Zenescope - Omnibusted #17: Tales From Wonderland Volume 3

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. the Retrospective Ticketmaster,
Grey and Rusty Omnibuster,
Marching Madly,
and Sharing the Love.

Now that I've reviewed the last of the Tales From Wonderland, the time has come to get Omnibusted once again, by compiling all of the Volume Three Tales into one post to pad my content while I catch up a little.

Please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

Tales From Wonderland Volume 3 was the last Trade Paperback that I started writing reviews for when the financial and temporal pressures of my gambling addiction, comic book collecting obsession, and "any way you can" digital trade editing and compilation project most heavily began to weigh upon my soul back in 2018.

The following review is the last completed critical piece I had written from that five-year-old backlog of content.

As I have mentioned in the recent past, I have since taken steps to remedy my financial self-destruction, and I now have a subscription to ComiXology Unlimited for my current reading and reviewing needs. As of earlier this year, the ComiXology app has been discontinued and its functionality integrated with the Kindle app.

TFW #8: The White Knight

Writer Troy Brownfield, along with the art team of Tommy Patterson, Jeff Balke, Alex Owens, and Jason Embury (with lettering by Crank!) reimagine this follow-up to the classic tale of a boy who would be king and the Jesus/Julius Caesar trope (powerful leader with twelve close followers who is betrayed by his best friend) that would be his downfall. Guinevere has a child by Lancelot, whom Merlin raises to be the titular character. Leon du Lac, the future White Knight, is left to fend for himself one day when Merlin goes to meet a lady-in-waiting. He ends up fleeing through a looking glass in Merlin’s cave that takes him to Wonderland.
Now, some might say here that Zenescope is once again throwing continuity out the window (as the myths surrounding King Arthur predate Henry Allen’s experiments by half a millennium or so). However, we also know from the Snow Queen, Frog King, and Snow White issues of Grimm Fairy Tales that it’s possible for multiple looking glasses with Dream Provenance energy to exist at multiple times. Henry Allen’s mirror was the first confirmed case of this that we saw, but that doesn’t mean it was the first ever in the Grimm Universe’s history. Perhaps Merlin, too, discovered a pocket of Dream Provenance energy and learned that he could use it to turn a mirror of his own into a Wonderland portal?
But again, speculation and knowledge fall to the madness of Wonderland and Zenescope’s love/hate relationship with time and space. Leon staves off madness long enough to find a set of white armor that Merlin enchanted against the effects of Wonderland, and sets out to slay the beasts of the realm, starting with…the Queen of Hearts? I guess this supports the “time is weird” mechanic established in the Tale of Alice and Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, but it’s also just confusing nonsense.
Speaking of confusing nonsense, the White Knight is supposed to be both slaying creatures in Wonderland (which is impossible without the Ebony Blade) and returning to the Nexus to slay Wonderland beings that crossed over into his world. But neither landscape, style of dress, character behavior, nor establishing text like “Meanwhile” or “Elsewhere” indicate where anything is happening at any given time. Whatever the case, a new Queen character is introduced in this issue (the Queen of Spades), who looks like a cross between a burlesque dancer, a cigarette girl from a casino in the fifties, and a vampire.

After sending Leon on his “cleanse the realms of the impossible” mission, she conjures up a stone statue of Merlin, hinting that she was the wizard’s lady in waiting, and that things didn’t end well for him.
The one time the issue indicates which realm we’re supposed to be in, the White Knight chases a black lion through a looking glass that takes him from Wonderland back to the Nexus. We learn from this that his armor was crafted to resist the effects of Wonderland specifically, as engaging the lion in the Nexus begins to tarnish it. Having slain the lion (and slaughtered many of the survivors of its wrath after they turned on him), the now Grey Knight returns to Wonderland, a victim—so the Queen of Spades says when she welcomes him into her service—of the same fate as Merlin, Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere.

This was a cool enough story, but like the Red Knight before him, nothing ever comes of Leon the Grey beyond what we see here.

This next review is from a post that I cranked out at the last minute because despite my claims to want to plan and compose my 2024 content well in advance, I wasn't going to write it until I realized that Valentine's Day fell on a New Comic Book Day (Wednesday) this year. But, as tends to happen with some of my impromptu content, things just lined up perfectly. And because roses are the flower of Valentine's Day (but also the flower we lay on caskets at funerals?), and that Wednesday was Valentine's Day, and New Comic Book Day, and Zenescope did a Tales From Wonderland about The Red Rose that just happens to be the next issue up for review in the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective (after The White Knight review I did last month), here it is!

So please share The Love Below by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your true feelings in the Speakerboxx at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read, and choo-choo-choose me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest heart-shaped boxes of news on my content.

Now, let's lean a little closer to see if this rose really smells like...well, you know.

TFW #9: The Red Rose

I mentioned in my coverage of Neverland that we would see the names Elisabeth and Mary again in Tales From Wonderland, and that promise comes to pass now.

We’ve seen in some of Sela’s dream sequence issues, Return to Wonderland #6, and the Mad Hatter, part 2, that Wonderland villains are often based on infamous murderers in our world’s history: Lizzie Borden became the Lily, Jack the Ripper became the Mad Hatter, etc. That also holds true in this Tale, which focuses on Elisabeth Mary Bathory, also known as Countess Blood.

There is some dispute among historians as to her status as a serial killer and aspiring vampire, citing religious tensions with the new Hungarian ruling class of the time, and Protestant witch-hunt behavior on the part of the masses, but Elisabeth Bathory and her attendants were alleged to have tortured and killed hundreds of girls and young women, and folklore and pop culture have since adapted this to include virgin bloodletting so she could bathe in it to preserve her youth. Several video games and other modern media have even depicted her as a straight-up vampire.

Not so much with the vampire angle here, but she is shown bleeding a girl to death,, bathing in virgin (?) blood, and looking quite youthful.

Of course, this is a Zenescope publication, so the female form is proudly but suggestively shown in various states of fractional (or non-)dress, with lingerie being the garment of choice.

As for the twist to the Bathory legend, here, she has been collecting large amounts of blood so that her attendant (hooded at first, but shortly revealed to be Baba Yaga) can use it as a portal to send Elisabeth to Wonderland!

I like how this is a dark inversion of the reflecting pool from the original Wonderland Trilogy, being a blood pool to Wonderland instead of a waterway out of Wonderland.

I also like the series of twists the story takes once Elisabeth emerges on the other side (now wearing a green, plant-like dress instead of being...naked). She immediately comes face-to-face with the Jabberwocky, where she reveals that the six hundred women she sacrificed were "vapid scoundrels truly deserving of death in exchange for this one thing." That one thing actually being two things: immortality and revenge.

And the Jabberwocky is not pleased that Elisabeth came to him empty-handed and has been hiding her true motives from him, so he tears her skull open! and treats us to a flashback of her finding her parents murdered and later losing two children to what appears to be natural causes.

Following the flashback (and a sequence involving vines that you shouldn't Google at work even though it isn't that graphic or obscene), the Jabberwocky has done what Wonderland be doin', and turned Elisabeth into the Rose of the Flower Girls (we saw Lizzie Borden get turned into the Lily in a previous Tale). But then, the big reveal comes when Elizabeth's husband, Gerald, also arrives in Wonderland, and another perspective on the flashback shows that Gerald was the one who murdered her parents and poisoned her two children so he could have her to himself.

And guess what? He gets his wish now because Rose infects him with the same vines she was reborn with, and he becomes the giant swamp monster who almost ate Johnny Liddle in Beyond Wonderland.

Whether or not you account for the morally gray sex appeal of the focus character, The Red Rose is a decent revenge story with some cool twists and reveals. My only gripe is that, unlike the Tweedles, the Cheshire Queen, the Grey Knight, and the Ripper Mad Hatter, this didn't have the build-up of hope and inevitable despair for a sympathetic character to make their corruption have weight. That lack of sympathy and the heavy backloading thereof also keeps it from measuring up to The Red Queen as a satisfying revenge fantasy. Even the Monkey’s Paw of poetic justice that we see in most of the Tales From Wonderland feels kind of uninspired here because Elisabeth/Rose got the immortality and revenge she wanted, and Gerald got what he deserved, all with the bare minimum of irony or care for pacing.

Gotta love the Baba Yaga cameo, though.

In addition to being my most viewed month of all time, March 2024 was the month when teams of college students who are good at putting large, orange orbs in bottomless cotton mesh baskets faced 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 reviewed in March.

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....

Queen Of Hearts vs. Mad Hatter may have been the last of the Tales From Wonderland, but it isn't the last Tales From Wonderland content. Like previous Zenescope collections, the third and final Volume of Tales From Wonderland features a short story, spread out over its individual issues to keep completionists invested so they don't skip out on a One-Shot they aren't interested in. Usually, the short would be included in its entirety at the end of the Trade or Omnibus compilation, and I don't know if the physical trade does this, but the Comixology (now integrated into Amazon and the Kindle app) edition keeps the parts separated, like it was too much trouble to do some minor rearranging in the compilation process and they just slammed the single issues together in verbatim order. Not a deal-breaker, but it wouldn't have been my choice, either.

Omnibuster's Note: I originally put an image of the Trade Paperback's issue-separation page here as a thumbnail to avoid having the short story's real title page trigger the Algorithm's sensitivity warnings, as you will see below.

TFW Short Story #3: The Redemption

At the end of the White Knight issue, Part One sees everyone's "favorite" scumbag pappy, Charles Dodgson, simping over a purple dress that belonged to a woman he does not name (and based on The Arrangement short from Volume Two and the color of the dress, it's easy to infer that it belonged to Belinda), before he forcibly removes his own face with a shotgun...and then regenerates. That's basically it for Part One: make the audience feel bad for psychological terrorist and pan-generational child murderer Charles Dodgson because Belinda left him and Wonderland won't let him die. But the art quality in the Redemption short is pretty peak for this era of Zenescope, and I love the effect of Dodgson's narration boxes stitching themselves back together as Wonderland heals him from the shotgun blast. Just genius.

Part Two was included as a B-story at the end of the Red Rose issue, and gets considerably meatier with its storytelling. But as usual, that involves so many attempts to have the Wonderland franchise make chronological sense that it just makes the timeline even worse.

As Dodgson looks back on the cursed life he leads to circumvent his incurable, fatal illness, we learn about his courtship and marriage to Monica Carden (the woman next to him in the photo from the beginning of Return to Wonderland, who also helped him send Alice down the rabbit hole in the Alice Tale, and who is the real owner of this particular purple dress, making some chronological sense for once and finally--maybe?--making Dodgson a genuinely sympathetic character), that Dodgson had a daughter named Rebecca who got taken by Wonderland, and that Fenton (the Dark One’s slimy, perverted, Civil War deserter sidekick) is so rich and/or powerful that he can do Sela's "I can have any job the plot requires" thing, here shown running a pawn shop with a "No Checks, No Refunds, No Whining" policy when Dodgson goes to sell the Allen mirror. Also, Dodgson says that his marriage to Monica was the first time he ever told the "we have to feed children to Wonderland to keep it from bleeding into Earth" lie, which is hard to believe, considering that he's been alive for two centuries. But I guess if Elizabeth Bathory can get away with stalking, kidnapping, and killing six hundred women in the time it takes to visibly age, Dodgson can sacrifice one child a year for two hundred years without having to make up a story.

Whatever the case, Part Two ends with the Jabberwocky shoving its terrifying face through Dodgson's TV like he's an NPC from a Zelda CDi cutscene.

Part Three wraps things up, included as a B-story in Queen Of Hearts vs. Mad Hatter. We're shown context for the first Mad Hatter Tale from Dodgson's point of view as he confronts Drake Liddle about physically abusing Johnny and pushes him into Wonderland through the Allen mirror, which made its own way there after Dodgson gave it back to Fenton in Part Two because its power set is broken by now and I like making unintended glass puns.

But Monica sees this and immediately "loses the will to live," landing her in the hospital where her soul is taken by the White Rabbit.

Suspecting the Jabberwocky is responsible, Dodgson gets the mirror back from Fenton and gives it to Lewis and Alice Liddle as a homecoming present. This makes Alice freak out even though she didn't go through a mirror as a child, which makes no sense unless she saw something in the mirror or can sense the twisted Dream Provenance energy coming from it, but that isn't really explained. From what I remember, there is an Alice In Wonderland miniseries and a Through the Looking Glass follow-up that elaborate on the Alice Tale, but just make even less sense out of everything. We'll get to those eventually, but for now, Dodgson returns from his...delegation quest...to find that Monica has died anyway because rabbits. News later reaches him that Alice has hung herself, and he and the Jabberwocky (who is talking to him through his own reflection in a few surreal, comical, and existentially disturbing panels that I love anyway) plan to talk to young Calie at Alice's funeral in RTW #6.

Dodgson is a hard character to like. He has some good lore behind him, but his ultimate turn to the dark side, his desperate, evil errand boy characterization, and the nothing manner of his death at the end of Escape From Wonderland makes him just another slimy, sold soul in the Dark One’s ongoing scheme to conquer the Nexus.

As for the Redemption short itself (despite there not being any long-lasting redemption going on), there's a lot to like here. The focus character notwithstanding, the story is easy enough to follow (especially for a Wonderland title), the art style is consistent between parts, making most characters easily identifiable, the editorial references are accurate, and the visuals are striking and memorable (everything with the Jabberwocky, and the gunshot and regeneration with the fractured internal monologue boxes come to mind). Hate the man, but love the content.

The next few weeks will be getting Omnibusted as I use that time to read, watch, and compose new content, so please give it and me some love by remembering to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, commenting at the bottom of this post, helping out my ad revenue as you read, and following me down the mad social media rabbit hole on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

My plans for the next two weeks are to do another Omnibusted that includes all three Volumes of the Tales From Wonderland series, as well as an update of my Countdown to TixMas #9: Winter Wonderland (Zenescope - Omnibusted #6) post to include the Volume Three content.

Also, Alien 3 review on Friday.

Ticketmaster,

Out.