GFT Retrospective #80: The Dream Eater Saga - Prologue

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

Retrospective Dreamer

& Ticketmaster

The Dream Eater Saga was Zenescope Entertainment's first big, "let's pare down our Universe" event, introducing an ancient, unstoppable force with the power to wipe entire franchises out of existence, kill the previously unkillable, and give good and evil no other choice than to work together to ensure their own survival.

It's why Belinda abducted Sela from Myst, and why Samantha Darren and Baba Yaga were at odds over the fate of Britney Waters (that still feels wrong to me).

And thankfully for my word count, the Dream Eater isn't a wholly original concept, so I get to talk about its origins in myth, folklore, and popular culture, which Grimm Fairy Tales hasn't given me much opportunity to do lately.

In the Pokémon series of games, Dream Eater is an attack used on sleeping Pokémon to heal the user's HP for half of the damage dealt. In the Kingdom Hearts games, Dream Eaters are Darkness-born creatures from the Realm Of Sleep, classified as Nightmares (who eat good dreams and create bad dreams to replace them) or Spirits (who eat bad dreams). There is also the Celtic adder stone I mentioned in a previous post, and the indigenous Dreamcatcher, which serve to cleanse evil spirits and/or bad dreams in the lore of their respective cultures. But most fitting to the Dream Eater here is a Japanese folk spirit known as the baku. Whereas Zenescope's Dream Eater is more of a conceptual boogeyman that takes human form, the baku was inspired by the Chinese giant panda and Malayan tapir, and depicted as a chimera with elephant and rhinoceros features, the body of a bear, the tail of a cow, and the clawed limbs of a tiger. It was believed that they warded off evil and pestilence in addition to eating or destroying nightmares, but if summoned too often or mistreated, the baku would devour a person's hopes and dreams as punishment.

Because even psychic librarians can't see their own deaths coming, please Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so my dreams don't get eaten by video game characters, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

And for those who have been putting requests on my socials for a link to all of my Retrospective and Omnibusted reviews as a gateway to Zenescope's Grimm Universe without the financial investment, here's my Zenescope tag. For a minor financial investment, you can get a pretty affordable ComiXology subscription that lets you check out full trades and individual issues of nearly the entire Zenescope library. I don't know if it syncs with Amazon Prime, but it's worthwhile if you just want to read every comic book ever made....

The Dream Eater Saga #0: Prologue/Prelude

On the TPB's Table Of Contents page, this issue is referred to as the Prelude, but it says Prologue on the cover of the issue, so that's what I'm going with...except that the title page inside the issue calls it the Prelude, so that's what I'm going with?

Speaking of the cover, it's an homage to Marvel Comics covers for Days Of Future Past and Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe Again, but with the collage of images being issue covers from Escape From Wonderland, Grimm Fairy Tales, Salem's Daughter, Fear Not, Inferno, Sinbad, Neverland, and other Zenescope titles. Derivative, but well drawn and ominous, and I love it.

The art in the issue itself (penciled by Anthony Spay and colored by Falk) is gorgeous, giving a sense of grandeur to the intimate, smallness to the grand, and darkness to the wonderful in every panel.

And I was pleasantly surprised by the reminder that this was an origin story for Baba Yaga.

Born into a holy order of oracles who were charged with recording the history of the four Realms Of Power into a library (not that one) of fairy tale books, including Sela's Book Of Provenance and the Book Of the Lost that Morrigan would later give to Belinda, Baba Yaga was only a child when her mother (with the unfortunately prophetic name of Fel) was killed by the Dark One, who invaded the order's sanctuary looking for the Book Of the Lost, with Morrigan, Orcus, and the Priestess in tow.

Angered by her mother's death at Malec's hands, as well as Thane, Shang, and Hakan for arriving too late to save her, young Baba Yaga realizes that power is more important than good or evil, and vows revenge against both factions, using a page from the Book Of the Lost to empower herself with the souls of her murdered family.

That page: "The Tale Of the Dream Eater."

This issue was featured as the short story for the Grimm Fairy Tales Volume Ten Trade, and being an origin story that fleshes out minutiae of the series' lore, it fits that spot well. But it also does enough to set up The Dream Eater Saga, of which it is an official part, so I covered it here, separate from Volume Ten.

As its supplemental material, this issue comes with a restatement of the explanations of Earth and the four Realms Of Power from Little Miss Muffet Part 2, the Highborn, Pureblood, Falseblood, and Lowborn character classes and the Dark Horde from Cinderella Revisited, and the Council and Realm Knights who were introduced in Hard Choices. There are also short bios for the characters who will be featured and/or killed in the event, but they are too numerous to include here, so I will bring them up in future posts as they become relevant.

I literally have nothing bad to say about the Prelude (or Prologue, or whatever you want to call it), save for one question: why is it that psychics in fiction almost never see their own deaths coming, but when they do, they're just cool with it?

While you ponder that, please Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so my dreams don't get eaten by video game characters, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Dreaming On.