Countdown to TixMas #9: Winter Wonderland (Zenescope - Omnibusted #6)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Omnibuster

and TixMaster

'Tis the ninth day of the Countdown to TixMas, and this will be long.

Four days remain, with ladies dancing to a familiar song.

It's not the twelve days of true love's gifts, you must understand,

But the one where sleigh bells ring across the land.

One bite makes you bigger, one sip makes you small,

So like and comment, and take a great fall

Down a hole for a rabbit who's running quite late,

To a party with warm beverages, and madness so great.

So now that this verse has gotten you adjusted,

It's time to get epic with Zenescope - Omnibusted!

In addition to the Countdown, I'd like to welcome you all to the Mad Tea Party! Nothing's better during these cold, holiday months than a piping-hot beverage, and I wanted to keep on the pattern of releasing an Omnibusted compilation on Wednesday, so it's kind of perfect that the next Trade Paperback to release after GFT Volume 3 was Wonderland. It also helps that the Disney and Zenescope designs for Alice look like a palette-swapped Sexy Elf costume. Strap in because this isn't just going to be a single Trade getting reviewed here; I'm including all three Wonderland miniseries, the first three annuals (collected in the House Of Liddle Trade), and the two Volumes of Tales From Wonderland that I completed reviews for before financial issues, education priorities, and a job change began to work their burnout "magic" on my soul. Most of this is content that I had not released on Blogger before, so that should be a big draw for those of you willing to do a lot of reading.

*Deep breath*

Let's go walking in Wonderland!

As far back as Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective #6, I had been making references to Zenescope eventually branching out of their fairy tale/nursery rhyme/fable niche that they established (with mixed, but mostly favorable results) in their main series, and spinning off into Wonderland. Since 2007, it has grown from a miniseries trilogy to four Annuals, ten character-focused Tales, seven additional miniseries, two additional One-Shots, a crossover with Grimm Fairy Tales, a fifty-plus issue ongoing series, and who knows how much more since I stopped trying to keep up with the franchise. From both a scholarly perspective (read: I had to do a ton of research and back-reading to even understand what was going on the first time around) and a fanboy perspective, reading it all was a fun process.
Mostly.
Get ready for a ton of spoilers and cynicism.

Wonderland Volume #1: Return to Wonderland

You’re probably thinking that the first volume in a trilogy shouldn’t be called Return to Wonderland, but in Wonderland, the only thing that makes sense is that nothing makes sense.
I tried to keep that in mind the first time I read this, but I didn’t enjoy it or understand it that much because I was reading it in installments over a long period of time. I came into it with no future knowledge, and I tried too hard to make sense of it. But reading it again, Return to Wonderland does make sense.
Kind of.
Not really.

It begins with Alice Liddle, grown up and escaped from Wonderland. She’s sitting in a bathtub and staring at a picture of herself as a little girl, posing with two adults who are presumably her grandparents. Though the Return storyline takes place in modern times, the people in the photograph are dressed in period clothing, indicating either that they are in costume, or that Alice has spent two hundred of our years in Wonderland, only having aged twenty years or so in that time.
As a result of either the time discrepancy, or the psychological impact of Wonderland itself, Alice attempts suicide.
After a few panels in an institution, she returns home and adopts a white therapy rabbit (which is drawn to look like the creepiest rabbit since Bunnicula--for those who don’t know, yes, there actually is a children’s book series out there about a vampire bunny, but that’s a whole other topic that I most likely will not discuss further here).
Her daughter Calie (anagrams!) is sexually active and into psychedelic drugs--that seem to give Calie prophetic dreams about Wonderland--her husband Lewis (as in Caroll, except his last name is Liddle, and Calie is actually short for Carol Ann, go figure) is fifty shades of cheating on her, and Calie’s brother Johnny is secretly a budding serial killer, so Alice spends most of her days in a catatonic state, nigh chemically dependent on the white rabbit’s company.
When Alice has a nervous breakdown upon the rabbit’s disappearance, Calie offers to find it for her, and ends up falling down an inexplicably deep (never mind that it’s there at all) hole beneath a bookcase in the basement that leads to Wonderland.
At the bottom, Calie goes through the iconic “eat me, drink me, grow me, shrink me” sequence before being flushed out onto a beach where she finds a seafood restaurant owned and run by the Carpenter, the Walrus, Tweedle Dee, and Tweedle Dum. Completely ignoring the photo on the wall of Carpenter and Walrus posing with a man who’s been strung up like a fish, she goes exploring and finds that Walrus and the brothers Tweedle have been murdered by the Carpenter, who seeks to add Calie to his body count (and his dinner--yes, the Carpenter is a cannibal…who speaks in rhyme…).
While we’re on the subject of really, really, really weird stuff, the white rabbit is a psychic zombie, and some of the trees are Sarlacc beasts in disguise. Yeah, Star Wars reference.
So, after miraculously escaping the cannibal-poet-Carpenter and defeating one of the Sarlacc trees with some leftover shrinking water, Calie encounters a mysterious, hooded blonde woman in a metal mask who tells her to run because “he” is coming.
“He” turns out to be the Caterpillar, who makes about as much sense as he did in the original Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. After a bunch of psychedelic nonsense involving the Caterpillar and the mind-reading Forest of Signs (read them, they’re hilarious), Calie finds herself on the run from something huge and invisible with a lot of sharp teeth.
Ignoring the Forest’s warnings and her previous encounter with the Carpenter, she seeks refuge in the home of a man calling himself Hatter. Of course, Hatter drugs Calie and turns her into a naked sushi bar (because Zenescope) so he can kill her slowly or something. Being final girl in this particular "horror movie," however, Calie is able to shake off the drug’s effects and beat Hatter within a fractional inch of his life.
Though numerous covers of this series’ issues have already depicted her dressed in a racy, black version of Alice’s Disney outfit, it isn’t until after her encounter with Hatter in the third installment (fourth, counting issue #0) that we see her don it on the page. This is a marketing ploy that Zenescope (and comic book publishers at large) are notorious for. The most famous instance I can think of is when Marvel was doing the symbiote suit with Spider-Man. Long after he swore off the symbiote, Spidey would still be depicted on the cover wearing the Black Suit. And it wasn’t always consistent, either. It’s meant to build hype and expectations for plot elements of an issue or story arc, but more often than not the company fails to deliver on their promises because of a change in writing staff or because someone got smacked in the head with a walrus carcass while snorting shrinking water into their temporal lobe and eating magic mushrooms.

The next issue picks up with Calie having made her way out of the Forest of Signs and stumbling across a group of card soldiers who have murdered one of their own for planting white roses in the Queen’s maze and are using his blood to paint them red. Yeah, if you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re in a Zenescope comic, where the order of the day is sex, gore, and foul language.
In steps the Queen of Hearts--who, true to her source material, is obsessed with beheading people--and saves Calie from execution (until she changes her mind, at least).
Back in the sane world, Alice is still semi-catatonic and Lewis and Johnny have done everything short of reporting Calie missing. Of course, Lewis’s mistress (feel free to take that both ways) shows up at his front door and Johnny sees them, deciding later to break the woman’s neck (budding serial killer, remember?). Alice also overhears Lewis and the mistress having sex and gets her own vengeful ideas.
Meanwhile (or however time works), Calie has managed to piss off the Queen of Hearts during a game of flamingo croquet. But before she can be executed, the Cheshire Cat (huge, invisible thing with lots of sharp teeth from the Forest of Signs) jumps in and slaughters the remaining card soldiers before setting his sights on Calie. I’m sensing a pattern here....
In the fifth installment, we learn the truth behind Johnny’s homicidal tendencies, that the Queen of

Hearts has a conjoined sister who acts as her legs (except the Cheshire Cat has torn her/them in half by this time), and that the masked blonde is named Lacie.
Though it was not revealed previously, the blonde cuts her way out of Cheshire’s stomach, coming to Calie’s rescue while an Editor’s Note informs us that “the Cheshire Cat ate Lacie--REMEMBER?” No, I don’t remember! Zenescope didn’t reveal the character’s name until just now, and I had to go back two issues and play Where’s Waldo to find the Cheshire Cat’s eyes looming behind “Lacie” in the panel just before her mask vaguely falls to the ground and breaks, so I had no idea that “he” was actually the Cheshire Cat, not the Caterpillar, nor did it even register that he might have eaten her, so the Editor’s Note here would have been better worded as: “Deus ex machina--our readers are idiots!”
Also, anagrams again.
The writing gets even lazier here as Lacie is revealed to actually be Alice (although how she can exist in both Wonderland and the sane world at the same time is something that won’t be addressed until later on in this post, and even then, it won't make a lick of sense), a bit of knowledge that we as readers have gone “duh” over while Calie can’t recognize her own mother staring her in the face. Nevertheless, it comes as a touching reunion between Calie and the version of her mother she never got to have up to that point, just before Lacie shoves her into a magic reflecting pool (mirrors again…) that takes her back to the sane world. It’s also a nice goodbye between the two because…well…remember the beginning of Return to Wonderland? Yeah, that happens again--sort of.

The final issue of Return to Wonderland is a prologue of sorts, starting with Alice’s funeral following her suicide by hanging. Calie and Johnny are being haunted by the White Rabbit, and Calie seeks advice and comfort from a man she calls Pappy (a man we last saw in a photograph at the beginning of issue #0, posing with Alice, and is accompanied by a black cat whose fur is too close to a dark shade of purple…).
He tells her that he can see the rabbit, too, and that there is a cult devoted to sacrificing young children to Wonderland in an effort to keep its evil from seeping into the sane world (except that kind of doesn’t make sense because, according to “Pappy,” this Wonderland cult gave rise to such mass murderers as Jack the Ripper--whose silhouette looks too much like the Mad Hatter--Adolf Hitler, and Countess Blood, as well as supposedly being responsible for Black Tuesday and both World Wars). Maybe instead of getting sucked into a psychedelic morality lesson, Sela should have been sent to Wonderland with a bunch of magical nuclear weapons, hmm?
Pappy reveals that the Liddle family is descended from that cult and asks Calie to go back to Wonderland. When she gets home, she finds that Johnny has killed their father, Lewis, and Pappy’s words ring in her head. Frightened that the worst has come to pass, she finds Pappy’s looking glass in the basement, pushes Johnny through to Wonderland, and smashes it behind him.
Backed by Pappy’s considerable resources, Calie goes on the run, taking her boyfriend, Brandon with her.
She’s pregnant.
That ends Return to Wonderland.

Some parting tidbits, though. Cheshire (in sane world cat form) calls Pappy “Charles,” which, if you are up on your Alice In Wonderland history, is Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the real name behind the Lewis Carroll pseudonym. When Calie wakes up in the sane world (in a classroom of all places), a chalkboard behind her has the name Mr. Dodgson written on it, along with some incorrect math that makes sense, and the taunting message, “twinkle, twinkle, Liddle bat.” Also, as Calie is leaving her home for the final time (for now…), she passes by a street sign bearing the name Croatoan Drive. Look up the lost Virginia colony if you don’t get the reference.
I think all of these little background messages are the writers’ way of making us pay attention and laugh through our chills, but the fact that the characters themselves seem utterly ignorant of the dangerous nature of their surroundings is nonetheless infuriating, like watching two people go off on their own to have sex in a slasher movie.
On its second reading, RTW is a decent beginning to the Wonderland franchise, but in places it makes as much (or as Liddle) sense as the realm of madness itself.

Tales From Wonderland Volume #1

Tales From Wonderland is a three Volume collection of One-Shot issues (single-issue comics that focus on a single character or team, usually as a means of providing exposition material to the reader) that tell the origins or motivations of some of Wonderland’s most notorious denizens. As with the early Grimm Fairy Tales Volumes, there is an additional short story at the end of each Volume of Tales From Wonderland.

TFW # 1: Queen of Hearts

The tale of the Queen of Hearts begins as the tale of two families. Patriarch to one of the families, a scientist named Henry is doing “work” in his basement with the looking glass when his wife’s friend, Martha, comes over for a social dinner.
While the grown-ups have their proper English time, Martha’s daughters, Julia and Bethany, fight for the affections of Henry’s son, William. We learn shallow things about the Queen of Hearts, like why she hates white roses and cheaters, and why she likes cards and croquet. William, who will get more page time in future issues, falls to the background during a game of hide and seek, letting the focus shift back to the sisters, who fall through the looking glass while fighting over a hiding place in the basement. The two are allowed a few fleeting moments of wonder before the true face of Wonderland shows itself. Set upon by the Cheshire Cat and a large creature that looks like Clive Barker and HP Lovecraft’s collaborative interpretation of a Chinese dragon, Julia and Bethany are fused together to form the Queen of Hearts.
That’s really all there is to this particular Tale From Wonderland. Henry will show up again throughout these volumes as well, but as I said, all we get from this is why the Queen has a conjoined “twin” and some insight (can insight be superficial?) into her temperament and preferences.

The second of the Tales From Wonderland is a cool one: the origin story of the guy who turned Calie Liddle into a naked sushi bar and got beaten unconscious for his trouble in Return to Wonderland.

TFW #2: The Mad Hatter

A firefighter named Drake finds himself at the mercy of the musclebound March Hare in the heart of a misanthropic maze. Sorry, I had to; I went a bit mad there for a second. Roped into the infamous Mad Tea Party, Drake is forced to do something for the March Hare that tests his sanity and his ability to hide who he really is. In accomplishing the Hare’s task, Drake is transformed into the first (?) Mad Hatter.
Wow! That’s the closest I’ve come so far to not spoiling major plot points while writing the Retrospective. Maybe that’s because The Story Of the Mad Hatter is one of the most connected and consequential Tales so far in the Wonderland continuity. Who Drake is, what the March Hare has him do, and why he is such an awesome and twisted choice to become the Mad Hatter are tidbits too good to give away so easily, so read it for yourselves.

Tales From Wonderland continues and confuses right now with a Retrospective look at the Tale Of Alice.

TFW #3: Alice

To say the Alice one-shot has a wonky sense of time would be a massive understatement of how confusing the mechanics of Wonderland are. To simply say that it doesn’t have to make sense because it’s Wonderland is to defeat the enjoyment of the progressive and mostly logical story that the writers have tried to craft on top of it (or through it, if the opportunity presents). To recognize the sense of the story and attempt to glean logic from all that supports and surrounds it is likewise an exercise in madness that may drive one down a rabbit hole or through a magic looking glass and on a path to becoming a nigh-indestructible, costumed murderer. I do not advocate this course of action, nor do I believe it to be a realistic outcome of insanity in the world. I only mean to draw symbolic allegories to the fate of characters in the series who have thus far attempted to force something about themselves or their world to be something that it cannot, in reason and reality, ever be.
That said, from what little sense I could make of this story, Alice has lost her parents to something undefined (but probably Wonderland related) and is living with her grandparents, one of whom is the all-knowing and financially all-powerful Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. “Pappy.” The period dress of Alice and her grandparents, as depicted in the photo from Return to Wonderland #0 and explained in a diary entry of Alice’s from the RTW Trade Paperback, is attributed to a costume fair, not an extreme case of Wonderland-based time travel weirdness.
The Dodgsons attempt to send Alice down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, but she somehow comes back. Pondering the unique case of Alice (since no other intended sacrifices ever returned from Wonderland before her), they put the looking glass in her room and she is sucked into the clutches of the green, Chinese dragon-looking thing, who seems to be a ruler of sorts in Wonderland. Alice, because children with questions, seemingly escapes from Wonderland by annoying the creature out of its mind.
Then there’s this whole part where Alice is growing up and meeting Lewis for the first time, but also still a little girl trapped on the other side of the looking glass in Wonderland. Even though Alice had already escaped from the rabbit hole and the mirror, Little Alice made a deal with the Chinese dragon thing that she would help it get into the sane world if it let her go back home. Except that it let her go back as the Alice who came out of the rabbit hole, while keeping her sanity trapped in Wonderland? Maybe? So Alice goes into the rabbit hole, comes out of the rabbit hole, goes into the mirror, then gets split in half so she can get trapped in the mirror and come out of the rabbit hole, after which she is trapped in the mirror, allowed to escape the mirror, and allowed to come out of the rabbit hole, all at the “same time?” So if there’s only Alice and her trapped sanity (who I’m guessing will turn out to be Lacie some indeterminate time later), where are all of the other Alices that were created by this god-awful time paradox loop scenario? If Alice stayed a girl in Wonderland while watching herself grow up, why is Lacie a grown woman when Calie meets her?
I had some other convoluted question regarding which Alices still existed at which points in the issue, but it’s late and attempting to start writing it made my head hurt, so I’ll just assume that it was all a dream and it doesn’t have to make sense because comic books and it’s Wonderland.

The Experiment was originally a three-part story, dished out in installments at the end of each of the first three Tales From Wonderland, perhaps as a way of keeping readers from being selective and getting them to spend more money on comic books.

Whatever Zenescope’s motives, I enjoyed this fractured story far more than the materials it was meant to accompany.

TFW Bonus Story #1: The Experiment

The Experiment follows Henry Allen, the scientist from The Queen Of Hearts, as he recounts his time as an employee of Charles Dodgson (who is apparently over two hundred years old by Alice’s time, as Henry Allen’s journal is dated 1864).
When an accidental explosion uncovers a portal to Wonderland (because of course there was a magic portal behind his basement wall the entire time), Henry begins sending animal test subjects through and recording his findings for Dodgson. If you hadn’t guessed, the animals were a white rabbit and a black cat whose fur is subtly inked in a dark shade of purple. Also, Wonderland seems able to infuse ordinary objects with its energy from beyond the portal, as the looking glass (shown herein to be property of Henry Allen) itself became a portal simply by being placed over it for extended periods of time.
After the future White Rabbit and Cheshire Cat fail to return from Wonderland, Henry begins receiving threats from Dodgson, and we catch up to the events of The Queen Of Hearts, prompting Henry to enter the looking glass when he realizes that his son, William, has gone in after Julia and Bethany, who have already become the Queen because time in Wonderland.
Also because time in Wonderland, and because father-abandonment issues hurt, William has become the King Of Hearts, a.k.a. The Suicide King, and is made to kill himself over and over again like some kind of Grecian hell punishment. When Henry tries to free William from Wonderland, the Chinese dragon thing quite literally tears through the fourth wall to stop him.
Henry wakes in his lab with the knowledge that the dragon creature wants to escape from Wonderland and feed on the sane world’s…sanity. He attempts to use dynamite to destroy the mirror and block off the portal in his basement (because of course low-tech explosives and corporeal laws of thermodynamics stand a chance against magical energies, right?), but no sooner does he realize it isn’t going to work than in barges a search party-slash-mob who promptly beat him to death.
Some time after Henry’s death, Charles Dodgson arrives to investigate the Allen house, looking exactly as he did in Return to Wonderland a hundred and fifty years later.
If you recall my coverage of the Snow White issue of Grimm Fairy Tales, I alluded to Wonderland’s looking glass being indestructible, or at least capable of magical regeneration. We know from the end of Return to Wonderland that it can be broken, and we know from The Experiment that it is resistant to more powerful means of destruction. It is perfectly possible that the Evil Queen’s mirror, the Frog Princess’s mirror, another mirror that will be discussed in a post-Christmas Omnibusted post, and the energy that transformed the Wonderland looking glass share some kind of origin, if not that some of these looking glasses/mirrors are in fact the same item.
In another few bits of supplemental material, we get reprinted snippets from young Alice’s diary, as well as a journal entry that Calie wrote to her unborn child. The former says that Charles Dodgson did not acquire the looking glass directly from the Allen house, but instead somehow arranged to have it arrive at an American antique shop over the intervening century and a half.
Alice also says in her diary that she was ten when the events of her Tale took place, and that she has no memory of what happened to her down the rabbit hole. I don’t know about you, but if I crawled down a hole and created a temporal paradox like the one that I am still trying to puzzle out after reading the Tale of Alice, I would want to have amnesia, too.
Calie’s entry is just a two-page Cliff’s Notes version of what happened in Return to Wonderland. Calie referring to Johnny as “your uncle” was a nice little mind-bender to think about however, especially if you’ve read the Tale Of the Mad Hatter. Must not give away spoiler!

Beyond Wonderland

My review of this second Volume of the Wonderland Trilogy 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 a 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), whom we will cover in a later edition of Omnibusted.

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, 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.

The Wonderland content from this point on is all new to Blogger, starting with the three-Annual collection titled House Of Liddle, which I first made reference to in the Snow White issue of Grimm Fairy Tales. Each of these three Annual issues takes place after the events of Return to Wonderland, focusing on the house that had recently been vacated by Calie Liddle, and what happened to the tenants who moved in afterward.

Wonderland Annual #1 (2009)

This is your typical take on the “new family moves into a haunted house” premise from a lot of horror movies. Cast-wise, we have Eric, the undeveloped father character with blood pressure problems, Ann, the undeveloped and unlikable, overprotective stepmom character, Tracy, the underdeveloped potential final girl with authority problems who tries to get the plumber into her pants like she’s in a cheap porno movie, and Ben, the slightly developed focus-ish character with a physical disability (Sudden Combined Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome) and a talent for drawing. While exploring the basement, Tracy finds Alice’s diary and the Allen mirror (the latter of which still has shards of glass on the floor in front of it from when Calie smashed it after sending Johnny to Wonderland). As this is an homage to horror movies, no one is smart enough to wonder why such large pieces of glass are on the floor in front of a perfectly intact mirror when there are no windows of any size in the basement, let alone any broken windows. When Eric punches out the plumber for making out with Tracy, his blood lands on the mirror, hinting that things are about to get weird. Also, Zenescope has Ben shoehorn in a product endorsement for the Sinbad comics, and the following week, Tracy is watching a movie based on The Chronicles of Dr. Herbert West, a three-part comic book series Zenescope produced based on the stories of HP Lovecraft. If you hadn’t noticed, there’s a lot of Lovecraft imagery in the Wonderland series. There are a lot of Poltergeist references in the series, too, which is why the White Rabbit suddenly starts talking to Ben. You know, the evil spirit communicating with the special child, trying to convince him it’s friendly so it can have him set up a bunch of evil stuff that’ll kill his family and suck him into another realm? Any of that sound like what the ghosts in Poltergeist did to Carol Ann? And, yes, Carol Ann is also Calie Liddle’s real first name, so let that warm up your brain for a second. Tracy still can’t do brain math when she sees a sore-covered White Rabbit magnet on the fridge and later notices that Ben’s White Rabbit drawing is blank. Some other cross-brand easter eggs for you: two other refrigerator magnets are of the New York skyline (where Calie presumably is by this time) and the Titanic (positioned to look like it’s sinking). Ann gets killed by a swarm of eyeball spiders with razor-legs (“friends of the Rabbit,” that Ben drew), and a neighbor finally tells the family about the history of the House Of Liddle, but because horror movie stupidity, Tracy and Eric ignore her. Of course, they are also subsequently murdered by Ben’s drawings, leaving Ben alone in the house, trapped in his vacuum chamber. The 2009 Annual is a decent homage to both its genre and the original RTW material, stepping away from the main plot to deliver a sequel of the kind that some Grimm Fairy Tales issues hint at but never deliver on. The result is at once successful in story and thin of character, with an art style that stays fairly true to previous Wonderland titles. Both times I read it, I enjoyed it but found myself wanting more.

Wonderland Annual #2 (2010)

According to the credits page, the events of this annual take place between Return to Wonderland #5 and Escape From Wonderland #0. Why they didn’t just say that it takes place during Beyond Wonderland and save some ink, I don’t know. Maybe someone just needed to get paid. Anyway, after the “family gets murdered in the haunted house” movie comes the “news crew investigating family murder in the haunted house” movie, so enter news reporter Sammy and her cameraman, Paul. They’ve come to Croatoa Lane (again, nobody notices these things in-story) to interview a blogger named Angela who lives across the street from the House of Liddle. We learn that the last name of the family from the first annual was Russell, and that Angela, who can only get around on crutches or in a wheelchair, is the one who saw Ben Russell pounding on his window at the end of the last Annual. Rather than follow a single narrative as the first did, this adheres to a formula similar to many of the Grimm Fairy Tales Annuals and other yearly specials before it: that of relating a series of shorter stories, in this case, with Angela giving her Rear Window perspective of several events. First, we continue where the first Annual left off, with Ben realizing that whatever he draws can become real. At face value, this is sort of a nod to A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, as far as characters in their respective stories having powers either by their natural brain capacity or through contact with a dream realm (Wonderland, in this case). It also references Patrick Danville, a character from Stephen King’s Dark Tower Universe with a similar power set. On a larger scale, this dream power concept would have been interesting to pursue in the Wonderland series going forward. Without giving away too much, a team-up between Ben and Calie would have been awesome to see. Another thing that really could have been awesome was what actually became of Ben. Figuring out how to manipulate and expand the walls of his vacuum chamber with his powers, Ben discovers the bodies of his father and sister, and swears vengeance against the White Rabbit and all the creatures that he himself drew. Then, in badass fashion, he steps out of one glass prison and into another, becoming the Red Knight in Wonderland. Zenescope could have done so much with this character as well, perhaps devoting a Tale Of the Red Knight or a whole miniseries (give it a cool subtitle like Crimson Nights or Red VS White or Running Red or something) to his bloody rampage through Wonderland, maybe having him cross swords with the Red Queen (whose Tale is coming up a couple of Volumes later) at some point. His vendetta and general menace are so played up here that it’s infinitely more of a letdown when we don’t get to see any of this play out. After expounding on some series mechanics (that Wonderland can imbue any person or object with its essence through prolonged physical contact, as established in the first Tales Volume with the Allen looking glass, here affirmed to have spread to the entirety of the House Of Liddle and its surrounding property), the book shifts focus to Millard and Bernice, an elderly couple plagued by roses growing over to their property from the House of Liddle next door. After finding that the rosebush grows back no matter what he does to it (and growing tired of his nagging wife and her yappy little dog, too), Millard accidentally feeds the dog to the rosebush, and the story segment goes where you’d expect it to from there if you’ve read these comics before. Next, a story about a realtor named Nancy. Maybe another Nightmare On Elm Street reference? It’s your basic “can’t sell the haunted house” story, with Nancy getting dragged into Wonderland by Lewis’s dead mistress in the end. Nice Return to Wonderland callback, but not much else going on here. The interesting part, aside from continuing where the 2009 Annual left off, is actually Angela’s story. Not only does she cross paths with Calie during the final pages of Return to Wonderland #6 (when Calie is leaving town), but we find out that the Cheshire Cat caused the accident that left Angela in a wheelchair in the first place. Of course, Paul the cameraman thinks she’s crazy (because who would believe that a giant, purple cat caused a car wreck and the death of a child?), prompting him to drag Sammy to the Liddle house for proof (because reporters always want to go into the haunted murder house for proof), and Angela goes in to rescue them. But she writes a blog post first? Urgency is so underutilized in this issue! Perhaps if Zenescope was more urgent (instead of waiting a year between Wonderland Annuals like the name suggests), they might have actually delivered on their promise to continue Angela’s story in the 2011 Annual. It could have turned into another “disabled person with magical powers takes on the evil dimension” plot like with Ben. Maybe Angela defeats Angela Two, or maybe she gets pulled into Wonderland where she gets the use of her legs back and her anguish over everyone dying because they don’t listen to her turns her into some kind of Black Canary-inspired Wonderland villain because irony and Wonderland doesn’t make sense. But for some reason, we never see the end of Angela’s story, and instead, we get the following.

Wonderland Annual #3 (2011)

Welcome to 2011, where the characters actually get explained a little and five out of six murder victims have nicknames. Lauren “Nelly” Nelman is a jock who wants to join the FBI. Ted Franklin is a jock who wants to be a businessman. “Nic”ole Antonio is a jock who wants to go into advertising and have a family. Steve “Schmoo” Marra is that Hispanic jock who took Spanish for an easy A (we’ve all gone to school with at least one of those guys, right?) and wants to become an architect in New York (which is like selling sun umbrellas in the middle of the night if you ask me). Tina “T” D’Amico, the least jock-y jock of the group, is an Italian who takes cooking classes, learns French, and makes bratwurst in hopes of opening an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles. And finally, Chris Malloy (whose nickname is just his last name because he’s probably destined for prison or the military) is the jock who skips school in hopes of continuing to be a jock, but famous! So, instead of an awesome continuation of the 2010 Annual like we were promised, we get the “six jocks on spring break decide to spend a night in the haunted house” movie, even though Nelly keeps having increasingly vivid nightmares that she’s getting strangled by Johnny “The Mad Hatter” Liddle. The only obvious reference to the previous two Annuals is one of the characters mentioning that there are no neighbors next door (because Millard went to prison for accidentally killing Bernice while the rosebush was trying to eat her) or across the street (because Angela went into the house and either got killed or turned by Wonderland, and then her father probably went in after her and she or something else from Wonderland probably killed him, too. Aren’t off-page deaths the worst?). Actually, the premise for this Annual is the worst. Sure, I like the setup for the issue as a standalone piece, the art is pretty good, and there’s some decent building suspense involving a cursed painting. But the continuity errors are mind-blowingly awful. For one thing, the characters clearly establish that there are two paintings, and the Annual itself establishes that nothing weird happened until Malloy uncovered the Allen mirror and something evil came floating out of it. And yet, when Johnny Liddle (the “something evil” previously mentioned) arrives, he claims that there is only one painting, and that he has the power to move it from room to room at will. Moreover, Johnny states that Calie let him hang himself in the same spot as Alice, and he is now using the mirror and painting to murder people and absorb their souls (because that’s become a trend in the Grimm Universe lately) so that he can become strong enough to return to the sane world full-time and do what insane serial murderers do best. But we know that’s crap because Johnny was sent through the mirror and became the Mad Hatter. It could just be that there’s something I don’t remember from Escape From Wonderland (which I will cover later in this mega-post), but if not, this is a glaring plot inconsistency. A second connection to the 2010 Annual comes when T loses the use of her legs. This could be a coincidence, but it could also be that she was possessed by Angela’s ghost. In any case, nothing I have read or written up to this point in the review matters because the 2011 Annual of Wonderland basically sucks. The writers seem to know it, too, because the next thing they have the surviving characters do is burn the House Of Liddle to the ground…twice. And of course, the mirror survives as it always does. Let’s all light a shit-fueled bonfire in memory of forgetting this damned issue ever happened, and pray that no reflections persist in our minds, okay?

Next on in the release schedule (after the first Wonderland Annual) was Tales From Wonderland Volume 2.

TFW #4: The Cheshire Cat

After Calie stabs Cheshire almost to death following Johnny’s diner massacre in Beyond Wonderland, he reverts to his normal cat form and is taken to an animal shelter by the police. A young woman named Lina adopts him and names him Oreo, which is both adorably appropriate and laughably stupid. Her roommate, Becky, hates pets almost as much as she likes having sex in horror comics, so guess how long she lasts? Like the with the Allen mirror in the first Wonderland Annual, when Oreo tastes blood (because Becky locked him in the closet and he killed a mouse), the murdery weirdness starts. And true to a lot of “be careful what you wish for” issues of Grimm Fairy Tales, Lina unknowingly provides Cheshire with a list of murder victims while venting about her daily frustrations. Amid all of the murders Cheshire commits (which slowly restore his strength, according to the most recently introduced Grimm Universe mechanic of “lots of dead people’s souls equals moah powah”), Zenescope shoehorns in more advertisements for Sinbad and two of their non-Grimm titles: The Living Corpse and a comic book adaptation of the Final Destination movies, neither of which I have read or plan to read. Cheshire’s kills are creative and he makes for such a charismatic solo character that I wonder why he has to constantly be relegated to sidekick for the majority of his run. I also wonder why, if Wonderland is the realm of dreams, killing or turning people--and thereby reducing the amount of imagination and dream power in the sane world--makes Wonderland stronger. You’d think that a realm built on dream energy would want to keep as many living people in the sane world as possible. But then again, the only thing that makes sense in Wonderland is that nothing makes sense, so I’ll shut up now. Speaking of Cheshire being a sidekick, we’ll be seeing Lina again in Escape From Wonderland. Another issue that’s above average as a genre piece, but serves as a barely consequential transitional Tale in the Wonderland franchise at large.

TFW #5: The Red Queen

The official Wonderland timeline states that this Tale takes place after The Experiment short story (in which scientist Henry Allen creates the White Rabbit and Cheshire Cat, and meets the Queen Of Hearts, the Chinese dragon thing, and the Suicide King, who is his son) and some time before the Tale Of Alice. When I was starting to read this the first time (and when memory failed me on this second occasion), I was expecting some kind of connection to Beyond Wonderland; to find out that the Red Queen was Calie’s great-aunt, who got sent through the looking glass when her grandfather, Howard, was a child. The real story is coming up in the short story for this second Volume of Tales, however, and though I still wish that Zenescope had brought that character into the story more, I don’t think their choosing a different origin story for the Red Queen has diminished anything. However, there are, as always, temporal inconsistencies that do distract from what little enjoyable coherence the Wonderland franchise has to offer. Beginning at the beginning, we have the Suicide King playing chess with a mysterious redheaded woman (who is not Belinda, for once) who has been imprisoned at some point for something. The White Rabbit arrives and announces that the Queen Of Hearts has left Wonderland and is not coming back. At the time, I attributed this as a reference to her running the house of mirrors in New York in Beyond Wonderland, a theory that could either be supported or refuted by the fact that the mystery woman had been imprisoned for over a century. But given the official Wonderland timeline, this seems impossible. Now, we could just attribute this to time (and everything else) in the Wonderland realm not making sense and leave it alone. But I’d rather err on the side of logic for a bit and say that if all given information on the subject is correct and coherent, that means that there is yet another chunk of plot (that is, if not New York, where did the Queen Of Hearts go prior to this Tale?) which Zenescope has found reason to do without. Now, on to the cool stuff. I love the Red Queen as a character. Once the Suicide King frees her, she spends much of the issue going on a bloody, vengeful rampage, in much the same way that the Red Knight was set up to do in the second Wonderland Annual before that plot was also dropped. But even though it makes for great, pulp-sensationalist reading, her bloody rampage itself isn’t what makes the Red Queen an awesome character. It’s her motivation. The Red Queen spent over a hundred years in a stone cage that the Queen Of Hearts put her in. So even though she has succumbed to the murderous madness of Wonderland, she has had time to think and to focus her mad bloodlust into something that almost resembles sanity, making her a dangerous anti-hero in a realm full of villains. The Red Queen is what you get when you throw Belinda, the Punisher, Proteus, and Green Lantern in a blender: a blood-soaked, bloodthirsty, badass, kick-ass chick with the power to bring inanimate objects to life and control them, and to otherwise do whatever the hell she wants. She gets heavily nerfed further down the line in favor of a more character-driven, quest-based plot, but the powers she has in this debut issue ratchet up the entertainment value to eleven. After suiting up and conjuring an army of golems, zombies, and carnivorous plants, she hacks her way through the four suit armies and returns to the Suicide King with their heads in tow, claiming that once decapitated, Wonderland creatures cannot regenerate. Again, we know this is crap because Johnny’s head grew an entire new body when he was decapitated. Granted, the circumstances were different and this is a comic book, where the writers also have the power to do whatever the hell they want, but how about some consistency? And again, it isn’t the pages and pages of sensationalism and gore that make this Tale great (although they certainly help). It’s the revelation that the Red Queen, unlike the rest of Wonderland’s entities so far, is still able to remember who she was over a century ago, and that she has some as-yet-undisclosed connection to the Suicide King that keeps the two of them from leaving Wonderland. She can’t stay because she’s still relatively sane, he can’t leave because he thinks he’s too far gone into madness to live a normal life, and yet neither one can live without the other. It’s a nice replacement dynamic for the “inseparable conjoined twin” take on the Queen Of Hearts that has more impact, dimension, and potential than its predecessor.

TFW #6: Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum

This Tale is probably one of the better entries in its series in terms of actual story and character development, right up there next to The Tale Of the Mad Hatter, if not ranked above it. Not something I’d expect in an origin story for two Disneyfied balls of clown fat who were dead the first time we saw them in Return to Wonderland, but as I’ve been known to say, Wonderland doesn’t make sense. Meet Tony, a friend of Charles Dodgson and a second-generation abusive father with a dark side that tells him to be an abusive father. Dodgson pushed Tony’s father through the looking glass in the Liddles’ basement when Tony was a boy, which makes me wonder why Tony never comments on how Dodgson has been the same age for thirty years. In the present, Tony is plagued by headaches and the voice of his dark side feeding on his insecurities over the success of his own son, and believes that if he sends his son through the looking glass (which is still in the Liddles’ basement--more on the numerous chronological incongruities of that later), all of his supposed problems will be solved. But the tables are turned at the last minute and history ends up repeating itself. Tony’s headaches and volatile temper point to a brain tumor (speculation warning!), which he might have gotten from being in close proximity to the mirror as a kid--short-term Wonderland radiation poisoning, perhaps?--putting the dark personality in his head. Wait, can Wonderland see the future? Did it mark him as a child, ensuring that he would become the man he did and end up following his father through the looking glass in a similar manner? It would certainly explain why the pictures of the Tweedles are already on the wall in the diner when they get there. But I’m getting ahead of myself. If you hadn’t guessed already (or you haven’t been reading along), Tony splits in two--kind of a bloody, reverse-Queen Of Hearts scenario--and becomes the Tweedles. This is Wonderland’s poetic justice side at work, with Tony’s dark side emerging as Tweedle Dee and playing brother/surrogate abusive father to his weaker, Dummy half. But the poetic justice doesn’t stop there, as they encounter the diner (yes, the same diner Calie found on the beach in Return to Wonderland) with their pictures already on the wall, and discover to their horror and eminent demise that the Carpenter (still speaking in rhyme, and therefore being the literal hammer-wielding embodiment of poetic justice) is the Wonderland incarnation of Tony’s father. And since Wonderland creatures regenerate, the Tweedles will get to experience the Grecian Hell punishment version of being abused by their father over and over again for as long as Wonderland exists. Mind blown yet? Well, get ready because no sooner does the Carpenter bludgeon the Tweedles to “death” and disembowel the Walrus than Calie herself comes knocking at the door, which means it’s time for me to tear the space-time continuum a new wormhole! So, according to this Tale, Return to Wonderland had already taken place when Tony was a kid, which also means that the first two Annuals took place during Tony’s lifetime, putting the third Wonderland Annual--or at least its epilogue--approximately thirty years after that, because the House Of Liddle is still standing, with the Allen looking glass still in the basement, when Tony is an adult. And yet both the Carpenter and the Tweedles arrived in Wonderland before Calie did? To quote a fake redneck, Wonderland is like wiping before you poop; it don’t make sense. And despite all the profound, anti-child-abuse symbolism and sensational character work, reviewing this Tale has been like wiping and pooping in the correct order, then finding out you have to plunge the toilet, drink the water, and wash down your own turds with the soiled toilet paper when you’re done. Next!

TFW #7: The Mad Hatter II

If you’re a comic book fan, not only have you been reading along with the series and my blog thus far, you also might know that legacy characters are sometimes identified by Roman numerals in off-page reference materials (such as Tim Drake being Robin III in the DC Comics Universe). This might lead to such questions as “how can the character in this story be the second Mad Hatter when Johnny Liddle is clearly the second Mad Hatter?” Well, this is one of those cases where a legacy origin turns out to be a prequel, not a sequel. Also known as The Mad Hatter part 2 (because it’s apparently okay to not capitalize non-article words in the titles of things now, but I’m just nitpicking), this Tale imparts not the origin of a successive Hatter between Drake and Johnny, nor any Hatter who might have come after Johnny, but the origin of the Mad Hatter as a concept. Strangely enough, the true original Mad Hatter first introduces himself as John, making me think again about how Wonderland can potentially implant ideas in people’s heads and see the future. Upon arriving on the beach in Wonderland (because that’s where everyone starts out, it seems), John finds himself rescuing a woman calling herself Lily (obvious foreshadowing?) from the Cheshire Cat and immediately falling in love with her. But of course, the wonder of Wonderland only lasts as long as it takes one to land. The Queen Of Hearts, true to the realm’s spirit of poetic irony and chaos, takes an interest in breaking up their romance, perhaps out of jealousy over her own inability to sever the bonded existence that her two halves are forced to live. Separated from Lily and tortured for years by the Queen Of Hearts, John eventually confides in his cellmate that he was Jack the Ripper, and that while fleeing the police, he was pulled through the looking glass in the abandoned Allen house, at which point Wonderland cured his serial killer impulses. That is, until his love (who, according to a slip of the tongue, is a Wonderland-sanitized mass-murderer who once took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks) gets kidnapped, tortured, and turned into one of the Flower Girls. Then, we get to see the origin of the Mad Hatter’s skin-wearing compulsion and the promise of a bloody, revenge-fueled sequel that won’t come to fruition for another six Volumes. So, yeah. This was basically a tragic love story between Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden. No real plot inconsistencies that I could see, no heaping piles of action, and minimal blood and gore when compared to the rest of the Wonderland titles; just a simple romantic tragedy with good character development and more of that profound “eternity of poetic justice” stuff that made the Tweedles’ Tale a good read. This was better, though, because it gave you both more and less to think about in all the right areas.

TFW Short Story #2: The Arrangement

Welcome to Shady Acres, an 1860s mental health facility that thinks it’s Jellystone National Park (“Please no feeding the residents,” says the sign posted at the entrance). Joking aside, a lot of information gets laid on us at once in just a couple of pages. First of all, one of the residents is Elizabeth Allen. No, not Liz Allen from Spider-Man; this Elizabeth Allen is the widow of the recently deceased Henry Allen. And no, I don’t mean the Flash’s dad. I mean the scientist from the first Tales Volume who blew a hole into Wonderland and was such an absent-minded professor that he let three children (including his own son, William) get sucked through a Wonderland-infected mirror in his basement. Second of all, it’s delivery day at the asylum, and the staff are so absent-minded themselves that they would allow the looking glass to be delivered to Elizabeth Allen’s room. For one thing, any sane and practical person would not have let anything made of glass past the front gate because broken glass plus crazy people equals lots of murder. For another thing, it’s a mirror that sucks people into an insane dream dimension, re-animates the dead, feeds on blood and souls, can see into the future, and gave a man a sentient, evil brain tumor. So…not only how, but why? Because Charles Dodgson, that’s why. In a flashback to what I’m guessing are the late 1850s, we find Charles Dodgson, old and dying of what might be cancer (or something we can now cure by washing our hands). It’s plainly stated that, at one time, Dodgson was romantically involved with Belinda.

Though I somewhat enjoyed reading both series, when this particular chapter of The Arrangement came along, something like a mix of excitement and relief washed over me, as if my obsessive-compulsive brain was saying “This is awesome, and thank God these two things I have invested so much energy in have finally turned out to be connected!” Yes, we had seen references to Wonderland in Grimm Fairy Tales before, but actually having Belinda show up in a Wonderland title made it official to me somehow.

When she dumps him (because evil, heartless, self-serving Belinda with male authority figure issues and control issues), it spurs Charles Dodgson to begin looking outside the confines of practical medicine (like, researching Lovecraftian death cults and extradimensional energy sources) for a cure to his impending mortality.

We learn that Dodgson had an adopted (grand)son named Thomas, the fate of whom should be obvious to anyone who’s read Wonderland up to this point, and the origin of the nickname, “Pappy,” which makes the man even more despicable despite the flashback’s efforts to make him a sympathetic character. There are references to Dodgson having nightmares about Henry Allen’s work and hints that the 1863Yazoo Expedition was actually a Dodgson-funded search for the fountain of youth through the Louisiana bayou. Upon receiving a letter from Henry Allen himself, Dodgson enlists Thomas to join him on a trip to investigate the good news. Zenescope re-uses a page from the first Tales Volume, re-bubbled and re-lettered here to reduce the ominous tone of the panels and turn the chauffeur’s accent from Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. Alfred Pennyworth to Sean Pertwee’s Alfred Pennyworth. Or maybe they just didn’t read their own work again…. Aside from establishing a timeline in a series that gives continuity the middle finger more often than not, this re-use of ink and paper seems superfluous when simply going to the following page might have felt like a smoother transition. On said following page and the two after it, Thomas and Dodgson find Henry Allen’s journal, as well as the looking glass that Dodgson had apparently been…looking for. Unfortunately, they also find that reason to hate Charles Dodgson even more that we readers had been waiting for, the same way that anyone who has watched Titanic seven dozen times is always waiting for the moment when Leonardo DiCaprio dies, or that moment in The Perfect Storm when Kevin Costner dies, or that moment in Amazing Spider-Man 2 when Gwen Stacy dies, or any moment in any movie where you know a likable character is going to die even though your brain has been rooting for an hour or more up to that moment for that character to not die. Now take that combination of thoughts and feelings and condense them down to two pages of a comic book and you, too, can barely repress the urge to violently and profanely rage-quit everything about Charles Edward Dodgson. And on the heels of hate comes a revelation about a character who had her own Tale this Volume: we find out the Red Queen’s sane world identity. Very cool reveal, but easy to see coming, and a little backstory on her imprisonment by the Queen Of Hearts would have been a welcome addition to the Wonderland canon.

Volume Two ends with a hand-written letter from Dodgson’s memoirs, recalling his illness and the nightmares he had about Wonderland, but all it amounts to is yet another attempt to humanize the obvious villain of the story.

There are more Tales and spin-offs and other Wonderland publications in the franchise, but for now, the last Trade I have complete reviews for is the following:

Escape From Wonderland

I kind of love the setup for this series. It not only gives us recaps of the previous two (Return to Wonderland and Beyond Wonderland), it also gives a ton of backstory on prominent characters in the franchise so far, including a psychological file on “Lacy.” A burned news clipping informs us (albeit through some reader-only knowledge and speculation between the lines) that after taking Violet, Johnny set fire to the hospital (perhaps to cover up the fact that he slaughtered everyone in the building and there’s probably security footage of him murdering people and kidnapping a baby). Calie survived and was shortly arrested for the crime, sentenced to a psychiatric facility, and therefore turned from A Nightmare On Elm Street Nancy Thompson into Judgement Day Sarah Connor by way of Dream Warriors Nancy Thompson. If you don’t get the references, go watch the movies at the links provided. It is also revealed in the news clipping from Lacy’s file that a nine-year-old girl named Sally Monroe (why Zenescope likes the last name Monroe so much lately is baffling, other than they’re probably trying to build hype for a character that hasn’t been featured for quite awhile) went missing at a travelling circus. Why this travelling circus business won’t be addressed for another eight years of publication time also baffles me, but whatever. The doctor seems to believe (as does everyone else, apparently) that Violet died in the hospital fire and that Lewis and Alice died in a car accident (the latter of which is a lie that “Lacy” told him). She fakes her way into an early release, but leaves behind a journal detailing all that she had experienced with Wonderland, the cover of which features the spiral pattern seen in the credits pages of past Wonderland issues and the message: HE HAS MY CHILD I MUST GO BACK.

Calie’s character bio reveals that she dyes her hair black, not the other way around, and claims that she is “highly intelligent and intuitive,” which, in light of all the horror movie Don’ts that she Did in the last two series, is laughable. Johnny’s bio doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know from reading previous installments, other than to confirm his Mirror Master-meets-Wolverine power set, explain that the Ebony Blade (spade dagger from the Beyond Wonderland series) is the only thing that can kill him, and reveal (finally!) that the Chinese dragon thing is the Jabberwocky. The White Rabbit’s bio describes him as the first creature to enter Wonderland. Even if they mean the first animal, that can’t possibly be true. It also confirms the White Rabbit has psychic abilities and that Wonderland can see the sane world through his eyes. Alice’s bio just simplifies a convoluted Tale that should never have been written in the first place. Even though we higher apes can do logic math with the squiggle-covered electrochemical fat ball between our ears, the Jabberwocky’s bio insists that we don’t know he’s the Jabberwocky and that basically nothing can be known about him. He’s listed as eternal, but given the Ebony Blade and more logic math brain stuff, that could change. Bios for the Cheshire Cat, Suicide King, Queen of Hearts, Henry Allen, The Red Queen, and Charles Dodgson are also all recaps of information we’ve already read in previous Tales and trilogy Volumes.

The zero issue itself sees Calie, having dropped her Lacy alias and returned to the House Of Liddle with stabbing and beheading on her mind. We see also the first appearance of what I’m calling Calie’s Black Berserker outfit in the Allen mirror as she prepares to enter Wonderland. Typically, this has been a sign of Wonderland creating a dark persona that will most likely reach out of the mirror and either kill or abduct its sane world original. But Calie is the One, True Hero of the Wonderland franchise, so cliffhanger!

Just in case you didn’t know, every story has a beginning and an end. You might say that every story ends the same way, if you were in a morbid frame of mind. But since this is Wonderland, no one has a mind or anything to frame it with, so even though issue one is the second issue, it is the beginning of the end of the Wonderland Trilogy, where all beginnings begin differently, all endings are new beginnings, and all beginnings come to an end. So maybe that’s why the issue opens on Lacy’s grave in Wonderland, with a black-hooded, yellow-eyed creature sniffing around the card soldier cemetery for Calie. Cut immediately to our heroine, who has been voicing over the previous page’s nonsense about beginnings and endings, and has officially decided to become a badass. Her transition into Black Berserker mode as she storms the Queen Of Hearts’ castle is an amazingly illustrated entrance sequence. But as you might recall from Beyond Wonderland and the last Tales Volume, the Queen Of Hearts is in New York and the Red Queen has taken up residence. Their exchange is short and incomplete--no doubt ending in some off-page re-exposition--but the subtext and similarities between Calie Liddle and Elisabeth Allen are clear. Both are mothers whose strength of will and love for their children have given them power in Wonderland without having to succumb to the realm’s maddening effects…that much. They are both bloodthirsty, vengeful badasses--Calie literally carries an axe to grind--with their own quests for whatever peace and normalcy their lives can afford them. Elsewhere, Johnny enters my idea of a nightmare (a tunnel sealed by talking vines, inhabited by talking, carnivorous worms that leads to a cave inhabited by a Lovecraftian Chinese dragon) and presents baby Violet to the Jabberwocky. I like how this issue takes Calie back through the Carpenter’s diner, serving as both a training ground for her new powers (the diner was the site of her first dangerous encounter in Return to Wonderland) and as a symbolic reset of sorts; an “I’m done running” what-if scenario playing out in canonical time. Meanwhile to the other three meanwhiles, we get another Charles Dodgson pity-party as he watches children being fed to the Queen Of Hearts’ funhouse. Apparently, Zenescope now has enough money to feature depictions of Animal the Muppet, the legs of Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony, a stuffed bear that might be Teddy Ruxpin, one of the Snorks, and Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish from The Simpsons Movie as carnival prizes. A stuffed Walrus with his stomach stitched up also appears as one of the prizes--another nice Return to Wonderland callback. And speaking of nice RTW callbacks, Calie now finds herself back in the Forest Of Signs She Didn’t Pay Attention To the First Time, and the signs are as funny as ever. Also they’re probably into some kinky stuff because they keep hitting on the angry woman wearing black leather and carrying an axe. At least she’s bothering to pay attention this time--except for the one sign that said the yellow-eyed thing in the hood was stalking her….

Cue a fight between Calie, the hooded lizard-man, and something that looks like the Cheshire Cat had sex with Kusaregedo from Samurai Shodown V. Things unexpectedly turn into a Godzilla fight, with the lizard-man coming to Calie’s rescue. The great thing about this entry in the Wonderland trilogy is that the writers have taken advantage of Wonderland not making sense as a way of letting Calie be the badass protagonist, but also nerfing her “hero armor.” She’s learned that “people” in Wonderland are not to be trusted, and that all Wonderland problems can be quickly and easily solved with an axe. She’s no longer as burdened by plot-assigned horror movie stupidity as she was in the Return and Beyond series, but with all of her knowledge and experience in what not to do, Calie is still outclassed by Wonderland’s ability to be poetically ironic. Having faced human-looking threats like the Carpenter, the Mad Hatter, and her brother, she is suddenly presented with something monstrous-looking that not only comes to her aid, but seems to care about her for some reason. Intermingled with this, the most interesting plot dynamic in the series so far, are the usual cutaway nightmare nonsense, more Cthullu mythos references, Johnny’s impatient complaining about not being able to kill his sister yet, the Jabberwocky taking his sweet-ass time to do whatever he has planned for Violet (because plot convenience), and a sort of cool aside that reveals that Calie and the Lizard King (at least, I think that was a character in the original Lewis Carroll material) are being stalked by the Cheshire Cat and…Lina the Cheshire Queen?! The writers could have done so much with this character, especially after spending the Cheshire Cat’s Tale setting her up, but I now find it even more insulting that they constantly stick Cheshire in a sidekick role. I mean, Lina is a potentially interesting character with a cool--if painful-looking--design, but given Future Knowledge, she should not be calling the shots in that relationship.

Getting back to the good stuff, upon reaching the Jabberwocky’s cave, Calie completes the final girl trifecta by becoming Ellen Ripley. She and the mysterious Lizard King soon find themselves trapped in a slimy corridor full of monster eggs that are being watched over by a much larger, queen monster. All we need is a panel of Calie shouting, “get away from her, you bitch!” and the similarities to the Alien movies would be uncanny bordering on copyright infringement. Johnny’s childish whining and the other uninteresting subplots follow Calie’s battle with the queen worm through half of the next issue as hints at the Lizard King’s identity are dropped here and there. After walking through a hall of looking glasses that appeared suddenly, Calie finds baby Violet in a cradle made of human ribs inside one of the mirrors she smashes, but is immediately thrown into a battle with the Cheshire Cat and Queen. I have no idea why Hollywood thinks it looks cool when people fight while holding babies, but they do. Remember, kids: child abuse is awesome! It’s not, though. Anyway, Calie javelin’s her sword into a keystone that’s suddenly conveniently holding open the entrance to the Cave of Mirrors, killing off Lina in a spirit of finality that not even the Cheshire Cat can explain (Wonderland entities are supposed to be able to heal from all wounds while in Wonderland), and runs back to the Red Queen’s castle to use the Reflecting Pool exit that Lacie pushed her through in Return to Wonderland. But even though the Forest of Signs warns her of danger, the castle is empty, the Pool has been drained, and Alice suddenly shows up (because there weren’t enough mind games, plot twists, and deviations from the actually cool stuff), Calie reverts to ignoring everything and being stupid because the Escape series was getting too interesting by this point. And it’s not even a mind game or plot twist that we haven’t seen already in Return or Beyond; it’s yet another “it was all a dream” happy ending where you read through the whole thing suspecting that the happy ending has been the real dream sequence all along.

The fourth issue, which is devoted almost exclusively to said surreal, happy ending nonsense, is a heart-warming break from the action that gives Calie an opportunity at closure with her past and tests her focus and ability to move forward. It’s necessary heroic journey archetype stuff that goes where you expect it to, but manages to feel like unnecessary pablum that could have (and has) been presented far better by anyone else in any other medium. The best part of this issue is when it comes to an end.

Alice (the one in Wonderland who pushed Calie through the fake Allen mirror in the drained Reflecting Pool and into issue four’s dream sequence) reveals that the fake mirror was some kind of keyhole that Calie was supposed to get stuck in so she could feed Wonderland her sanity or dream energy or soul or something and allow the realm to break through to Earth. Oh, and big surprise--not really, if you know a bunch of sinister looks when you see them--Alice was the Jabberwocky in disguise. After several theoretical or not pages of such things as the Queen Of Hearts unleashing her card soldiers in New York, a crocodile made of books and Ben Russell’s Papercut Man slaughtering a library full of people, and the Caterpillar crawling amok in Time’s Square, we finally get back to the good stuff. Sort of. There’s some posturing between Calie and the Jabberwocky as they prepare to fight each other, interrupted by Dodgson confessing everything to Johnny in hopes that Johnny will kill him, followed by more of the Jabberwocky posturing…and then the Lizard King shows up and slices him in two like a badass. Through and through the vorpal blade went…SNICKETY? Why not use the actual onomatopoeia from the Jabberwocky poem? That aside, the splash page of this just looks awesome. But of course, they’re in Wonderland and it’s the frickin’ Jabberwocky, so things don’t end quite so anticlimactically as that. We get treated to a chest-burster scene (another Alien reference!) as the many wounds the Lizard King received from the mini-worms give birth to a small legion of lizard-worms. For some reason, having all of the lizard-worms tear free of his body makes the Lizard King revert to human form. If you remember Beyond Wonderland, the last time we saw Brandon was when he was being skinned alive by lizards while the Jabberwocky looked on. Do logic-math and, that’s right! Brandon was the Lizard King! More awesome, right? Well, Brandon dies, the Jabberwocky reattaches his own head, and Calie gets majorly pissed. But before anything else cool can happen, things cut back to Dodgson, who finally goads Johnny into stabbing him with the Ebony Blade. This summons the Reaper (see Beyond Wonderland), who tells Dodgson that he ruined everything before claiming his soul, which weakens the Jabberwocky’s link to Earth. I’m glad Dodgson is dead, but did it have to be Johnny who ends up killing the Jabberwocky? The issue ends with a cartoonish splash page of Johnny lunging at Calie, but once again, it takes awhile for anything to come of it.

In the sixth issue, titled Escape From Wonderland: The Final Chapter (Friday the 13th reference!), we are once more sidetracked and mind-gamed by nine pages of speculative outcomes that range from the relatively ridiculous, to the overtly gory, to a decent mix of self-reference and foreshadowing, and are nonetheless unnecessary. When we return to the action, or rather, to an alternate perspective on the events before the action, it is through Johnny’s petulant, twisted perspective on the old villain-blames/credits-hero-with-his-creation trope. Following an epic-looking blade struggle with tone-ruining punctuation, Calie drags Johnny by the scruff of his neck through the looking glass that somehow works despite still being broken. Some cool symbolism and irony takes place on the other side of the mirror, with Johnny now blaming Calie for his not being able to be the Mad Hatter now that the mirror’s portal has closed (which, looking back--or forward--to the 2011 Annual, is crap of the brownest shade possible), when previously he blamed her for his ever becoming the Hatter in the first place. I guess when you’re insane, two such contradictory thoughts have equal merit, so things turn into a surprisingly good, if not as epic, slasher movie, with Calie and Johnny assuming their respective final girl and slasher roles for a few more pages in the Liddle house before Calie sort-of-accidentally hangs Johnny with his own jacket in the same exact place where Alice committed suicide in Return to Wonderland. The modern sensationalist in me wanted a more protracted, action-focused fight between her and the Jabberwocky, but the English enthusiast in me recognizes that it was all meant to end as symbolically as it did, with the Liddle siblings hashing out their personal demons in the house where everything started. The numerous callbacks throughout the series were a welcome build-up to this resolution, and gave a sense that the trilogy as a whole was both coming to an end and serving as the launch point for something more. Following Johnny’s death (which makes the still-despicable 2011 Annual make more sense), the story jumps forward. Calie has had white hair since coming through the broken mirror, perhaps to strengthen the symbolic connection between her and Johnny. This is something we’ll see again in the future with Sela: a heroine suddenly and inexplicably having grey or white hair. The only thing I can draw from this, other than some attempt at being smart and clever, is that magic in the Grimm Universe literally sucks. Sure, being in Wonderland can turn a helpless, clueless teen mom into a nigh-unstoppable killing machine, but once you leave Wonderland, no amount of leave-in conditioner can save your Samsonite locks from that kind of damage. My point in mentioning Calie’s hair color was that in the jump forward, she still has white hair, so the only obvious way you can tell that it’s a jump forward is that Violet is now a teenager. Calie believes, stupidly, that Wonderland is behind them, and that she can just run and lie and hide her past from Violet and have a normal life for once. That, above all things, has been her Achilles’ heel from the beginning, and is one of the most infuriating--but necessary--aspects of her character. Some time later, we find out that the Queen of Hearts is still running her funhouse, and that she has come into possession of the Mad Hatter’s hat. She gives it to a boy who manages to survive the House of Mirrors, and Escape ends for real. Supplemental materials include the usual cover gallery and a script book for EFW issues #0 and #1 that confirms the series’ Terminator, Lovecraftian, and Alien influences, and draws attention to a few background Easter eggs that bear a second look. Despite my criticisms of the later issues’ heavy deviation and anti-climactic approach to fight scenes, I think Escape is the easiest to follow of the trilogy and does the best job at expanding the mythos of the franchise. Return might have been the best at portraying raw action, and Beyond was the most focused, but Escape tries and succeeds at being the most meaningful. No wonder I had so much to say about it.

Wow! Was that as long for you all to read as it was for me to edit together? I hope you enjoyed this deep dive down the Rabbit hole; this epic, winter walk through Wonderland; and I hope you all Stay Tuned and wait smart as we roll into tomorrow's Ticketverse Trade collection of old, Christmas-relevant reviews for the Countdown to TixMas!

Omnibuster,

TixMaster,

Out.