Zenescope - Omnibusted #21: Tales From Neverland TPB

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster.

Think happy thoughts, Ticketholders!

You're going to need them for at least the next two weeks because I'm going to attempt to make sense of Neverland's continuity so far next week...and then read The Library, which I remember being less fun and a bigger waste of time than actually reading the entirety of my local library. It's a long flight to the bottom if you don't wanna rock 'no roll, so 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 never-landing content.

Also, as a change of pace from my usual, copy-and-paste approach to these Omnibusted collections, I'll be touching on some additional content that was featured exclusively in the trade paperback collection of Tales From Neverland at the time and talking about the structure and production value of the collection itself, so check the end of the post for that. Now, let's get into the post.

Tales From Neverland #1: Tinkerbelle

Remember when Belle was a one-dimensional, jealous, slutty villain of circumstance and necessity with a big redemption moment that ended up not mattering?

Well, it's time for Zenescope to try making her relatable...by revealing that she killed the fairy princess on accident because she wanted the popular girls to like her, and she feels bad about it now, but not bad enough to turn on her "friends" (who threatened to feed her kid sister to the same mermaid pond where the princess was eaten, which would have proven an empty threat once their guilt had been revealed, but we need a reason for Belle to be exiled and ostracized by her people, and Zenescope thought their early, Belinda-era episodic moral of "villains are made when popular girls get away with being mean" was the best way to make that happen). And finally, there's the last page leading into Belle's first meeting of Pan, whom she follows without question for most of the Neverland series despite subconsciously knowing that he "made her special" by killing almost her entire race and donating their corpses to Malec's entomology collection, including Belle's sister. This character transition would have made more sense if Belle had a more simplified motive to actually hate her people (like, if she was a mutant fairy or had some abnormal kind of magic and her people were racist or treated her poorly because of a vague prophecy or something), and ironically dimensionalized her more as a tragic villain. But instead, Occam's Rusty Razor cuts away everything that makes sense, boiling Belle down to one trait: she will reliably and unfaithfully throw herself at whoever promises to make her feel included at any given moment, consequences be damned.

Did I mention the art style is trash? It's this rushed, disjointed, sketchy-looking style that takes what should be a bunch of recognizable, scantily clad fairy designs on par with Nyssa, Belle, and the Nutcracker fire-dancers, and turns them into the kind of deformed, blurry, androgynous blobs of color and chicken scratch you get from a sophisticated cave painting, or when you prompt a long shot from an AI image generator that can't do faces.

But that said, I will admit that there are parts of the Tinkerbelle issue, particularly near the end, where the line art-free style goes more on model and has genuine, visible artistic effort to it. I like the variety of what costume designs were discernible, the fight paneling was decent, and I thought the decision to make the make the male fairies look like Pan was interesting.

I ended the above review with a heavy dose of hopium that the Tiger Lilly issue would fare better than Tinkerbelle as a story and from an art perspective. It turned out to be a blessing story-wise, but featured some cursed artwork.

Tales From Neverland #2: Tiger Lily

Beginning with the art of this isssue, it is certainly a stylistic choice, with that choice being to take the line art style from Tinkerbelle, and make it worse, looking like a blind epileptic learned to do rotoscoping on YouTube, filtered the result through an AI program, and then had a dirty chicken walk on it.

As for the story, not only is it important to the Neverland lore, it has long-standing ripples in the greater Zenescope canon, does justice to an (albeit fictional and fairy tale-oriented) indigenous culture and its female focus character.

Tiger Lily is a kick-ass chick. She can out-shoot, out-track, and nearly out-fight any male in her tribe (the "Tawchok," which is Choktaw with the syllables reversed). She's basically Naru from Prey before that movie existed, and in a less chauvinistic tribe.

The issue opens in the midst of Tiger Lily's leadership trial by combat, which is a decently paneled and well narrated victory for our eponymous heroine. But because her people hold fertility sacred and Lily won by kicking her opponent in the balls, her father, Harkyn (who may be a direct relative of Hakan, the Realm Knight from GFT #49 and Hard Choices) chooses her opponent to be his successor as tribal chief and assigns her to guard the Sacred Child (an ancient, immortal infant encased in an emerald-like stone that gives the Tawchok "Sisters" the power to heal any injury...except for genital damage) while her opponent leads a scouting party to engage with some potential pirates.

While these groups fight on-and-off-page, looking like melted zombies, Lily is approached by Pan (who looks like a melted zombie Dee Snider) on the pretense that he was injured by the pirates and needs to be healed. We soon find out that Tinkerbelle (because this takes place between her Tale and the Neverland series proper, and because of the art style here, she looks just as sin-fugly as everyone else) knew of the Sacred Child, and that our..."favorite" dysfunctional couple recruited the pirates to help him steal the Sacred Child's power for himself, thereby causing the land to wither and die, and the Tawchok to be without a permanent home until Pan's defeat at the end of Neverland.

In a fight that once more shows how stubborn, savvy, and badass she is (and how good the paneling is), Tiger Lily does manage to get the Sacred Child away from Pan before he drains it completely, resulting in some palpably tragic images of Lily cradling the near-dead infant in her arms that hit hard, even with the shoddy art style in play.

Despite the art style and the clear "the white man ruined nature for the 'Indians'" subtext of the ending, I loved this story. Tiger Lily may be woefully underutilized (she was just an offscreen damsel in the Neverland series before getting some banter with Wendy, and we don't really see her again until around the time Grimm Fairy Tales hits one hundred issues), but this alone puts her in my top three archers in Zenescope, behind Liesel Van Helsing and Robyn Hood, and the introduction of the Sacred Child is one of those plot devices that will become majorly important down the line, and partially explains Sela's ability to use healing magic in Volume 9.

Those of us who grew up with the VHS re-release of Peter Pan (which is where I swear I saw the Mandela Effect of Tinker Bell spelling out the Walt Disney logo as a kid) remember not only the giant, plastic clamshells they came in, but the literally offhand story Peter tells of how his rivalry with Hook started: cutting off the Captain's hand in a swordfight and feeding it - and a clock - to the crocodile.

By the way, how unlucky do you have to be that your name is James Hook and you get your hand chopped off by an immortal, flying child, forcing you to wear a hook prosthesis? That's like if your name is Otto Octavius and you wind up with eight limbs, or if your name is Skywalker and you wind up in space, or if your name is Ripley and you die from an alien tearing its way out of your chest, or if your name is Jack Cole and you're a terrible human being. Nominal destiny sucks, doesn't it, folks?

Tales From Neverland #3: Croc

The Disney telling of Hook's origin is similar to what transpired in J.M. Barre's original novel and play, but some major liberties are taken in the Zenescope version (which has the best art of the three Tales, and makes one wonder why the female-focused issues looked so bad by comparison or if it was merely an issue-by-issue stylistic choice by the art team).

Things open with the pirate Captain Arcos in the midst of sending his crewmen (specifically one man named Gregor, who doesn't make it past the second page) to the island home of a Lake Placid/SyFy Channel-sized crocodile to retrieve a treasure he stashed there.

Arcos is dressed in a legally distinct red pirate ensemble and Pan and Nob are on his crew, so you know immediately that his chances of survival are on par with those of a horny asshole of color in a slasher movie, but a comic book has pages to fill, so plot must plot.

Pan claims to have a plan to get around the Croc, and Arcos' crew (including a background character who looks like Sagat with tribal tattoos)

are too scared and disloyal to risk joining Gregor as crocodile food, so Arcos and Pan team up to battle the kaiju momma (just like '98 'Zilla, Croc has eggs! Damn you, Roland Emmerich!), interspersed with panels of sinister mugging and vague threats from Pan because the first Deadpool movie hadn't come out yet to let us know what the red suit is for and we're not supposed to have read the nine-plus other comic books where Pan is one-dimensionally evil. So surprise! After getting the location of the treasure from Arcos, Pan kills him and uses his corpse as bait to kill the Croc before recovering the treasure and taking over Arcos' crew. Nob's loyalty to Arcos here places the Tales in the following order: Croc, Tinkerbelle, Tiger Lily.

And that's pretty much it. As a non-speaking character who dies by the end, the Croc is a tertiary presence in its own story, and the abrupt ending leaves little in terms of a satisfying arc or any hints at how this affects whatever Pan's frog-ass-flat villain scheme was prior to "kidnap and sexually assault my great-great-great-great..." in Neverland.

I guess we're supposed to speculate that Pan kept one of the crocodile eggs and raised it to be his guard dog (or maybe accelerated its growth with the stolen Sacred Child magic?), hinting at some character depth for him, turning him from "evil, abusive, incestuous asshole" into "evil, abusive, incestuous asshole...who likes animals" and adding to his "twisted shepherd of lost children" MO that we've seen with Belle and (in less obvious, literal ways) the Sacred Child's power, the zombified Lost Boys, and Arcos' crew. This should have been renamed to Pan, or even followed up with a Croc part 2, but sadly, this standard betrayal story is the last of the Tales From Neverland.

As is to be expected by now, each TFN issue ended with part of an extra story (like was done with the Tales From Wonderland comics), which I will cover next with some editing to address a name discrepancy in the second part.

Tales From Neverland Bonus Story: Family History

Flash back to London, England on April Fool's Day, 1912, when a woman named Penelope wakes from a nightmare (but in the Grimm Universe, maybe she has precognitive abilities?) and happens upon her husband, Phillip, engaged in a mass virgin sacrifice with a robed figure. Since the origins of April Fool's Day predate these events by at least half a millennium, he could have easily claimed a holiday prank, but this is a Grimm Fairy Tales spin-off, so he and the generic hood are content to keep slaughtering "Lowborn human scum" and plotting to enslave the Nexus (which is pretty hard to do if they're all dead from slit throats and punctured hearts, but if you want to be all Laszlo Gogelak about your racist world-domination scheme, you do you, guys!).

To be clear for The Algorithm, that was sarcasm. Racism, slavery, murder, and world domination are bad things, and I do not advocate bad things (even though I just spent last Monday giving qualified praise to an anime about a thirty-something suicide who reincarnates as a child, masturbates to a girl's underwear, and tries multiple times to have sex with his underage cousin because watching Mushoku Tensei is like unironically reading Playboy for the articles: you ignore the pornography and focus on the interviews and storytelling).

Getting back to the story that matters today, eight days after learning that her husband is a controlling, murderous Highborn supremacist, Penelope takes their son, Jacob, on board the Titanic, where they are followed by one of Phillip's henchmen who doesn't get named because he won't make it much farther into the page count. Several allusions are made to Jacob being a continuation of Phillip's legacy (and one reference to Phillip having a second son), which confused me in the early pages of this story because I thought it was going to follow Mary and Daniel Darling in their days before the 2008 Annual, instead of two new characters.

This is quickly remedied when Jacob "makes a new friend" onboard the Titanic (this boy's identity subtly confirmed by the pair's poses in their game of tag),

and Penelope exchanges dialogue with the boy's "strange...distant" mother. Throw in the boy's superhuman agility, red eyes, sharp teeth, and the fact that he cannibalizes the henchman off-page (perhaps the same person Daniel is shown feeding on in the 2008 Annual?), and this mysterious mother and son are clearly Mary and Daniel Darling.

Flash ahead to April 18th (three to four days after the sinking of the Titanic), and we see that Penelope (who is pregnant), Jacob, Mary, and Daniel are among the survivors, and they are heading for America. I almost gave this a Jason Takes Manhattan inaccuracy rant, but I looked up the location of the wreck, and I can kind of believe that a life boat could make it to the Northeast coast of the United States in four days, so let's move on.

Six years later, the four of them are living in New York. Penelope has resorted to "things I'm not proud of" with a fat, scummy stepfather archetype to make a living (because when your husband is a supernatural mass-murderer, the bar for acceptable male companionship is rusting into nothing at the bottom of the ocean with the Titanic), Jacob and Daniel are joined by Jacob's younger brother, Vincent, and Daniel pretty much confirms that he's going to be Pan when he starts telling Jake and Vince about how he's going to rule Neverland and whips out a vial of pink Provenance energy (maybe fairy dust?) that transports the three of them there via a portal in the sewer.

Omnibuster's Note: Penelope has some narration in this part where she refers to Jacob's brother as Michael (a name we previously - or later, if we're going chronologically instead of by publication order - saw in Neverland as one of the Darling boys whom Wendy comes to rescue from Pan), which is revealed in the third part of this story to be a printing error. I originally thought Vincent was just some random neighborhood friend because of this error ("how will Jacob and Michael eat?"), which only compounded my confusion and disappointment as Family History closed in on its final twists.

A decent mystery emerges as to whether Jacob or Daniel will be Pan, when Malec approaches Jacob and offers him dominion over Neverland. There's also a few panels of a grey-skinned fairy and the rhino guard from GFT #49 (along with silhouettes of what could be Hakan and two other Tawchok extras) discussing the slaughter of fairies by the Horde and "The Beast," and ordering the closing of all portals between the Realms and the Nexus (which was mentioned in Shang's exposition dumps in previous GFT issues). Unable to visit Neverland, Jake snaps and kills his stepfather while Daniel is shown eating...something...in the sewer and Malec watches, offering Daniel a "reward" as the second part ends.

Part Three opens with Penelope attempting to kill Jacob and Vincent, but Jacob wakes up and blasts his mother with green magic, she narrates that her own suicide will happen shortly between panels, and the boys run away to join Daniel and train with Malec, Volac, and *swallowing my own vomit* Fenton. With the diary-style narration having now shifted perspective from Penelope to Jacob, and Jacob being able to levitate with green magic while Daniel growls and sneers jealously, it becomes disappointingly clear that Daniel rhymes with Paniel for absolutely no reason.

Also, Malec tricks Daniel into heart-fisting Vincent to death, and suggestively takes credit for sinking the Titanic (probably by having Morrigan and Sela do it for him), offering Jacob the usual "resources for revenge in exchange for mutually beneficial and unconditional servitude" bargain.

So...is Daniel Captain Arcos? Is he Barr? Is he Cross' great-great-great-grand-something? Does going to Neverland Rule 63 him into the kaiju Croc-mama? Does going to Neverland Animorph him into the were-croc father of the eggs? Is something else going on? This spin-off franchise at large, and this bonus story, specifically, are so "fuck you" about making their lore satisfying or their villain characters deeper than an atom of paper pulp (or treating their female supporting characters with any kind of artistic dignity or narrative appreciation - Tiger Lily being the temporary exception to the narrative appreciation rule...in an issue that looked like a rejected Walking Dead comic drawn by a tap-dancing chicken with ALS who walked through motor oil during an earthquake), that Zenescope would rather do nothing with the property for half a decade (aside from having crossover event villains cannibalize and/or slaughter everyone...twice) than explain the reasoning behind the three-year cock-tease that was Daniel's mere existence in Grimm Universe continuity.

Family History looks on par with the main Neverland series and GFT issues of its time (even giving me quality whiplash with the hard transitions at the end of the Tinkerbelle and Tiger Lily issues), and my opinion of the narrative was heavily influenced by my over-caffeinated emotional state at the time of writing, but I absolutely fucking hate it with every ounce of passion I possess and every ounce of passion that I find lacking in the Neverland brand to this point in the Retrospective.

And that was it for the Tales From Neverland Trade Paperback. After the cover gallery, there is a zero-issue special preview of The Dream Eater Saga (Zenescope's first big, "kill everyone with low sales figures and cancelled franchise potential" event series), but that is better left discussed when we get to it in the Retrospective proper, so let's move on to how the Trade Paperback is structured. Much like the Tales From Wonderland Trades, this one is a case of laziness: simply taking the single print issues (minus ad copy) and smashing them together back-to-back-to-back. There's some clear effort in the beginning, what with the expected issue break pages you see in GFT's Volume Trades, a Table Of Contents, and a specially edited title page for the Tinkerbelle issue (seen in the review up above) before the chosen cover art and the beginning of the Tale itself. Even the aforementioned Dream Eater preview gets some love. But no effort is made to collect the three parts of Family History into one, continuous narrative at the end, and instead of issue break pages or special title pages, the Tiger Lily and Croc stories just get the previous issue's ending preview page and their own credits page respectively. I get that Zenescope is not on the level of Marvel or DC, so time and budget are bigger concerns at this early stage (conserving pages, ink, and manpower), but there must also be some appearance of consistency and effort to these things. The next (and final?) series to have Tales will be Oz. I hope this trend resolves itself by then.

To keep the bells tinkering and that codfish cooking slow, hit the first star to the right, head straight on 'til morning, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, tell me if I'm a crock or if I have you hooked down in the comments, give a hand to 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 never-landing content.

Ticketmaster,

Glad I'm done with Neverland for awhile, but dreading my trip to The Library.

I can fly!

I can fly!

I can fly!

Splat!