GFT Retrospective #81: Dream Eater Saga - Once Upon A Time

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

Retrospective Dreamer

& Ticketmaster

The Dream Eater makes its first official appearance in today's issue up for review, with its Bio from Dream Eater Saga #0 reading as follows:

This will start to have context once I get into talking about the issue itself (which was the random insert from the first Myths and Legends Volume, and the short story from the Tales From Neverland Trade, a review where I mistakenly referred to it as issue #0), but I must first get the call-to-action nonsense out of the way by asking that you 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 cosmic forces, 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 #1:

Once Upon A Time

Yes, this sharp-toothed old man is what the Dream Eater chose to look like. I'll get into that more a bit later, but for now, let's talk covers.

Perhaps my Third Demon World fatigue from watching Dragon Ball DAIMA has something to do with it, but I'm not a fan of this cover. It may stand out stylistically when compared to the zero issue's chosen cover, and fit the tone and style of this issue better than the others, and I get why the other covers weren't chosen, but the all-warm color scheme with some creepy old man standing in a desert with this high Dutch angle perspective looks more like it belongs on a Goosebumps book than a Grimm Fairy Tales comic.

Aside from the usual, sexy convention exclusives (Sela or Belinda posing in booty shorts or a bikini with a car or motorcycle was a common theme), the main available covers also included a Justice League homage with a beautiful, painted realism to it, a sprawling, "everyone is here!" double-wide mural (my two favorites this issue), and what I think is a bloody variant of an old Wonderland cover because SPOILERS.

Retcons can suck.

They aren't always bad (I again point to Dragon Ball DAIMA for its cool lore drops), but they can absolutely suck if not handled right. Case in point, the Dream Eater. The previous issue would lead one to believe that the Dream Eater was unleashed hundreds or thousands of years ago within Baba Yaga. Hard Choices (and GFT #51) would have one believe that the Dark Horde killed the entire Realm Council except for Blake.

But because the Dream Eater only needed to be a thing now, continuity is what it needs to be so the new threat can exist.

Following the Dark One's short-lived invasion of Earth (stopped, unbeknownst to anyone left in Myst, by a time-traveling Belinda and Baba Yaga and their magic Pokéball made of crystallized cyclops blood), it turns out that Thane was the one to unleash the Dream Eater, desperately sacrificing himself in a last-ditch, scorched earth play to stop Malec from doing what every big comic book villain wants to do.

This would be fine as a simple, misguided act of heroism, but the story cuts to Blake and Sela, the latter cradling a dead Nyssa in her arms as a shooting star passes by in the distance. Blake's reaction makes it clear that he suspects something is up, considering Thane's emotional state the last time Blake saw him and the fact that we haven't seen the lion-man since. So if he thinks that might be the Dream Eater (a limitless, ancient force that specifically targets those born of the Realms Of Power regardless of their polar morality), why has he been laying on his ass and traveling Myst with Sela like they're on a long, life-threatening vacation instead of investigating the end of all non-Lowborn life as they know it? Like I said: retcons can suck, and this is one of those.

Speaking of Sela, her issue #0 bio is pretty on-point, with the exception that it says she is currently trapped in Myst (the last time we actually saw her, Sela had been kidnapped by Belinda, leading into a cliffhangerhttps://itsjusttheticket.blogspot.com/2023/01/zenescope-omnibusted-9-salems-daughter.html ending for Volume Ten), but this is less a case of continuity errors than of publication order, as the individual Mother Nature issues hadn't finished releasing when The Dream Eater Saga started its run.

Getting back to continuity, it turns out that the Dream Eater retcon isn't that bad because we're shown a montage of the same shooting star across time and space, including South Dakota (where Belinda and Baba Yaga are preparing to recruit Britney and Sela), New York (where Pan is shown to be alive and feeding on the homeless like a hobo vampire), the Salem's Daughter timeline (where Anna is having visions of an approaching evil and she and Braden encounter a teenage girl who has had the youth sucked from her body - bringing to mind Allexa's fate from the Baba Yaga issue, as well as Pan's vampirism and necromancy-like abilities), Arizona (where Calie and Violet Liddle are trying to cope with the former's Wonderland trauma as an ethereal figure in white observes them from afar), Sinbad's timeline (where Pots has a nightmare, but can't articulate anything beyond binary responses because of a wish he made on Belinda during that unreleased Lamp series), and an unknown location that's probably the cabin from The Good Witch (where Samantha has a 90s Jean Grey faint-gasm while trying to sense the Dream Eater because being able to Big Brother everything and everyone in the Universe and display them as magic holograms is a thing she can do now.

Which is where I start criticizing the character bios.

First, Samantha's bio says that Shang trained her to be the new Guardian of the Nexus when Sela died, and upon her resurrection, Sela "quickly named Samantha as her replacement" if her efforts to stop the Dark Horde invasion failed. This retroactively gives Sela too much credit, as we know from The Good Witch onward that Sela was insulted to learn that she had been replaced and would later be repeatedly thrust into high-stakes scenarios with little to no training where she would fail by allowing personal feelings to interfere with her vaguely defined mission, and merely gave Samantha a reluctant, passive "Good luck," where the bio makes it seem like some profound passing of the torch based in love and trust. Thanks, I hate it.

Speaking of the Dark One's invasion, his bio says it was "thwarted by Sela's brave actions." To recount those brave actions, they include fixating on a dead man she met in her dreams once while all of her allies get slaughtered around her, distracting an ally from making a weapon that could close all portals to the Nexus, using that weapon to destroy the book that she had used to help countless people find their way as well as the box of all remaining Provenance energy in the Realms (which accomplished nothing), being defeated by a swarm of insects, failing to stop the Horde from invading Earth, killing the last fairy in existence, and as we learned this issue, leaving Thane with no option but to unleash a beyond-multiversal shapeshifter programmed to eat all magical beings across time and space. The real heroes of Earth? Belinda and Baba Yaga.

Their bios also contain information that doesn't track with what we've been told in the comics so far, like Baba Yaga being the one to reveal that the Dark One had been using Belinda, and Baba Yaga ingratiating herself with Orcus and claiming part of the Horde as her own. I can't recall Baba Yaga and Orcus ever sharing a panel together, Baba Yaga leading an army or commanding any monsters past Hard Choices (unless you count the lycan who attacked Britney in Myths and Legends, and that's mainly supposition), or any meaningful conversation between the two women aside from Baba Yaga going, "I want revenge on the Dark One; wanna help?" (with no hint to her motivation until The Dream Eater Saga #0) and Belinda agreeing because they'd been shown working together a few times.

Pan, Sinbad, and the Salem's Daughter and Wonderland characters' bios are solid, but the bios that remain fall into a special category (much like Belinda and Baba Yaga's relationships, motives, and social maneuvers) that is less factually inaccurate and more, "that sure would have been nice to see in print!" This begins with the tidbit about Sinbad's crew (who are combined into one bio with "various useful abilities," probably because they're getting eaten later and don't matter) where he "helped free them from the mind control of a merciless wizard." That sure would have been nice to see in print! I'll get to the Piper and Mercy Dante in a minute (relative to how fast you can read, of course).

When the Dream Eater lands, we see it is something like a mix between the T-1000 and a Transformer, as it magically scans humanity before taking the form of an old man and heading straight for the Queen Of Hearts' House Of Mirrors (she/they have seemingly been operating a legit carnival attraction and are in the beginnings of a romantic relationship with a co-worker...but also have dismembered body parts hanging all over their home like grotesque popcorn string ornaments). The Dream Eater devours the conjoined sisters one by one, with the dark-haired bottom half (pause) repenting before her death, asking the Dream Eater if it will hurt.

We don't get an answer from it, but when the issue cuts to the Pied Piper, it's clear from the scream he (and Malec and Lucifer, because it's more magical than it is sonic) hears that being eaten by the Dream Eater does hurt. A lot.

Mercy's bio is a mix of inoffensive inaccuracy (referring to Lucifer as Satan, when we know from Inferno that her name is Lucifer, and Satan will be revealed as a separate character later on) and things that would have been nice to see in print (Mercy killing unrepentant souls on Earth in the canceled Soul Collector series).

As for the Piper, it's unclear if he's the one from his debut issue or the miniseries (logic says it's the latter because the one from the issue was a construct in Sela's book - which was destroyed - while the miniseries Piper was a real character chronicled and imprisoned in Belinda’s book. Whatever the case, like a lot of the bios mentioned here, it is fleshed out with information that wasn't made explicitly clear in the then-six-year-old original material, retconning the importance and depth of an under-utilized character (since the miniseries, he had only appeared in Hard Choices as Prince Erik's puppeteer) who is guaranteed to be eaten to death despite already being dead. Even Malec and the mysterious white-clad observer from earlier have written him off as a doomed soul.

Leaving the Piper to his own devices, Malec grabs Cindy and transports her to the Inferno with him to team up with Lucifer and Mercy because it's apparently not considered a Realm so travel there isn't restricted?

It makes more sense than Baba Yaga just being able to magic a crack in reality with her bare hands that pinpoints to Sela's exact location so the end of GFT #62 can happen, though.

The issue ends with the reveal that the white-robed observer is one of a group of five who exist in a foggy, Stonehenge-like dimension beyond the Realms. They will be relevant in a future event as well.

I can't recall if her identity is ever revealed, but I like to speculate that she is the innocence Baba Yaga abandoned in her vow of revenge, as she bears some resemblance to the young Baba from the Prelude/Prologue.

The art this issue (by Roberto Viacava, colored by Jason Embury and two others because this is a packed story and Embury worked on two of the covers), while not being on par with the beauty of the zero issue, is still really good (though some properties and characters benefit more from the style than others).

Next week, I remind myself what happens when the Piper gets his own One-Shot, so don't just be an observer; 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 cosmic forces, 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.