Zenescope - Omnibusted #13: Inferno
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
That isn't any kind of work-life pity reference on my part; it's just a recognition of the old numerical superstition about the number thirteen. Three of my columns (Time Drops, Dragon Blog Super, and now, Zenescope - Omnibusted) have hit their thirteenth issues in the past week, and promotion figures still aren't looking good for the new theme and layout, so it's only fitting that today (in addition to helping the TBT 2023 push of my old Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy review on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook), we follow one of my favorite old-school Zenescope heroines on her journey into Hell itself.
It is a refreshing take on the Grimm Fairy Tales formula, marking the first time the focus character(s) were sucked into the book without reading it. Not only does Sela will them into the book, she enters it herself, turns them into pig-men, and sics a werewolf on them to scare them into repenting.
This is not the same werewolf as in Red Riding Hood--which died--but the fact that she can control it or is working side-by-side with it suggests that either Sela does have some power over the book and its characters, or that she has some kind of business relationship with the man behind the werewolf outside of this specific scenario.
This also introduces some rather shaky continuity, as we have seen Sela go from a non-presence to a passively evil force to a guide and mentor of varying morality, then something resembling human and fallible, and now as an active force of vengeance. One can suspect that everything as far back as Snow White took place after the Timepiece short story, and this issue and Cinderella took place some time after Timepiece. But this early in a newly-minted series, it doesn’t seem like even the writers have it all figured out. Later on though, this issue will prove to be a catalyst for one of the most kick-ass characters in the Grimm Universe.
The King Midas tale is framed here by your average debt-and-ransom plot, with a wealthy man named David Franks (first name, Biblical king, last name, the official currency of Switzerland, the country with one of the most morally gray banking systems on the planet) who is indebted to Belinda and is secretly a hitman for hire.
Belinda reads David’s daughter, Trisha, the story of King Midas. It goes much the same as the common knowledge version, with the wish for the golden touch being granted by Belinda herself in this version (rather than a satyr or an elf, as traditionally told), and the king dying of starvation after turning all of his food--and his daughter--to gold.
After the fairy tale (which is not a Grimm Fairy Tale, but a Greek myth), Trisha is kidnapped by Mercy Dante, a woman who has some bloody personal history with David Franks. I had forgotten Mercy’s backstory since the first time I read this, and revisiting it now only makes me appreciate even more what a badass character she turns out to be. Mercy will return in the Dante's Inferno (Prelude)--the lead-in to Inferno--and be featured as a lead character in several other miniseries.
Back in Grimm Fairy Tales #29: King Midas, we learned that Belinda not only bestowed King Midas with the golden curse that ultimately killed him and his daughter, but that she was responsible for turning David Franks into the hitman who killed Mercy Dante’s parents. As a result, Mercy would grow up to be an assassin herself, bent on revenge against David Franks and aided, in part and unbeknownst to her, by Belinda. Mercy’s revenge came at the end of the issue when she kidnapped and then murdered David’s daughter, Trisha, in front of him. The Dante’s Inferno (Prelude) issue picks up seven months later, with Mercy still a hit for hire, haunted by the ghost of Trisha Franks and flirting with her suicidal tendencies in between indulging in more homicidal activities. But before she has a chance to self-destruct, Mercy is forced to fend off a series of attempts on her life, orchestrated by her contractor on behalf of…can you guess? That’s right, it’s her again! And guess who’s there to use her words to magically fix life? That’s right, it’s Sela again! I know I said something earlier about the issue being original, and this predictable turn of events doesn’t really illustrate that very well. But it is otherwise among the Zenescope team’s best work, with clearly defined action, a solid art style, witty writing, good pacing, and in the absence of a fairy tale reading (that’s the structural originality I was talking about), there is plenty of page time to make this an issue about character development and relationships. All that notwithstanding, Sela sending Mercy back in time and convincing her to commit suicide is not only completely out of character, it’s wrong on multiple levels as a concept. I get that Sela came back to life with a new perspective on the world and her powers (which might explain why none of her charges has deja vu or has felt like they’ve been sucked into the book for some time now), and a more aggressive, active approach to her calling, and that because of all this, she’s been written into some kind of personal feud with Death. But still, why would the hero of any story convince anyone to commit suicide? For the answer to that, you’ll have to keep reading.
I could go on about the multiple redundancies in this recap of King Midas and the Dante’s Inferno (Prelude), or the obvious lack of commas, but instead I’ll draw your attention to the retcon that Mercy had a twin sister (as this cliché/detail will be important to the plot) and the list of questions the recap promises will be answered by the time the Inferno series is done.
To start off, we meet Grace, who has an unusual case of amnesia after a supposed car accident. Her boss and her boyfriend are both controlling chauvinists, and her therapist has a perfectly rational explanation for why Grace is seeing demons everywhere, which can be solved by taking high doses of psychiatric drugs, even though mind-altering substances are the last thing anyone with a head injury and uncategorized amnesia should be ingesting. If you’ve read this before (like I have) or you remember that Mercy shot herself in the head and you can do plot math in your head (like I usually can with some high, but not infallible, degree of accuracy), you probably already know what twist the story is going to take (like I do). It becomes even more obvious when Grace gets mugged and realizes she’s secretly a bloodthirsty badass. And then Sela shows up. With gray hair for some reason. Also, Drew (Jenna’s abusive, thug boyfriend who committed suicide in Beauty and the Beast) is a cab driver now, and Grace is having memories of Mercy’s suicide, leading her to send her bullshit plot medicine into the depths of the toilet from whence it came.
After finding out in the second issue that her boss (and possibly also her landlord and her boyfriend) is a demon, Grace calls for an early meeting with Sela, who finally reveals the twist that those of us with trope-sensitive brains (and those of us who have seen The Sixth Sense) already knew for ourselves.
So begins the quest of Mercy Dante, badass contract killer, who was sent back in time by our now morally bankrupt heroine so she could commit suicide and spend six months in Hell thinking she was her younger sister and getting sexually and otherwise physically abused by demons. And the real kicker? Sela orchestrated the whole thing to land Mercy in Hell so she had a tool at her disposal to retrieve another lost soul from the Inferno, which basically amounts to Sela delegating the clean-up of one of her own messes. I could point out the glaring irony here about how even though Sela despises Belinda, they spent so much time together that, with her memories returned to her, Sela is now resorting to the same kind of convoluted scheming and soul manipulation as Belinda would to get what she wants, but you probably stopped reading this sentence three commas ago, and I’m pretending that such basic vehemence is beneath me.
Besides, Mercy’s disturbing origin story (and Sela’s uncharacteristic involvement in it) notwithstanding, I affirm that she is a cool character, and one of the Grimm Universe’s first badass leading ladies, alongside Calie Liddle, Robyn Hood, Britney Walters, Liesel Van Helsing, Masumi, and (of course) Sela and Belinda. We’ll get to more about the new characters among these much later, but for now, back to the story.
Now that Mercy knows she’s Mercy again, Sela has tasked her with recovering the soul of the third of the Three Little Pigs, whom she sentenced to Hell prematurely in GFT #15.
The funny thing here is that despite her Machiavellian turn, Sela is still given a moment to be Sela before she sends a woman whom she orchestrated the death of on a suicide mission into Hell. She gives Mercy a pep-talk and “some of your old things,” then kisses Mercy on the forehead like a mother sending her daughter off for her first day of school, instead of, you know, an immortal superheroine sending the soul of a damned assassin into the seventh circle of Hell to recover a disposable human chess piece with unimportant magic powers so she can prevent the devil from trying to conquer the Earth with a fairy tale army. Again.
After a little of what Mercy terms “fun” (torturing and killing her dead sister’s probably-a-demon ex-boyfriend, among other things), she has a second encounter with a blind man named Virgil (her gatekeeper, and an obvious parallel to the source material, wherein the ghost of the Roman poet-author Virgil accompanies Dante on his journey through the Inferno). Other possible allusions here include the 1999 romantic drama At First Sight (wherein Val Kilmer portrayed a blind masseuse named Virgil), and the historical tidbit that the poet-author’s father had been blind near the end of his life.
Virgil gives Mercy a watch to give her hope or an awareness of time or boost her HP or something, then vanishes suddenly like all good gatekeeper tropes do. Next stop in Hell: a church run by the damned soul of a priest Mercy herself killed. Just as with the Three Little Pigs and the Ugly Duckling Killer, I shudder to think what he might have done to get killed by an assassin, end up in Hell, and have his soul eaten by demons. As usual, though, we are spared the more interesting details of the supporting cast in favor of the main character turning the current landscape into the set of a Grindhouse film directed by John Woo. And despite my preceding sarcasm, that ends up looking as cool as it sounds. Mercy two-gunning demons in a church parking lot is as brutal and clearly depicted as any of the better action sequences thus far in the Grimm Universe, and while it may lack some of the soul (pardon the pun) of those before it, Mercy is such a charismatic anti-heroine that her quips before, during, and after each exchange elevate the moment.
Following a conversation with the damned soul of a disfigured parishioner, Mercy begins the next issue with demons at her heels, like a pack of hyenas stalking a wounded lion, unsure if they can take down their prey. The issue is fuzzily and sketchily drawn, and Mercy’s line as she looks out across the River Styx (“You can never be too careful in this part of town.”) is incongruously hilarious because it implies Mercy has a level of familiarity with that particular section of Hell that she clearly does not have! Never mind the presence of an element of Greek mythology in a clearly non-Greek underworld (unless a misanthropic Grecophobe died and the Styx was fabricated in Hell as their punishment, but let’s move on because I’ve just been re-informed that comic books don’t have to make sense). Speaking of the Styx and things not making sense, Mercy soon encounters a black-robed Death figure on a boat (this is Charon, the ferryman of the Greek underworld, not to be confused with the other black-robed Death figure on a boat, whom we met in the 2008 Annual. By the time I get caught up, there will be at least six Death characters and three Satans for you to keep straight, so count your blessings while they are few), whom she deals with the same way she has dealt with everything underworldly so far: make a snarky quip and try to shoot it in the face. This doesn’t go well because you can’t kill Death with a handgun and Mercy missed out on the whole “Charon likes metal” lore of Greek mythology when Belinda had her parents murdered and she quit school to learn how to make money killing people. So she trades one of her guns for passage across the river—and not being choked to death…by Death.
“Alive” but wishing she had minored in three-gunning at hit school, Mercy crosses the Styx and encounters several souls like herself: suicides. The background becomes Wonderland levels of inconsistent from this point on, and the supporting characters appear randomly out of plot convenience. Cities with high-rise jumpers give way to groves of nightmarish tentacle trees inhabited by topless demonic harpies faster than you can say “hentai,” and a random blonde woman Mercy rescues from them just happens to be the real Grace Dante, both making the reader groan at the coincidence and putting to rest any question as to whether there ever had been a Grace Dante to begin with. Hmm. I wonder if there will be any kind of “ultimate sacrifice for the greater good” trope involved in the next and final issue?
And…I was right. Mercy is forced to choose between returning to Earth with Sela’s human chess piece (whose name is Michael Barnaby, by the way), or sending Grace back in her place to have a better life (or possibly get killed off-page with Michael in the course of the great cosmic war that keeps getting foreshadowed). Guess which choice she makes? Yes, the cheesy, badass one that also ends with Mercy becoming Satan’s personal soul assassin. The ensuing awesomeness was to be detailed in a sequel miniseries called Inferno: Soul Collector, yet another planned publication that was cancelled because reasons. Speaking of Satan, it’s Zenescope, so she’s a woman with a skin-tight, revealingly cut costume design. Her real name, she says, is Belia, not Lucifer (which is later retconned to not be true), and gives Mercy the typical “rebellious, fallen angel cast into Hell” narrative from the Bible (which is also retconned to not be her actual origin story later on). As I said previously, after the Dark One, Belia/Satan/Lucifer is the second of at least three devil characters to be introduced into the Grimm Universe so far, so just roll with it and enjoy the ride as much as you can. Mercy will return in several miniseries and crossover issues in the future for more badass, kick-ass adventures.
the Unlucky Omnibuster.
But it wouldn't be a Zenescope - Omnibusted compilation if I didn't start off with the issues that started it all: The Three Little Pigs, King Midas, and the Dante's Inferno (Prelude).
GFT #15: The Three Little Pigs
This issue continues a theme first seen in The Frog King and again in Beauty and the Beast: that of balancing a person’s inner self with their outward appearance.
Three young men with histories of theft, sexual assault, drug abuse, and general delinquency (who can be figuratively referred to as “pigs”) are planning to hold up a grocery store when Sela intervenes to teach them a lesson.It is a refreshing take on the Grimm Fairy Tales formula, marking the first time the focus character(s) were sucked into the book without reading it. Not only does Sela will them into the book, she enters it herself, turns them into pig-men, and sics a werewolf on them to scare them into repenting.
This is not the same werewolf as in Red Riding Hood--which died--but the fact that she can control it or is working side-by-side with it suggests that either Sela does have some power over the book and its characters, or that she has some kind of business relationship with the man behind the werewolf outside of this specific scenario.
This also introduces some rather shaky continuity, as we have seen Sela go from a non-presence to a passively evil force to a guide and mentor of varying morality, then something resembling human and fallible, and now as an active force of vengeance. One can suspect that everything as far back as Snow White took place after the Timepiece short story, and this issue and Cinderella took place some time after Timepiece. But this early in a newly-minted series, it doesn’t seem like even the writers have it all figured out. Later on though, this issue will prove to be a catalyst for one of the most kick-ass characters in the Grimm Universe.
We now know the lore reasoning behind Sela's scattershot morality in those early issues (memory-erasing magic involving the Timepiece itself), and I now see some connections to Sela's behavior in the above issue and her new, take no prisoners attitude since being resurrected and re-burdened with glorious purpose (is that meme too old yet?). Also, this issue is important to the Inferno Omnibusted because that kick-ass character I mentioned at the end of the review? It's Mercy Dante! Now let's look at the split duology that got her to this point:
GFT #29: King Midas
Belinda reads David’s daughter, Trisha, the story of King Midas. It goes much the same as the common knowledge version, with the wish for the golden touch being granted by Belinda herself in this version (rather than a satyr or an elf, as traditionally told), and the king dying of starvation after turning all of his food--and his daughter--to gold.
After the fairy tale (which is not a Grimm Fairy Tale, but a Greek myth), Trisha is kidnapped by Mercy Dante, a woman who has some bloody personal history with David Franks. I had forgotten Mercy’s backstory since the first time I read this, and revisiting it now only makes me appreciate even more what a badass character she turns out to be. Mercy will return in the Dante's Inferno (Prelude)--the lead-in to Inferno--and be featured as a lead character in several other miniseries.
GFT #41: Dante’s Inferno (Prelude)
But first, something that would have been awesome, were the subject matter at issue in this...issue not questionably handled, and had Sela Mathers' involvement in the story at this point in her character arc done Dante's Inferno (Prelude) any favors. I can’t think of any sane person who would describe child murder and suicide as “awesome.” But in terms of character development and structural originality in a Grimm Fairy Tales issue, it's good stuff. I still think Mercy is a cool, sexy character, and her revenge-driven origin is one of the best in independent fiction. Plus, just look at the cover art!
Inferno Volume 1
“Twenty-five years ago two young twin sisters named Mercy and Grace were orphaned when a paid assassin took the lives of their parents.“Six months ago Mercy Dante, now a contract killer, found the young daughter of the man guilty of killing her parents and in turn took the girl’s life as a form of vengeance.
“It was a horrifying measure and a regrettable decision that Mercy could barely live with…. The guilt and regret she felt left her more cold and empty than ever before and she knew without a doubt that if there was in fact such a thing as Hell, she would eventually burn there.
“But Sela Mathers, the mysterious woman who has the power to help people choose the correct path in life paid Mercy a visit. And Sela was able to bring Mercy back to the point in time where she made the decision to kill the man’s daughter….
“This time Mercy chose to spare the little girl and instead take her own life.…
“So the daughter lived and in her place Death claimed Mercy’s soul…but what was Sela’s reason for intervening? Why did Mercy need to die? What ever happened to her twin sister, Grace? And how can she help Sela complete her plan…? All the answers will come….”
To start off, we meet Grace, who has an unusual case of amnesia after a supposed car accident. Her boss and her boyfriend are both controlling chauvinists, and her therapist has a perfectly rational explanation for why Grace is seeing demons everywhere, which can be solved by taking high doses of psychiatric drugs, even though mind-altering substances are the last thing anyone with a head injury and uncategorized amnesia should be ingesting. If you’ve read this before (like I have) or you remember that Mercy shot herself in the head and you can do plot math in your head (like I usually can with some high, but not infallible, degree of accuracy), you probably already know what twist the story is going to take (like I do). It becomes even more obvious when Grace gets mugged and realizes she’s secretly a bloodthirsty badass. And then Sela shows up. With gray hair for some reason. Also, Drew (Jenna’s abusive, thug boyfriend who committed suicide in Beauty and the Beast) is a cab driver now, and Grace is having memories of Mercy’s suicide, leading her to send her bullshit plot medicine into the depths of the toilet from whence it came.
So begins the quest of Mercy Dante, badass contract killer, who was sent back in time by our now morally bankrupt heroine so she could commit suicide and spend six months in Hell thinking she was her younger sister and getting sexually and otherwise physically abused by demons. And the real kicker? Sela orchestrated the whole thing to land Mercy in Hell so she had a tool at her disposal to retrieve another lost soul from the Inferno, which basically amounts to Sela delegating the clean-up of one of her own messes. I could point out the glaring irony here about how even though Sela despises Belinda, they spent so much time together that, with her memories returned to her, Sela is now resorting to the same kind of convoluted scheming and soul manipulation as Belinda would to get what she wants, but you probably stopped reading this sentence three commas ago, and I’m pretending that such basic vehemence is beneath me.
Besides, Mercy’s disturbing origin story (and Sela’s uncharacteristic involvement in it) notwithstanding, I affirm that she is a cool character, and one of the Grimm Universe’s first badass leading ladies, alongside Calie Liddle, Robyn Hood, Britney Walters, Liesel Van Helsing, Masumi, and (of course) Sela and Belinda. We’ll get to more about the new characters among these much later, but for now, back to the story.
Now that Mercy knows she’s Mercy again, Sela has tasked her with recovering the soul of the third of the Three Little Pigs, whom she sentenced to Hell prematurely in GFT #15.
The funny thing here is that despite her Machiavellian turn, Sela is still given a moment to be Sela before she sends a woman whom she orchestrated the death of on a suicide mission into Hell. She gives Mercy a pep-talk and “some of your old things,” then kisses Mercy on the forehead like a mother sending her daughter off for her first day of school, instead of, you know, an immortal superheroine sending the soul of a damned assassin into the seventh circle of Hell to recover a disposable human chess piece with unimportant magic powers so she can prevent the devil from trying to conquer the Earth with a fairy tale army. Again.
After a little of what Mercy terms “fun” (torturing and killing her dead sister’s probably-a-demon ex-boyfriend, among other things), she has a second encounter with a blind man named Virgil (her gatekeeper, and an obvious parallel to the source material, wherein the ghost of the Roman poet-author Virgil accompanies Dante on his journey through the Inferno). Other possible allusions here include the 1999 romantic drama At First Sight (wherein Val Kilmer portrayed a blind masseuse named Virgil), and the historical tidbit that the poet-author’s father had been blind near the end of his life.
Virgil gives Mercy a watch to give her hope or an awareness of time or boost her HP or something, then vanishes suddenly like all good gatekeeper tropes do. Next stop in Hell: a church run by the damned soul of a priest Mercy herself killed. Just as with the Three Little Pigs and the Ugly Duckling Killer, I shudder to think what he might have done to get killed by an assassin, end up in Hell, and have his soul eaten by demons. As usual, though, we are spared the more interesting details of the supporting cast in favor of the main character turning the current landscape into the set of a Grindhouse film directed by John Woo. And despite my preceding sarcasm, that ends up looking as cool as it sounds. Mercy two-gunning demons in a church parking lot is as brutal and clearly depicted as any of the better action sequences thus far in the Grimm Universe, and while it may lack some of the soul (pardon the pun) of those before it, Mercy is such a charismatic anti-heroine that her quips before, during, and after each exchange elevate the moment.
“Alive” but wishing she had minored in three-gunning at hit school, Mercy crosses the Styx and encounters several souls like herself: suicides. The background becomes Wonderland levels of inconsistent from this point on, and the supporting characters appear randomly out of plot convenience. Cities with high-rise jumpers give way to groves of nightmarish tentacle trees inhabited by topless demonic harpies faster than you can say “hentai,” and a random blonde woman Mercy rescues from them just happens to be the real Grace Dante, both making the reader groan at the coincidence and putting to rest any question as to whether there ever had been a Grace Dante to begin with. Hmm. I wonder if there will be any kind of “ultimate sacrifice for the greater good” trope involved in the next and final issue?
And finally, my original, quick-fire review of Inferno FROM June 8, 2014 (Cover Charge #3: Grimm Fairy Tales): I don't get why people didn't like this enough to make it ongoing. After killing herself and winding up in the Inferno, Mercy Dante thinks she is her sister, Grace, until Sela Mathers shows up, asking Mercy to help her retrieve a lost soul from the seventh circle. I don't understand why Sela has grey hair in this, but the Inferno mini-series is full of well-drawn, easy-to-follow action and has the best ending of any mini-series the Grimm Universe had to offer up to that point.
So, I clearly had rose-colored nostalgia-beer-goggles on when I wrote that. The suicide, amnesia, and rape elements have aged like fish milk, the ending doesn't land because it's a cliché and the expected continuation got cancelled, and the story itself doesn't ultimately matter. I stand by Mercy being a great character and the action looking cool, though.
I hope you...enjoyed?...this critical journey through Zenescopean Hell. Please remember (and remind your eternally damned twin, if you have one) to like, comment, subscribe, follow, and visit me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook for the latest news on my content.
Next week, I'm starting the Retrospective review releases from GFT Volume Eight, so Stay Tuned and
Omnibuster,
Out.
Comments
Post a Comment