Zenescope - Omnibusted #18: Tales From Wonderland

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Omnibuster

This is my second week in a row of getting Omnibusted, this time by compiling my reviews of all three Volumes of Tales From Wonderland into one post to pad my content while I catch up a little.

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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.

Tales From Wonderland Volume #1

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!

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 until Tales Volume 3. 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 1863 Yazoo 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.

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.

Next week will be the final Omnibusted issue of this Wonderland era 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.

Also, Alien Resurrection review on Friday.

Ticketmaster,

Omnibuster,

Out.