GFT Retrospective #82: Dream Eater Saga #2 (The Piper)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Pied Ticketmaster Of Blogger.

That's right, Ticketholders; this week in the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective, I'm reviewing the second (third, counting the Prelude/Prologue) issue of The Dream Eater Saga. It's kind of unique, in that it is the first One-Shot Zenescope has ever done that isn't a Tale From Wonderland or Neverland. Typically, like those aforementioned Tales, a One-Shot is a single-issue, standalone comic that highlights a particular character or franchise. But this is different because of its place in a major company-wide crossover event, which Zenescope had never done before. Sure, they had revealed links between GFT, Wonderland, and Neverland (and hinted at similar events transpiring in Oz, which had yet to have a published series at this point) and done a smaller crossover with Sinbad, but this was something new for the little pulp juggernaut that could.

Also, it's been awhile since we've seen The Piper do...anything, so after I remind you to 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 I don't have to sell my soul to an undead musician, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content, let's get Omnibusted!

As his bio says The Piper began his short tenure as a member of the Underutilized & Overpowered Club in Grimm Fairy Tales #12:

GFT #12: The Pied Piper

Chad (could be an older version of Chad from Red Riding Hood, but there’s nothing to confirm that idea beyond their slightly similar appearances) and his brother Neal are arguing about the latter being investigated for embezzling money from his company. There is an informant (referred to as a "rat" because there has to be a Pied Piper connection), and Neal has hired a hitman to eliminate him, but plans to cheat the hitman out of his payment as well.
When they are later discussing this at a bar, up walks Sela, who pisses off Neal by being psychic and dressing like a hooker. Perhaps as a nod to the Chad connection, Sela refers to Neal as a “big, bad wolf.” It might be a coincidence, but given how Sela likes to be all mysterious and knowing with her more morally gray charges, I doubt it.
Sela leaves her book behind, opened to the Pied Piper tale, which Chad reads while Neal plays pool. In the story, Chad and Neal become Charles and Nathan, switching hair colors for some reason. It follows closely to both the common telling and the framework narrative, with the Piper being an analogue for Neal’s hitman. Chad/Charles attempts to be the voice of reason, but his brother’s stinginess comes at a high price.
This issue is the most connected thus far in Zenescope’s universe, beyond the probable link to Red Riding Hood. Early in the Piper fairy tale, Charles is reading Beauty and the Beast to his son George, which will receive a Myths and Legends continuation in a future Volume. 

Shortly after his debut, the Pied Piper would get his own limited spin-off series. In Cover Charge #3: Grimm Fairy Tales (FROM June 8, 2014), I gave said miniseries a Critical Quickie-style review that amounted to the following:

The Piper: The redhead from the Timepiece short story has a hand in unleashing The Pied Piper (issue #12) on the modern world, and the results are less than satisfactory or impactful on the "Grimm Universe" at large. At least it was a fun read.

The Retrospective review, on the other hand, was much less forgiving and ambivalent, as you'll see.

The Piper

Breaking from tradition, The Piper four-part miniseries opens with the fairy tale and lets the action flow from there. At the top left corner of the first panel, we see the familiar markings of a certain book cover. But this book is the purple Book Of the Lost, not the red Provenance Book Sela had at the time.

The first issue’s cover (left, in two print editions) features the Pied Piper sitting and playing his flute alongside Belinda. Within the pages of the Book Of the Lost, we learn that over seven hundred years in the past, the Pied Piper tale played out much as it had in Sela’s volume, but with more historical context and a different fate befalling the children at the end. The townspeople drown the Piper out of revenge, and the miniseries moves on to present-day Florida.
At an elite prep school, a musical prodigy named Sean is being bullied by the jocks in his class (because true stereotypes). After hearing a strange melody one night, he runs into Belinda, who is posing as the school librarian and loans Sean her fairy tale book. When one of the bullies paralyzes a girl who had a crush on Sean, he reads from Belinda’s book and summons the Piper.
The next two issues play out like a typical slasher movie, with the Piper commanding various animals to kill the jocks and their coach one by one. But when the Piper sets his sights on Sean’s friends, Sean reads more of the book in an effort to send the Piper back from whence he came.
It is revealed that Belinda is at least twice as old as Sela, and that her book is some kind of fairy tale purgatory where evil souls (like the Piper) can be trapped. The surviving students and the music teacher attempt to trap the Piper by playing his melody backwards (because horror movie cliches), but the jocks read the summoning incantation, Candyman-style (because idiots).
Following a short but epic musical battle, Sean succeeds in trapping the Piper, but in a turn that is more ghost movie than fairy tale, the ending is not the end, nor is it happy. Different, entertaining, illuminating, but also derivative and consequently predictable.

For obvious reasons (he can easily control people and animals to do his bidding from a distance without being seen, including those with similar powers, making him uninteresting and sucking any tension out of whatever scenario he might have otherwise appeared in), the Piper would not be used again until Hard Choices as the puppetmaster behind Prince Erik's murderous heel turn at the end of GFT #49, and wasn't seen after that until the previous issue of The Dream Eater Saga, where he failed to slaughter some nameless coeds because he was scared by the Queen Of Hearts' psychic death knell, and was promptly disowned by Malec, calling into question the white-robed girl's claim that he is important and worth observing. So...he's going to die screaming, too, right?

The Dream Eater Saga #2: The Piper (One-Shot)

In Hamelin, Germany in 1284, a hundred-thirty children mysteriously disappeared. It's in the town's actual public record as early as a centennial memorial. But being real and mysterious was also enough at the time to spawn a folk legend that rings very similar to the Irish legend of Saint Patrick that predates the Pied Piper by almost a thousand years, just darker and creepier because Germany. And because mysterious tragedies needed "plausible" causes (colorfully dressed Crusade draftsmen and an undiagnosed epidemic of St. Vitus' Dance weren't good enough reasons), we wound up with a fairy tale about a mercenary musician with a magic flute who commits mass kidnapping because he was underpaid for his rat-catching skills. And because tragic history cannot escape economy, the town now celebrates the Piper legend in plays and other written and performance media.

In The Piper One-Shot, things begin as the miniseries did by going back to the year of origin, but surpassing the source material in terms of darkness when the Piper (looking considerably non-Pied) uses his Falseblood gift to march the children into a river to drown.

Now that the Dark One and his Horde have been known entities for quite some time now, the Piper's simple, financially-driven act of revenge is muddled here by the use of the children's souls as an offering to the Dark One in exchange for "power so great that not even death will hold sway over me." So...was it never about money and revenge? Would he have taken the children even if he was paid fairly because he wanted power that badly? That becomes slightly more clear later in the issue, but for now, I said what I said and simpler is better, even with the exposition boxes telling us that the Piper may already be dead here.

When the issue isn't expositing how unique, unstoppable, and important the Piper is to a crossover event where seldom-used and abandoned characters like himself are set to be cannibalized to death, the story focuses on the elderly Mr. Douglas, a man so distraught over the death of his wife that he summoned the Piper to get revenge on the doctor who failed to save her life (and presumably the drunk driver who landed Mrs. Douglas in the hospital to begin with).

When the old man has regrets after the fact, the Piper tries in vain to transfer his own petty, emo motivations, but Mr. Douglas is too old and ill-versed in psychology to know what emo transference is, so the Piper eats his soul.

Which is when the Dream Eater shows up, reaches down the Piper's throat (which, given the vagina dentata design of his face,

is probably someone's demonetizable fetish), and rips Mr. Douglas' soul out of him to return it where it belongs.

I've criticized the Dream Eater's chosen appearance in the previous issue, but I love that, despite being designed as a primordial genocide machine to protect humanity, it has a personality. The Dream Eater cracks jokes, shows concern for the Lowborn, and listens to those of the Realms who repent in their final moments even though it treats existential cannibalism like an office job. And the fact that it is an unstoppable force in the form of an old man actually serves that personality well and plays into the subversion of expectations when its targets see it and believe that they have a chance.

There is also more to the Piper's past (developing a hatred for humanity because generic witch hunt tropes made his girlfriend's father think their relationship was based in brainwashing), but it felt too little, too late, and I was genuinely disappointed when the issue ended not with the Piper being eaten "alive," but being summoned away by Baba Yaga at the last possible moment.

The art this issue (drawn by Allan Otero and colored by Volume Nine beasts, Studio Cirque) is beautiful and detailed, with a cool color pallette and a style reminiscent of Wonderland and the better parts of Neverland. My only real gripe is the returning plot device of the Piper being summoned with the Book Of the Lost. It raises so many inconsistencies regarding Belinda’s connection to the book, and made me question which book it was (the cover is seemingly red in color in the one panel we see Mr. Douglas with it,

but at the end, when Baba Yaga summons him, she's clearly using Belinda’s book).

In essence, I don't care for the Piper, I think the Dream Eater is becoming a fun, entertaining, badass villain, and I enjoyed looking at this issue, including the above chosen cover.

There's also a B Cover from Jason Embury that features Belinda holding the Piper's severed head, and a retailer exclusive that's a Psycho homage, and I like them all. The shown A Cover is my favorite, though, because of its rough, gleefully morbid, dynamic imagery (and my feelings about the Piper as a hastily fleshed out, sarcastically quoted "character").

Next week, The Dream Eater Saga meets Myths and Legends as witches collide, so please Stay Tuned for that, 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 I don't have to sell my soul to an undead musician, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest Grimm news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Omnibuster,

Playing myself Out.