GFT Retrospective #36: How Not to Go On the Run

Hey, everyone!

It's Old Comic Book Day again, and the Retrospective has returned with some new material to whet your appetites. This is another miniseries, so I'm going to just put the TicketVerse Trades stuff right up front for you if you'd like to avoid spoilers before getting into my commentary and analysis.

Beyond Wonderland

Digital Trade: Beyond Wonderland
Includes the following:
Beyond Wonderland #0-6
Beyond Wonderland Cover Gallery
Calie Liddle's Diary
Interview w/ Fantastic Realm Calie Statue Artist C.S. Moore

And with that, on to my review of Volume Two of the Wonderland Trilogy, which includes some rules for going on the run that should be followed (however strangely Wonderland-specific they may be), but aren't because there has to be a plot or something.

So, what do you do when you’ve started out your trilogy by Returning to Wonderland? You go Beyond Wonderland in the second miniseries, obviously! Well, at least that’s what Zenescope came up with before the EDM festival became a thing....

You might recall that at the end of Return to Wonderland, Calie Liddle pushed her brother Johnny through the looking glass to Wonderland after he murdered their father, and then she used her evil grandfather’s money to go into hiding with her boyfriend and got pregnant.

Beyond Wonderland picks up with a recurring nightmare that Calie has been having ever since she left home. Her boyfriend, Brandon, either doesn’t know about it or doesn’t understand why she’s having the dream in the first place. But against her better judgement to stay unattached to anyone, Calie has fallen in love with Brandon.

Going by the name Lacy (because what better way to hide from an insane, evil dimension than assuming the name used by your mother’s sanity while it was trapped in that same dimension?--breaking Going On the Run Rule #1, by the way), Calie now works 80 hour weeks at a diner in New York that’s run by a guy who’s basically the much fatter, much less perverted version of the cook on 2 Broke Girls. And why would a pregnant woman work 80 hours a week in a hot, sweaty diner in the largest, rudest city in America? Well, because she’s basically Nancy from A Nightmare On Elm Street by this point, with an entire Freddy Kreuger dimension looking for her. She’s afraid that if she falls asleep, the dream will either kill her or drive her insane. Never mind that after a certain period without sleep, the human brain will be subject to hallucinations and death anyway, but comic books, so….

She tells Brandon everything about what happened in the last miniseries, and (because male stupidity) he blabs to his work buddies, who get him to recommend that Calie/Lacie sees a therapist. She…isn’t happy about it.

And that whole “stupidest possible change of identity” thing? Johnny is now the Mad Hatter, just like in her dream, and he takes advantage of Calie and Brandon’s argument by kidnapping Brandon into Wonderland and leaving Calie a Dear John letter (fitting) from “Brandon.”

The very first line of the second issue is, “I hope his dick falls off.” Seriously. That’s the first line. Go read it.

Apparently, Calie/Lacy has a best friend named Melody (yet again breaking Going On the Run Rule #2: Don’t get attached to anyone), and her hair has gradually gone blonde over the course of the zeroth and first issues (breaking Going On the Run Rule #1.5: If your mother’s sanity gets trapped in an alternate dimension and you’re already using her name as a false identity, don’t go walking around one of the biggest cities in America with the same hair color as hers). No wonder Johnny found her so quickly.

Which brings us to Going On the Run Rule #3: If a cat--one that looks suspiciously like the dark purple cat that was hanging out with your evil grandfather when he told you about sacrificing you to Wonderland--walks into your house, immediately thrash it around the room by the tail and fling it out the highest possible window before it can grow giant and maul you. Yeah, Calie didn’t follow that one, either.

Of course, Melody gets killed by Cheshire, and somewhere in Wonderland, Brandon gets skinned alive by lizards.

Following this, and another nightmare, Calie contemplates suicide, stopped by thoughts of her baby growing up without a mother.

Meanwhile, we learn that the Queen of Hearts is back, running a funhouse in New York, that Johnny has some kind of knife with a spade marking on it (more on what it is later), and that a third mystery player is stalking Calie.

The fourth issue is a flashback that relates Johnny’s encounter with the Flower Girls (more on them in a future Tales volume), the first (?) Mad Hatter, Alice’s sanity, and how he got the Ebony Blade (that’s the spade knife introduced last issue).

After killing Alice’s sanity and the Mad Hatter (look back at Tales Volume One for hints on who that is) with the Ebony Blade, Johnny makes a revenge deal with the Chinese dragon thing and the Reaper figure (obscurely referred to here as “the Death card”--more on that when we get to the 2016/2017 issues of Grimm Fairy Tales) first seen in Retrospective continuity in the GFT 2008 Annual.

Back in the present, in the fifth issue, Calie’s mystery stalker turns out to be her actual grandfather, Howard Liddle, and their conversation leads into another flashback.

So “Pappy” is actually Calie’s great-grandfather. He sent Calie’s great-aunt through the looking glass and arranged the car accident that killed her real grandmother and sent Howard to prison for ten years.

Of course, Johnny and Cheshire have been spying on them the whole time, and kill everyone at the

diner to goad Calie into a final showdown at the top of the Empire State Building.

When Calie gets there, Johnny has set up the Allen looking glass, with the intention of pushing her through to Wonderland. But she fights back.

That’s what I love about the Wonderland series. No matter how nonsensical the plot, no matter how stupid Calie is about trusting people or paying attention to her environment, no matter how incompetent she is about running away, when she fights back, it makes for great reading. The imagery that goes into each fight is (usually) clear and epic, and just bloody enough to not be more over-the-top than necessary. More broadly, the art style across the trilogy and most of the Tales is consistent, giving welcome cohesion to the madness.

That being said, here’s Going On the Run Rule #4: If the guy who’s trying to kill you does eventually find you, and if, in the middle of a fight, he says “I can heal if I can get back through the mirror to Wonderland” (long-winded paraphrasing), don’t behead him when he’s laying next to said mirror.

So Calie beheads Johnny while his head is inches away from the Allen glass, and it’s clear from every shown angle that Johnny’s head is nowhere to be found on the rooftop. As in Return to Wonderland, she smashes the mirror (because that worked so well last time), and the worst part appears to be over.

Except, nope.

Later, Calie is in the hospital, giving birth to her daughter, Violet.

By the way, Going On the Run Rule #5 says that if you’re living in a universe where women can turn people into flowers (again, see the GFT 2008 Annual), and the evil insanity dimension you are running from is down a Flower Girl, don’t name your daughter Violet.

Thanks to Calie not following Rule #4, Johnny’s head grew a new body and he came back to the sane world and kidnapped Violet.

The individual print issues held some supplemental materials: a reprint of Calie’s journal entry to Violet from Tales Volume One, a preview of Escape From Wonderland #0, and an interview with the sculptor of the Fantastic Realm Calie statue, but otherwise this ends Beyond Wonderland.