Character/Zenescope Entertainment

Rumpelstiltskin

Zenescope

In the Zenescope Entertainment comics universe, Rumpelstiltskin is a dwarf who was once a prince. When a miller tells the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold, the king imprisons the girl in a room in the castle and tells her she must spin the roomful of straw into gold for him overnight, lest he put her and her father to death. Desperate, when Rumpelstiltskin appears and offers to turn the straw to gold in exchange for her bracelet, the girl quickly agrees. The king, finding the room full of gold the next morning, rejoices, but he wants to be sure... he keeps the girl a second night, and gives her the same task again, offering to marry her if she can spin the straw to gold once more. When Rumpelstiltskin comes to her at night, she has nothing left to exchange for the transformation of straw to gold. Rumpelstiltskin asks for her firstborn child. Once again desperate, the girl agrees. Overjoyed at finding another roomful of gold the next day, the king marries the miller's daughter, and soon they have a son. Rumpelstiltskin comes to the miller's daughter (now queen), and wants to take her baby, but she refuses. He gives her one chance to keep her son: she must guess Rumpelstiltskin's name within three days. Obtaining the name through a messenger from a shadowy figure, she keeps her son until his thirteenth birthday, when the shadowy figure appears at the castle. He tells the story of a prince turned to a hideous dwarf by an evil witch, and how the curse can only be broken by the passing of it to another prince willingly provided by his mother, and how the seal for the magic was the mother's utterance of Rumpelstiltskin's name. It is at this moment of realization that Rumpelstiltskin turns the prince into a dwarf, transforming himself simultaneously back into a prince.