Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cinderella in Cinderella (2010), a “graphic novel” by Chris Roberson (writer) and Shawn McManus (artist), is a fairy tale figure-cum-action heroine.  Sound bad?  Not quite.  In fact, it’s okay.  It’s a breezy, pleasantly drawn and colored page-turner with a cable-TV miniseries plot. . . Granted, Cinderella is too strong for a girl, but it must be remembered that she is what is called a “fable” and thus not human.  Nor is there any indication that she does what she does—spy stuff—to make a feminist point.  She is just the uncomplicated female spy we want her to be—in a comic book.

The second novel in the series is Cinderella In A Bikini.  Well, no, it’s Cinderella: Fables Are Forever (2012), but it’s more harmlessly sensual—for several pages Cindy is in a bikini, and so is her adversary: a grown-up Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz!—than the first book.  It’s better than viewing P***y Galore in an objectifying James Bond picture.