grimm
Explanation
This multi-panel comic begins with a character complaining: "I hate all these Disney-fied versions of old fairy tales!" Another character responds: "She would point to the scary and dark originals and say kids are being told they're 'too young' for the originals, and that's 'doing something' to them, making it 'end something stranger.'"
The comic then presents the text of an actual Brothers Grimm fairy tale — "Grimm 117: The Stubborn Child." The tale reads: "Once upon a time there was a child who was willful and did not do what his mother wanted. God was displeased with him and caused him to become ill. No doctor could help him, and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. He was lowered into a grave and covered with earth, but his little arm came back out and reached up. They pushed it back in and covered him with fresh earth, but it didn't help. The little arm kept coming out. So the mother had to go to the grave and beat the little arm with a switch. When she did that, the arm finally came to rest beneath the ground." The tale ends with "THE END."
In the final panel, one character says: "Whoa, one more — wait, is there a talking animal?" The other responds: "There could be a pop song called 'Stubborn.'"
The joke has multiple layers. First, it satirizes the common complaint that Disney has sanitized fairy tales — the person demanding "the real versions" gets exactly what they asked for, and it turns out the original Grimm fairy tales are not just "darker" but genuinely horrifying and disturbing. "The Stubborn Child" is an actual Brothers Grimm story (tale number 117, also known as "Das eigensinnige Kind"), and it really is as grim (pun intended) as presented — a dead child's arm keeps reaching out of the grave until the mother beats it with a switch.
The final panel provides comic relief: after hearing this deeply unsettling tale, the characters' reaction circles back to the Disney-fication question, with one person joking about whether there's a talking animal and the other suggesting it could be turned into a pop song called "Stubborn" — implying that yes, even this nightmarish tale could theoretically be given the Disney treatment. The humor comes from the enormous gap between the brutal source material and the sanitized entertainment products people actually want.