Grim Tales from Down Below



The second crossover Web Comic from Vinson Ngo a.k.a Bleedman (the first being Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi), created in late 2004 (roughly a year after PPGD was started). Grim Tales from Down Below is a fan-comic based on fanfics, focusing on two characters created by E.R.M Griffin (DeadDoll00), the children of Grim and a now adult Mandy, from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, who in this Alternate Continuity are the king and queen of the underworld: Grim Jr. (a.k.a. Junior) and his patchwork sister Minnie (short for Mini-Mandy), while incorporating an origin fanfic for the two which was written by SonicRose.

Like PPGD, Grim Tales started off at DeviantArt before Ngo moved it to Snafu-Comics. Already well known, Grim Tales added more readers to Ngo's already overflowing fanbase. Ngo has a penchant for incorporating Narm, and Darker and Edgier in his works, and as such, the comic has garnered some controversy, particularly regarding a plot point within the comic where it is revealed

After six years, the main series eventually finished in June 2009 and was apparently the end to the series. However Ngo unveiled he was working a short sequel called AfterBirth that apparently deals with Minimandy coping with her agelessness and being left alone after Junior sets out on a life of adventure. Here are some preview pics of the comic.

In February 2011, The comic continued with a mini-series called Grim Tales: What About Mimi (GT: WhAM) which will bridge the gap between the main story and Afterbirth. The comic follows  Mimi, who is sent into the Grim's household to local an object of immense power for him. During said mission, Mimi's past is brought to light bringing many shocking swerves with it.

If you're intrigued by all of the above, then commence reading. The sequel, Afterbirth, is uploaded fully on the Grim Tales Wiki. (Warning: you will have to navigate carefully to avoid spoilers)

Now has a Character Sheet. Feel free to contribute.

Grim Tales From Down Below provides examples of:

 * Absurdly Sharp Blade: Pain's sword
 * Almost Kiss: Mimi is such a Moment Killer sometimes.
 * Always a Bigger Fish: No kidding
 * Art Evolution: Same as PPGD, the style changed as the comic progressed
 * Art Shift
 * Ascended Fanon: The flashback was originally a fanfiction written by a fan that Bleedman decided to incorporate into the story.
 * Author Appeal: Mimi and Junior have a very...suggestive relationship.
 * Author On Board
 * Badass: Has quite a few of em.
 * Bad Future: this strip
 * Bad Humor Truck
 * Beam-O-War: It's payback time, bitch!
 * Big Bad: Three of 'em: Ooogie Boogie, Him, and finally Minnie's Nergal demons. Boogeyman in Afterbirth
 * Big Damn Heroes: Several. This being a quite prominent example.
 * Raven was looking like one in Mimi's flashback...until Him shows up
 * Berserk Button: Do not mess with Junior if you don't want to face the wrath of Minnie. Which leads us to...
 * Beware the Nice Ones: Minnie is sweet, gentle, respectful, and caring. Make her mad if you want to.
 * Black Speech
 * Brother-Sister Incest: Minnie thinks of Junior as more than just a brother, despite her denials, This seems to indicate that at some point in the future Grim Jr. will return her affections . Right now they seem to have an odd brother-sister version of a Romantic Two-Girl Friendship.
 * By the Power of Greyskull: Or Nergal, as the case may be.
 * More of a lampshading than an actual invocation of said trope.
 * Calling the Old Man Out:
 * And Junior to Mandy over Mimi
 * Cooldown Hug: Minnie gives Junior one to stop his monster side.
 * And before that  
 * Clingy Jealous Girl: Minnie is not appreciative of Junior appreciating Mimi's skills, or her Too Kinky to Torture moment.
 * Continuity Nod:, Minnie makes reference to a piece of Valentine's day throwaway art involving the girl in the well.
 * Crossover: With several other shows. Most notably, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Danny Phantom.
 * Dora the Explorer, Teletubbies...where IS that Ice Cream Man from, anyway?
 * Prepare to feel very silly ...
 * Even some characters from the obscure cartoon Visionaries appear as Many's henchmen.
 * Mandy's weapon vault is a room made of shoutouts to too many other books, movies, comics, cartoons and myths to count... but it's fun to try anyway
 * Cute Monster Girl: Minnie, Mimi
 * Darker and Edgier
 * Read Afterbirth. If you thought Grim Tales was morbid... you ain't seen nothing yet. Let's summarize:  And the ending...
 * Dead Little Sister: Played straight and subverted.
 * Death By Cameo:
 * Distracted By the Sexy: Looks Like She Is Enjoying It. That was clever.
 * Grim's urgent entrance gets a little side tracked, as seen here. Not that we can blame him.
 * Eldritch Abomination: Ngo is quite apt at these.
 * Emergency Transformation: The comic pretty much leads up to this.
 * Enemy Without: What happened when Junior couldn't control Minnie's powers.
 * Failure Is the Only Option: Him knew all along that Mimi wouldn't be able to stand reliving her greatest fear via "Horror's Hand." The mission to retrieve it was pretty much his way of "disciplining" her for her earlier betrayal.
 * Fan Service
 * Fan Disservice
 * Flipping the Bird: Junior to Mandy. Kid's either got a solid set on him for a skeleton, or an un-death wish.
 * Flowery Elizabethan English: Minnie Mandy speaks like a person under the influence of too much Shakespeare.
 * Gender Equals Breed: Minimandy is a human and Junior is a reaper.
 * Somewhat subverted by the fact that
 * Good Thing You Can Heal: Grim flat out says this to his son. Minnie even says "the pain will be brief".
 * Heel Face Turn:
 * Hot Mom: Mandy "HUBBA HUBBA! Is that your Mom?". Also
 * How We Got Here: The whole comic is basically one big flashback. Even having a flashback within a flashback when Junior tells Lock, Shock, and Barrel how his parents got together.
 * Hyperspace Arsenal: Mimi pulls this is pretty much every appearance, some of them are truly absurd, and hilarious.
 * I Know You Are in There Somewhere Fight: Junior with Minnie due to Him's influence.
 * If I Can't Have You:
 * I'll Kill You!: See above spoiler.
 * Incest Subtext: Minnie has... tendencies.
 * Informed Ability: Helga Pataki can be a jerk, but the idea that she's ended up as ”the meanest and rottenest teacher in the underworld” is overdoing it.
 * However, this could be a case of Unreliable Narrator.
 * She was why Minnie talks the way she does, so it could be more of a Sugar and Ice Personality.
 * Interspecies Romance: Mandy and Grim, Minimandy and Grim Jr.,Mimi and Grim Jr., and
 * Kamehame Hadoken: Dark Danny
 * Lovecraftian Superpower: The Nergal demons have these
 * Love Triangle:Grim Jr., Minnie,and Mimi
 * Mayfly-December Romance: Mandy and Grim.
 * Meaningful Background Event: During the fight with the Pumpkinator redux Nergal Junior's silhouette is visible.
 * On this page, there are three heroes which come to Mimi's aide,.
 * Mega Crossover: And how! Even Spawn shows up.
 * Ms. Fanservice: Mandy grows up real nice. REAAAALLL NICE.
 * Naughty Tentacles: One of the pages has this title. See?.
 * And this scene is a perfect example.
 * Neck Snap: How  kills.
 * Mimi pulls one on Junior also, but it's played for laughs as the whole page was a big Mortal Kombat spoof/parody/etc.
 * Negative Continuity: The use of this in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy is revealed to be Grim just not feeling like reaping them.
 * In Mandy's case it was for a specific purpose. Billy on the other hand... Well it's complicated
 * No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Observe.
 * Noodle People: Minnie has extremely long legs for an eight-year-old girl, and highlights this by wearing leotards and extremely short dresses all the time. Exhibit A. It gets more pronounced as the Art Evolution goes on; in the beginning she looks more normal. Junior looks pretty noodley himself in this page.
 * Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Practically everything that happens in the story is Junior's fault for telling his sister off. Disaster Dominoes, anyone?
 * Obligatory Swearing
 * Oh Crap: Several times, especially Junior's face in this comic
 * One-Winged Angel: Minnie, with and without her soul. Particularly gruesome in the latter.
 * Was that all you got, WORM?
 * Him also has one which he assumes
 * Panty Shot: Oh sorry, "Realistic Skirt Physics" =P
 * And yet there's still a fair amount of Magic Skirt action. Whether girls jumping around in extremely short skirts results in a Panty Shot seems to depend entirely on the whim of the artist.
 * Orphan's Ordeal: In this image, Mimi witnesses Raven's death at the hands of Him, barely able to utter the word "Mama" as she falls. Given what we know becomes of her under Him's "care"...
 * She survived, but given how things are going, give it another three pages...
 * Pass the Popcorn: Clockwork.
 * Pensieve Flashback: Mandy activates a device in the vault which sends them and Mimi into one.
 * Purity Personified: Minnie. Except for the incest and Yandere aspects.
 * Puppy Love: Oh, dear God, the Puppy Love...
 * Ruins of the Modern Age:
 * Shared Universe: with Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi (albeit a bit into the future)
 * Actualy the co-writer/editor Bee Are and the colorist Seiryuga for PPGD have reportedly stated this to be false. Though as Seriyuga no longer works on the comic this has turned into a Flip-Flop of God.
 * Shout-Out
 * Nergal's "soul eating sword effectively makes him Nightmare.
 * The same page as Adult Mandy is on? Yea, tear your eyes off her and look to the bottom-right. It's a line-for-line reference to "LA Bretto", from Dexters Laboratory. Just see for yourself.
 * The Angry Video Game Nerd cameos here as the personification of the Deadly Sin Wrath.
 * The demon-mecha has an odd Verbal Tic. Yes...
 * See The Cameo. Nasty Burger is from Danny Phantom.
 * "Am I not Merciful!?"
 * And just like the Jollibee shout out in The Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi, Bleedman made a shout out to another another Filipino franchise in this page.
 * Next to the sword Mini pulls out of Jr's Body to fight Mimi is A red hilted Frostmourne.
 * When Mimi infiltrates Grim's vault in the WHaM comic, every panel has one or two items on display in the background from some other franchise. They've ranged from Captain America's shield, to the Lament Configuration, to the Sword of Omens, etc.
 * And the Omnitrix and Mjlonir and Hellboy's stone hand thing and Chemical X and a Giglypi and a robot with Freakin Laser Beams.
 * Spartan Shield, what looks like the silhouette of Link's shield, Freddy's clawed glove, the Infinity Gauntlet, A silhouette that could be Hector Con Carne's brain, and the vial identified previously as Chemical X could just as easily be Antidote X, since it is black in color.
 * Mimi in this page somewhat resembles Senjougahara (as seen in that page's image).
 * The Golem may look familiar to those who watched Samurai Jack. He's the Lava Monster/Norse Warrior that Jack help set free. The size and color may be different, but the resemblance is uncanny.
 * Mimi fires Angry Birds!
 * Skyward Scream - Mimi after her flashback from Hell
 * Starfish Language: Check that article's picture.
 * Summon Bigger Fish: Damn straight
 * The Cameo: Coop seen here.
 * The Chessmaster: Clockwork
 * The President's Daughter: Minnie. For the love of God, Minnie.
 * The Unfavourite: Poor Junior, doesn't mean his parents and especially his sister don't care though.
 * Particularly ironic when considering the later revelation that it's actually MINNIE who is Grim's Un-Favorite, due to her being the child of Nergal Jr., himself the son of his old rival, Nergal. He hides it flawlessly in front of his kids, but he definitely favors Junior over Minnie by a long shot. Whether that changed when Nergal's powers was passed from Minnie to Junior is another matter...
 * The Unintelligible: The "Nergellian Speak" Minnie, Nergal and later possess is show only as symbols and never translated. Even the Ngo himself lampshades he has no idea what their saying.
 * Although, sometimes you can get the basic idea of what they might be saying. Near the end, their "Nergellian" appears in the form of hearts.
 * One of the most recent pages actually translates a short conversation between Junior and Mandy in the Nergel speak as footnotes.
 * The Voiceless: Mimi doesn't utter a word through her appearance in the comic.
 * This Is for Emphasis, Bitch: Dark Danny has a line or two like this.
 * Time Skip: If the preview pics are to be believed, Afterbirth will be this.
 * Tomato Surprise:
 * Too Kinky to Torture: Mimi being stretched out by Minnie only hurts her for a second until she starts liking it.
 * The Worf Effect: Once again, poor Junior.
 * Villainous BSOD: A brief one, but with a twist. Dark Danny here contemplates the chaos and destruction of Megaville shown in Mimi's past via "The Hand of Horror." He has a BSOD of sorts not because he caused the destruction, but that he wasn't around to cause it. Also a touch of Fridge Logic when you realize that with all the heroes gone, that includes the young Danny Phantom, meaning their rivalry will never be settled like Dark Danny wanted.
 * Wall of Text: Rather extreme in both this and this
 * Yandere: Minnie.
 * Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Minnie.
 * Your Cheating Heart: Mandy cheated on Grim with Recently, she's apparently slept with . As it's clearly stated that Grim cannot, and it is unclearly stated that there isn't anything except bones to him, it might be a "can't fulfill your needs" situation, and Grim knows about
 * You Said You Would Let Them Go: Here
 * You Shall Not Pass: After Mimi's demonic essence is removed and contained, Mandy orders Pain to remove her from the premises...but Junior's suddenly blocking the way and his eye is aglow. Defying your mother is one thing, but when she's Mandy, it takes some real Brass Balls, skeleton or not.