Zenescope - Omnibusted #3: The Piper Miniseries

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Omnibuster

In Cover Charge #3: Grimm Fairy Tales (FROM June 8, 2014), I gave this week's Omnibusted miniseries a Critical Quickie-style review that amounted to the following:

The Piper: The redhead from the Timepiece short story has a hand in unleashing The Pied Piper (issue #12) on the modern world, and the results are less than satisfactory or impactful on the "Grimm Universe" at large. At least it was a fun read.

The Retrospective review, on the other hand, was much less forgiving and ambivalent. You can give the original post and the Ticketverse Trades link-list (where it was paired with next week's Sinbad--which will come Omnibusted with Volume Two's as-yet-unreleased review as well) at the following links:

• GFT Retrospective #12: The Piper
• TicketVerse Trades #4: Two For None Special

And now, on to the review:

The Piper

Breaking from tradition, The Piper four-part miniseries opens with the fairy tale and lets the action flow from there. At the top left corner of the first panel, we see the familiar markings of a certain book cover. But this book is purple, not red like Sela’s.

The first issue’s cover (left, in two print editions) features the Pied Piper sitting and playing his flute alongside a certain red-headed woman, suggesting that there are in fact two books, and that she possesses the purple one. Within its pages, we learn that seven hundred thirty-three years in the past, the Pied Piper tale played out much as it had in Sela’s volume, but with more historical context and a different fate befalling the children at the end. The townspeople drown the piper out of revenge, and the miniseries moves on to present-day Florida.
At an elite prep school, a musical prodigy named Sean is being bullied by the jocks in his class (because true stereotypes). After hearing a strange melody one night, he runs into the red-headed woman, Belinda, who is posing as the school librarian and loans Sean her fairy tale book. When one of the bullies paralyzes a girl who had a crush on Sean, he reads from Belinda’s book and summons the Piper.
The next two issues play out like a typical slasher movie, with the Piper commanding various animals to kill the jocks and their coach one by one. But when the Piper sets his sights on Sean’s friends, Sean reads more of the book in an effort to send the Piper back from whence he came.
It is revealed that Belinda is at least twice as old as Sela, and that her book is some kind of fairy tale purgatory where evil souls (like the Piper) can be trapped. The surviving students and the music teacher attempt to trap the Piper by playing his melody backwards (because horror movie cliches), but the jocks read the summoning incantation, Candyman-style (because idiots).
Following a short but epic musical battle, Sean succeeds in trapping the Piper, but in a turn that is morqe ghost movie than fairy tale, the ending is not the end, nor is it happy. Different, entertaining, illuminating, but also derivative and consequently predictable.

I am currently working on Part 3 of What If GOKU Was NEVER BORN? and a franchise review of My Hero Academia. So Stay Tuned for those in the coming week. If you have any comments, please put them in the comments section, leave a like by hitting the like button, and click on some ads by clicking on ads so I can get rich by getting rich.

Obviousmaster,
obviously, out.