins for hours on this one.
We don’t get to see what Papa bear’s bed looks like, but here in Mama’s bed, G looks like she’s about to make all sorts of people cover their eyes and scream “BAD TOUCH!” as the hidden memories come flooding in.
And now, as the story enters the turnpike, we are lulled into a false sense of security as G falls asleep in Baby bears bed, her pleasant purple outfit clashing gently with the dark green sheets, we are reminded that she hasn’t bothered taking off her boots this entire time. In the near background, a hairless bear doll lies on the bedside table, much as a skinned human dolls might lie at the bedside of a particularly violent lunatic-child. But G sleeps the sleep of the righteous. If by righteous, we mean stoned. “Soon the three bears come home”, the next panel reads, and by the feverish glint in their eyes, they’re joneseing for their hit of porridge right about now. “We’re almost home” Baby bears seems to say, but the look in Papa’s eyes echoes back, “not yet, son, wait until the PCP wears off and we can tell where the horizon lines meet”. Mama Bear hums “Mother’s Little Helper” in a distracted and wistful sort of way, fumbling for her purse but finding it empty.
Hoo boy, now we see the true nature of our hosts, and boy are they pissed. Papa’s got that red-eye thing that means every blood vessel in his eyeballs has just burst from another capillary rage reaction to missing out on his porridge. Mama appears to be taking the more stoic evil villain approach, by the crafty set to her eyes and the sudden robotic lobster claw into which her paw has mutated, while the other has shifted into a mode that could only be used to cut Julienne fries like no StarFrit ever has. Papa’s thumb has apparently dislocated itself as well in his sudden outpouring of homicidal feeling, and great green Grinch-coloured ferns spill out into the house from the floor to highlight the obvious chlorophyllic nature of his anger.
Baby Bear, eternal diplomat and well versed in his parents subtle shifts of temper, attempts to disarm the situation with humour. Expectorating bits of lung into his bowl, he spasmodically vibrates and leaks a violet jellylike substance that can only be called clean sweat if you’re a Russian Olympic judge at a swim meet and your team’s up next. Somehow, in the shuffle, his right hand has slipped entirely off the bowl and his right thumb has fallen off, but the great Green Sun rising behind him (third one today) must offset both gravity and pain... or is that just another hallucination? Either way, it has the intended effect, as Papa bear judiciously uses a few drops of Visine between panels and slips Mama Bear something from his store of aphrodisiacs. She looks downright demure and amorous all of a sudden, and the robot claws have disappeared, but the way she’s pushing baby bear into the parlour and the expectant look on his face, I don’t like the looks of this...
Oh dear, the other shoe’s dropped, and as they discover the violation of their ‘parlour’, Mama’s lobsterlike appendages and evil eyebrows reappear. As they knit in a calculation and analysis of the situation, Mama’s eyebrows fail to notice Dadzilla bear’s transformation as he gains a number of super-powers, notably the Yuletide Sonic Fists of Death (normally only used for foreplay), the sudden Louferrignonian gain in mass, and as we look through the post of the bed, the occasional gap in reality where the colorist forgot to paint by the numbers. Meanwhile, Papa’s wrath is obviously about to cause him a stroke, as his face leans precariously in one direction while his eyes twist into an entirely new shape even as barely refreshed capillaries burst freshly anew. Overreaction? Hardly, given that none of them have dosed up with their porridge and are all experiencing massive withdrawal symptoms.
Ever the stage-hog, Baby bear hams it up, the length of his orange vest changing yet again as it clashes with the little purple testicles he wears around his neck for good luck, and as more pastel sparks of electro-emo-angst pour out of him to show his obvious distress. His transparent ploy works its magic on his poor demented parents as they calm down yet again, Papa bear pausing only slightly to attempt to cheer him up with his amazing vanishing paw and ventriloquism trick, or perhaps merely the artist’s lack of talent. It only serves to make the pain worse, as Baby Bear realizes that he has gnawed off yet another digit on his right hand to keep himself from calling 9-1-1 and getting the heck out of Dodge. As Mama bear cops another free feel in the following panel, Baby’s eyes glisten over as the fingers on his right hand regenerate and he contemplates a full course meal, followed by both his feet and he manages to keep his sanity by somehow trying to find a way to ingest his own head next. Papa bear seems much recovered at this point and only interested in ogling Mama bear.
At this point, Baby bear’s magic appears to have done the trick as Mama’s lobster claws only serve to hold Papa back, her eyes no longer glinting with maniacal fervor. Papa’s anger management therapy seems to be taking hold as well, as jagged art deco lines pour out of his head. His top fang dentures appear to have fallen out and he must be a few pints down as even his eyes no longer burst at the sight of yet another violation of their private areas.
Ah-ha-ha, it’s time for a family moment of fun. Baby bear appears to be slapping himself upside the head “Oh Jizz, did I leave this silly old animatronic beast-bot in my bed again, Dad?” . “Haha, son, and look, it’s bubbling over with Jelly. “Oh dear,” gasps Mama, “What did you do to it’s hips...and...are...are those cowboy boots?”. “Look darling,” says Papa, “it’s making its Bukkake-mode face at us...”
“Thank goodness they never suspected anything, I’d better use my magical fairy powers and escape”, the poor drug-addled girl mumbles to herself as she flings herself from a second-storey window and down the path below. In the next panel, the bears wave kindly goodbye. “Get the 50-caliber French sniper rifle, Mavis” says Papa. “I can’t”, replies Mama, “I’m stuck.”
Eventually Baby bear arrives with buckets of lubricant, setting everyone free. No. Wait. It’s just porridge. And just the way everyone likes it! “I’ve laced it with the hemlock I collected during our morning walk”, thinks Baby gleefully to himself, as he spoons a third helping into his bowl and watches his parents hungrily digging in...
