GFT Retrospective #60: Queen Of Hearts vs. Mad Hatter

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
Marching Madly

March is the month when teams of college students who are good at putting large, orange orbs in bottomless cotton mesh baskets face off against each other, all the while running a lot, sweating a lot, making the floor go "squeak!" a lot, and also stopping the opposing team of students from a different college from putting the orange orb in the bottomless cotton mesh basket a greater number of times than them.

This happens in a tournament format known as March Madness, and because today is New Comic Book Day, there is a March Hare in Wonderland, and Zenescope did a Tales From Wonderland where the Mad Hatter fights (?) the Queen Of Hearts for the anthology series' finale, that's what I'm reviewing today!

So if you get a wild Hare, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, March down to the comments section at the bottom of this post to share your madness, help out my ad revenue as you read, and dribble over to follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest card-adorned top hats and bottomless cotton mesh baskets of news on my content.

TFW #10: Queen Of Hearts vs. Mad Hatter

This serves as a direct sequel to The Mad Hatter part 2, with the first Mad Hatter (a.k.a. Jack the Ripper) seeking revenge against the Queen Of Hearts for taking his love, Lily (a.k.a. Lizzie Borden), from him and helping the Jabberwocky turn her into a Flower Girl. She also imprisoned and tortured John/Jack/Hatter for an indeterminate, Wonderland-dilated number of years just for the fun of it.

But before the good stuff gets underway, we apparently need a prologue and an origin story for the Queen Of Hearts' servants, which begins at the Allen house with Elizabeth Allen (a.k.a. the Red Queen) being reassured by her butler in lieu of "the people from the sanitarium" arriving to "help [her] get through this." An Editor's Note tells us that this takes place prior to "The Agreement" (by which I'm assuming they mean the Tales From Wonderland Volume 2 short story, The Arrangement), wherein she is already living at the sanitarium and Dodgson has her husband's mirror delivered to kick off the Red Queen Tale, and we got our first taste of Zenescope having a shared comic book Universe because Belinda. It is also revealed in this prologue that the Queen Of Hearts has been harassing Elizabeth, contributing to the public, private, and personal opinion that she has gone mad. And because Wonderland is brutally, poetically ironic and the Allens' butler, maid, and cook are worried about their futures ("nothing lasts forever," the butler says), the Queen kidnaps the three of them, as well as the gardener, and turns them into corrupted body horror versions of their former selves.

When we catch back up to whatever accounts for the present in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter has already killed the Queen's card soldiers off-page and taken their heads. I guess that, at this point, Wonderland hasn't gotten strong enough for heads to grow entire new bodies yet, so the heads and bodies need to be near each other for the resurrection/immortality/healing factor thing to work?

Whatever the case, the Hatter gives a Cliff's Notes version of Mad Hatter part 2 (also with an Editor's Note referencing that title) and states that he intends to kill all of the Queen's subjects and playthings as a means of making her suffer and breaking her before he finally kills her and gets his revenge. All he has now that Lily and his sanity are gone is who he used to be before Wonderland: Jack the Ripper.

Weeks go by without incident after the Card Soldier massacre, until one night, the Mad Hatter reveals that he has been using his skinsuit ability to masquerade as the cook, and he does so in the most ominous, horrifyingly gory way possible.

He then skins the maid and turns the Queen of Hearts against the gardener before using the butler as a disguise to try killing her in her sleep. I remember this feeling longer and more epic, but the Mad Hatter's revenge is ended quickly by some interference from the Cheshire Cat, thanks to a truce I don't remember him having with the Queen.

The Queen then gives the Hatter's hat to one of her soldiers to pass along to the March Hare, and the story ends with an Editor's Note reminding us that this leads into the Mad Hatter Tale while the Queen goes for a swim (which means her lower half is drowning).

The art (provided by Martin Montiel and supervised by Pinocchio's David Seidman) is literally sketchy, which aids the gory aspect of this bloody revenge tale, but looks cheap and off-brand otherwise. Even though it plays into the horror movie inspirations of the Wonderland side of Zenescope’s early portfolio, we didn't really need the pagetime it took to introduce four characters we've never seen before just so the Hatter could spend most of the actual story killing them between panels, and in turn, the titular promise of an epic final battle was never delivered on the way it should have been.

Look way forward to that happening again....

But also, look forward to more blogging goodness by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, March down to the comments section at the bottom of this post to share your madness, help out my ad revenue as you read, and dribble over to follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest card-adorned top hats and bottomless cotton mesh baskets of news on my content. Please‽

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Making a Fast Break for it.