By Elliot Toburen — Classic fairytales were all about passing on life lessons so that the next generation of young people would know what to believe and who to be. Webtoon Original Cursed Princess Club may be a comedy, but while puns and visual gags abound, the life lessons it offers keep it true to its fairytale roots. Lambcat, the webcomic’s creator, bills CPC as a fairytale like the ones you loved as a kid, with the lessons you needed to hear back then. Featuring base coloring by Shei (@sheidraws) and edited by Eunice Baik, its specially composed soundtrack and strong use of the scroll format make it a shining example of what makes Webtoon a platform to watch.

Cursed Princess Club stars Princess Gwendolyn, a somewhat unconventional looking princess who has grown up completely isolated from the outside world. When Gwen’s father arranges marriages for her and her sisters, the bubble of her family’s adoration abruptly pops, courtesy of a new fiance who is repulsed by Gwen and even frightened of her. For the first time in her life, Gwen wonders how her looks affect not only her desirability but also her worth as a person.

When Gwen meets the cursed princesses of the eponymous club, they immediately take her under their wing. As Princess Calpernia, the club’s president, teaches Gwen about self love, Gwen’s fiance, Prince Frederick, goes on his own journey that mirrors hers. Gwen and Frederick are both the youngest members of their families, and neither of them are completely sure that they belong. While Gwen struggles to overcome her internal prejudices about what a woman and a princess should look like, think, and do, Frederick has to overcome similar ideas about manhood.

As we get to know Princess Calpernia, a.k.a. Prez, better, Prez reveals that her own upbringing was just as strict and insular as Gwen’s. Every lesson she teaches Gwen is one that she needed herself not too long ago. Prez subverts society’s gender based expectations with her actions as well as her immaculate pantsuits; when a princess needs to be rescued, she does it herself no matter the risk. The in-world Cursed Princess Club is a place where people who cannot achieve happiness and a storybook ending by the usual narrow channels can gather to support each other and honor the progress they have made on their personal journeys.

Lambcat, the creator of Cursed Princess Club, brings the series to life with a masterfully composed original soundtrack, downloadable from her Patreon, that transitions from jaunty to heartfelt at the drop of a hat.  A composer first, Lambcat’s soundtrack perfectly underscores the emotional beats of her comic for a richer, more immersive reading experience.  The sheer vibrant success of CPC’s soundtrack makes musical accompaniment feel like an untapped resource full of potential.  I can’t wait to see what Lambcat and other musically inclined webcomic creators, like Kelsey Peterson of Spiderforest’s Court of Roses, do next to expand our understanding of what a comic can be.

Cursed Princess Club’s scroll format works wonderfully in concert with the music to bring the story to life from the very beginning with subtle environmental storytelling.  The story begins with a short prologue paired with haunting music that uses scrolling to slowly reveal that the women we’re watching get ready for a night out aren’t entirely normal.  During a flashback or at night, the white space around the panels becomes black to help set the mood.  Scrolling allows Lambcat to do this gradually with gradients.  It’s so interesting to be able to feel the passage of time even before a shot of the sky.  

The gradient technique is used to particularly jarring effect when Gwen overhears Frederick insulting her looks.  In an instant, the bright white background turns dark and is filled with shattered glass and blurred words.  Before we see Gwen’s face, we know that she is incredibly hurt.  Later, when Gwen runs away to the forest in tears, the background shifts back to black and the music changes to resemble the prologue, sad and dramatic and frightening.  Gwen and the reader share the same fear.  The scrolling format also allows Lambcat to linger over tender moments, slowly pan over a crowd like a cinematographer, or otherwise make flat images and text seem to occupy three dimensional space.

On a meta level, the strongest way Lambcat uses the webcomic medium to tell her story is with Frederick’s fairytale-within-a-fairytale.  In flashbacks and dreams, Frederick recalls a story from his childhood that seems to parallel his decisions and growth as he wonders if his first impressions of Gwen were wrong.  Just like Lambcat’s readers, younger Frederick needed life lessons that his childhood fairytale wasn’t there to tell him.  Now that he is starting to seek out those lessons as a young adult, he returns to the story of the angel and the serpent in his dreams as his mind fills in the gaps.

Like Gwen, Frederick’s dream angel tells him that she can’t rescue him from his hole alone.  He has to pull himself up the rest of the way.  He has to choose for himself whether he wants to spend the rest of his life chasing the kind of manhood his father always expected for him at the expense of his heart or if he wants to develop into a softer masculinity that fits him.  When Frederick meditates with a mentor, he discovers that part of him has been “in the hole” for a long time, ever since a traumatic bullying episode in military school.  In order to be the kind of person who can treat Gwen—and himself—correctly, Frederick works to pull himself up and heal from the toxic lessons he internalized in the past to make way for a life and self he can be proud of.  At the same time, the story keeps hinting that Frederick may have to fight a metaphorical version of the giant serpent in the story before he will be truly free to live wisely and well.

For all the puns, llama jokes, and the “true love’s kiss” from a waffle, Cursed Princess Club comes off as a fundamentally honest coming of age story that seeks to remind young people to treat themselves as valuable.  Much like Brimstone and Roses and The Sea In You, Lambcat’s masterpiece is a fantastical self-love story chock full of humor and heart.  Planned as a four season fairy tale, CPC began its third season earlier this year and updates every Monday.

Cursed Princess Club

Cursed Princess Club on Webtoon
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This piece is the first in a new monthly series about webcomics!

Elliot Toburen is a writer, editor, general webcomic fanatic, and one half of the creative team behind the upcoming webcomic Superfluence. If you want to read the same excited yelling about webcomics with more typos, you can catch him on Twitter.