10th Anniversary Van Helsing

Spoilers for Grimm Fairy Tales’ 10th Anniversary Van Helsing special. Continuing with the anniversary specials, Van Helsing takes Liesel back to London in 1844 and builds its story around something that makes sense for her character: being smart enough to build a time machine doesn’t mean she’s ready for what happens when she uses it. David Wohl’s story brings H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine into the Grimm Universe, but the reason she climbs into that machine is much more personal than wanting to see the future. Liesel loses her cousin Marcus during a vampire hunt. He saves her, and she’s left with the knowledge that he died protecting her. She already has the beginnings of a time machine in her workshop, so after his death, finishing it becomes a way to undo what happened. Abraham warns her that traveling through time might create another timeline instead of changing the one she knows. He also wants her to test the machine before she puts herself inside it. She understands the warning, but she’s grieving, and she goes anyway. Her first stop is 2044, where her own home has become a museum. There’s something strange about watching someone walk through an exhibit about herself while she’s still trying to figure out how her life is supposed to go. The museum credits the Van Helsings with developing a virus that wiped out vampires, and its account includes her mother, Elizabeth, whom Liesel believes died when she was a baby. It even tells her about her own apparent sacrifice. She’s being handed a history of her family that doesn’t match the family she knows. Then she tries to return to 1844 and finds London in ruins. This is where the alternate-timeline warning starts to matter. The date can be right while everything else is wrong. Vampires control much of Europe, survivors are hiding underground, and the Morlocks roaming the streets are primates that have been turned into vampires. Liesel has to figure out how to fight creatures her usual weapons don’t all work against while also finding out what happened to this world. And then she finds Marcus alive. He has a wife, Mary, and a daughter named Liesel. Abraham is alive too. Their Liesel died fighting the Morlocks, but the weapons she designed and the people she helped are still there. She gets to see how much she mattered to a community that lost her, while standing beside the cousin she lost in her own world. For a little while, staying there seems possible. The world is terrible, but her family is together, and Marcus has a life she never got to see him have. That makes what happens next especially cruel. On patrol, Liesel hears someone calling for help and refuses to leave her behind, even when the others warn her that it could be a trap. Marcus follows her. They survive the Morlocks, but the woman Liesel tried to save is a vampire, and she attacks Marcus while he’s checking on Liesel. He dies again, and this time Liesel has to drive her sword through him and his attacker to keep him from turning. She went into the machine because she couldn’t live with losing him once. Now she has lost him twice, and there’s a wife and child waiting for him this time. The issue also keeps her compassion involved in that tragedy. Liesel refuses to walk past somebody who needs help. That’s a good part of who she is, even when acting on it puts her and the people beside her in danger. Knowing how the first loss happened doesn’t give her control over the second one. Anthony Spay’s art and Jorge Cortes’ colors carry the changes between the workshop, the bright museum, and the wrecked city. The family scenes underground give that ruined world people worth caring about before the story tears the reunion apart. And it doesn’t end with Liesel accepting the loss and returning safely home. She uses the machine’s last charge to escape, arrives somewhere that initially looks familiar, and walks straight into a vampire regime with uniformed troops marching through the streets. She’s captured, and the issue closes with “Not the End.” It ends on a cliffhanger, and that storyline was never continued in another comic. For an anniversary story, it leaves her in a pretty brutal place. Her invention works, but she still hasn’t saved Marcus or found her way home, and every world she reaches gives her another reason to question what she thought she knew about her family.